On this day in aviation history, February 1, 1912, the Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.2 made its maiden flight. Often maligned by aviation historians for its high casualty figures sustained over the Western Front, the B.E.2 was a pioneering pre-war design that was among the first aircraft flown by the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) that gave valuable experience to British aircrews and taught British designers lessons that applied to later observation bombers of the First World War.
The B.E.2 was derived directly from the B.E.1. The B.E. acronym stood for ‘Blériot Experimental 1’ a confusing designation system the Factory used. In reality the aircraft, and designation, had nothing to do with Blériot. The B.E.1. made its own first flight two months earlier, on December 4, 1911, with the aircraft’s own designer, Geoffrey de Havilland, at the controls. Both the B.E.1 and B.E.2 were built at the Royal Balloon Factory (which was later renamed the Royal Aircraft Factory in 1912) at Farnborough, Hampshire, England. Both aircraft were the product of a design team led by Mervyn O’Gorman, the factory superintendent at Farnborough with Geoffrey de Havilland serving as chief engineer and test pilot. Even before the First World War erupted, the armies of Europe were beginning to recognize the potential of airplanes for military purposes, though largely as a way to support ground armies through reconnaissance as opposed to fighting one another in the air.
On February 1, 1912, Geoffrey de Havilland took the first B.E.2 for its first flight. The B.E.2 differed little from the B.E.1, expect for a new engine type, though both the B.E.1’s original Wolsley V8 engine and the B.E.2’s Renault V8 only produced 60hp. Both the B.E.1 and the B.E.2 had a two-man crew consisting of a pilot, sitting in the rear position, for balance reasons, and an observer, in the front seat, between the wings. This was to prove a problem later. Control of both aircraft was achieved through foot pedals for the rudder and a joystick for the elevator and wing controls, which was achieved through wing warping. Flying controls were only fitted in the rear cockpit.
On April 13, 1912, only two months after the B.E.2’s first flight, the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) was established through a royal warrant signed by King George V. As such, the B.E.1 would be a one-off design used for flight evaluation, while the B.E.2 was ordered into production as the B.E.2a. To fulfill the demands of the new Royal Flying Corps, production of the B.E.2a was sub-contracted to Vickers and the Bristol Aeroplane Company. Soon, the first B.E.2as entered the first three squadrons of the RFC (No.1, No.2, and No.3).
The first RAF B.E.2 aircraft and the sole B.E.1 participated in unofficial flights during the 1912 British Military Aeroplane Competition, but as Mervyn O’Gorman was one of the judges, the B.E. designs were barred from the competition – yet demonstrated better performance than the designs actually competing. As such, the first B.E.2s were used in early army cooperation exercises, with some of the first experiments with the Royal Army for artillery spotting and observation using airplanes.
The B.E.2s also set several military aviation records. On August 12, 1912, the B.E.2 achieved a British altitude record of 10,560 ft (3,220 m) while being flown by Geoffrey de Havilland with Major Frederick Sykes, Commander of the Military Wing of the RFC, as a passenger. Less than a year later, Captain Charles A.H. Longcroft flew a B.E.2 from Farnborough Airport to Montrose Aerodrome, Scotland, 550 miles in 10 hours, 55 minutes, with only two intermediary stops. On August 19, 1913, Longcroft had a B.E.2 outfitted with an additional fuel tank to repeat the flight, setting a new record at 7 hours, 40 minutes with only one stop on his overland flight.
Even in the final days of peace before the outbreak of WWI, aviation developed rapidly, and the B.E.2 would see two new variations of its design emerge. The first was the B.E.2b (introduced in 1913), which offered revised cockpit coamings for better protection from the elements and revisions for both the elevator and rudder controls. In early 1914, the B.E.2c was developed, which replaced the wing warping system for ailerons on the wings, a new tailplane design added, and a triangular stabilizing fin was fitted to the rudder, which made the B.E.2c a more inherently stable airplane to fly. The aircraft also received a new 92hp engine V8 engine from its manufacturer, the RAF 1 (with a maximum output of 105 hp for takeoff) which was based on the earlier Renault 70hp and 80hp V8 engines. Additionally, the undercarriage was redesigned, and a cutoff was made in the trailing edge of the upper wing’s center section to provide better visibility.
