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The SFCA Taupin was a French tandem-wing aircraft, designed to provide a simple, stable and safe aircraft able to take-off and land in small spaces. ==Design and development== In 1907 Louis Peyret, a friend of Louis Blériot designed the tandem wing Bleriot VI.〔 Alex Manerol, flying the Peyret Tandem won the 1922 Itford glider contest〔 and in 1924 Peyret obtained a patent for it.〔 He continued to build designs of this type as well as more conventional aircraft until his death in 1933,〔 after which his patent rights were purchased by the Société Françraise de Constructions Aéronautique (SFCA). In 1935 they designed and built the tandem wing Taupin which broadly followed the lines of the glider. Taupin is the French vernacular name for beetles of the family Elateridae or click-beetles, known for their ability to jump rapidly into the air. The Taupin had rectangular plan wings, the forward one providing 65% of the wing area, both mounted on the central fuselage longeron. They were wooden two spar structures, fabric covered and braced from below with parallel pairs of forward leaning struts to the lower fuselage longerons, each pair stiffened with a horizontal cross-brace between them and with short upward secondary braces to the wings.〔〔 The wings were mounted with equal and significant dihedral. Both had full-span flaps which were interconneted and could move differentially as ailerons and together as camber changing flaps,〔 a system first used on the glider and acknowledged as the source of its "extraordinary controllability".〔 The fuselage was a wooden structure with plywood covering. Its lower part was rectangular in section and the upper part roughly triangular, with a central longeron along its top to which the wings were joined. This member was visible above the open cockpit, placed immediately under the wing trailing edge and formed by opening the upper fuselage. Ahead of the cockpit, and on some examples behind it, the upper surfaces were inwardly dished to improve the pilot's view and there was a cut-out in the wing trailing edge for the same reason,〔 much bigger than that shown in ''L'Aéronatique''.〔 The Taupin had a Mengin C air-cooled flat-twin engine, sometimes referred to as a Poinsard after its designer, in the nose with its cylinders exposed and supplied from a fuel tank in the fuselage. At the rear the vertical tail was conventional, with a triangular fin bearing a round-topped, straight-edged unbalanced rudder which reached down to the keel and operated in a small cut-out in the rear wing control surfaces.〔〔 The Taupin had tailskid landing gear with its low pressure mainwheels mounted on V-struts hinged from the lower longerons and with a single telescopic strut on each side to the mid-upper longerons,〔 though the drawing in ''L'Aéronatique'' shows a different, split axle undercarriage.〔 The exact date of the Taupin's first flight is not known, though it was before late October 1935 when it took part successfully in the 1935 ''Tour de France des Prototypes''.〔〔〔 Later that year it went for certification at Villacoublay; it returned to SFCA in January 1936 for modifications,〔 restarting testing at Villacoublay in April.〔 It lived up to its name, needing only to take off.〔 During 1937 SFCA introduced a two seat version of the Taupin, the Taupin 5/2. This had a Régnier〔 inverted inline engine, wings with duralumin tube spars and side-by-side seats. Take-off weight rose by 80% but the dimensions were only slightly increased.〔 Immediately after World War II SFCA introduced the metal framed Lignel 44 Cross-Country, which had dimensions slightly larger than the Taupin 5/2, a Régnier 4 D2 inverted inline engine and a new, enclosed cabin fuselage; the seats, accessed by side doors, were still under the trailing edge of the wing though without a cut-out. As in the earlier designs there was no vertical separation of the wings, both mounted on the upper fuselage longerons. It was 20% heavier than the Taupin 5/2 and had a maximum speed of .〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「SFCA Taupin」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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