Slingsby Falcon III
The Slingsby Type 4 ( T.4 ) Falcon 3 was a two-seat training glider of the British manufacturer Slingsby Sailplanes, Scarborough, which was developed in the 1930s from the single-seater training aircraft Slingsby Falcon.
History
The stockbroker Espin Hardwick from Birmingham was 1934 Slingsby a two-seat version of the Falcon in order. Although there were in England as early as two -seated training machines, such as the Kassel SK -3 Hercules, which Hardwick but wanted was the world's first school glider with adjacent seats. The redesign of the single-seater Falcon 1 and 2 presented Slingsby enormous problems, took several months to complete. But basically the design was an enlarged version of the original Hawks of Lippisch. In addition to the altered seat number and the dimensions of the Falcon 3 differed mainly by an additionally inserted rectangular wing center section of the single-seater Falcon.
In May 1935, the prototype of Hardwick was delivered, the flight performance proved so convincing that other copies were ordered. This differed from prototype through full Sperrholzbeplankung the trunk and the covering of the wing center section with transparent celluloid, to improve visibility. With these and other small improvements to December 1938 eight copies for British sailing clubs were produced, one of which is exported to Belgium.
Among the five British gliders, participated in the first international championship races across the water dome in July 1937, also a Falcon was 3 The FAI had recently set up a new category for two-seater records, this reached on July 12, the pilots Murray and Fox a flight time of 9 hours 48 minutes and were the first record holder. As already in the solo category, a flight duration of over 40 hours by Ernst Jachtmann was reached previously in the same year, the two-seater record remained without special resonance in public.
Until the beginning of World War II had to be written off only a Falcon 3 after an accident, the rest were taken from the Air Training Corps. 1944 were still four or five copies airworthy, the last aircraft flying in 1947 after a landing accident on the Bramcote Naval Air Station badly damaged and then probably burned.