In the summer of 1914, Europe erupted into all-out war over an entanglement of alliances, and when Germany invaded neutral Belgium to reach belligerent France, violating the Treaty of London of 1839 (which guaranteed Belgian neutrality in European conflicts, and decreed that a signatory of the treaty must come to the aid of Belgium) Britain had its Casus belli for war with Germany. As such, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was quickly organized and sent across the English Channel to help both the Belgians and the French stop the German advance through Flanders. Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.2s were among the first British aircraft to join the BEF, flying across the Channel to the aid of France.
Early on, the B.E.2s flew unarmed reconnaissance missions over German lines. In fact, no aircraft carried guns for defense or attack at this stage. But it soon became apparent to both sides that allowing free passage of enemy reconnaissance aircraft was unacceptable, as it would let the enemy gather intelligence with a birds-eye view of entrenchments, lines of communication, men, vehicles and stockpiles of supplies. Thus, more aggressive aircrew (on both sides) began improvising ways to destroy these enemy aerial spies, with observers in B.E.2s carrying whatever firearms they could get their hands on, from service revolvers to semi-automatic pistols, rifles, carbines, or even Lewis drum-fed machine guns.
However, the cockpit ergonomics of the B.E.2 presented a unique challenge. The pilot sat in the rear cockpit, while the observer sat forward of the pilot. This meant that pilots had to operate the side-mounted cameras on reconnaissance missions, while the observer had to try and shoot from the sides through the struts and wires of the biplane or to the rear over the pilot’s head and shoulders. They could not shoot through the arc of the propeller, either with a free gun, or one fixed to the aircraft as no synchronization gear had been adopted yet.
By 1915, some of the first dedicated fighter aircraft (scouts, as they were referred to in WWI) began to be introduced, and in the RFC’s B.E.2 squadrons, none were more feared than the Fokker Eindeckers. Developed by Dutch-national Anthony Fokker for the Imperial German Air Service, the Eindeckers featured an interrupter gear (not the first to be designed, but the first to enter widespread service) that enabled them to fire machine gun bullets directly through the arc of their propellers. Even though the Fokker Eindeckers were not as maneuverable as other contemporary aircraft owing to their continued use of wing warping, the B.E.2’s inherent stability, a great feature for training and observation, became a disadvantage as the aircraft was slow to maneuver, becoming a vulnerable target.
The high casualty figures relating to B.E.2 pilots and observers led to an outcry in British politics and the tabloid papers, who labelled the B.E.2s as “Fokker Fodder”, with the young British ace Albert Ball being reported to have described the B.E.2, which had had flown his first combat missions in, “a bloody awful aeroplane”. The most incendiary charge leveled against the B.E.2 was made on March 21, 1916, by British aviator, co-founder of Supermarine, and member of the House of Commons Noel Pemberton Billing, who claimed that RFC pilots in France were being “rather murdered than killed”. The controversy also led to the Mervyn O’Gorman’s contract at the factory not being renewed, forcing him to step down as Superintendent at the Royal Aircraft Factory, though he continued serving as a consultant and was not found responsible for the excessive loss of airmen due to the quality of the B.E.2. The B.E.2’s main designer and first test pilot, Geoffrey de Havilland, had already moved from the Royal Aircraft Factory to Aircraft Manufacturing Company Limited (Airco), where his designs would bear his initials.
Once the British and French adopted aircraft more maneuverable than the Fokker Eindeckers (namely the Nieuport 11 and the Airco DH.2, the latter developed by Geoffrey de Havilland), they wrestled control of the skies from the Fokkers by early 1916. However, German manufacturers such as Albatros and Halberstadt introduced a new series of biplane fighters that would claim many more B.E.2 aircraft over the Western Front. This would eventually culminate in the events of “Bloody April”, where German Jastas claimed up to 60 B.E.2 aircraft destroyed in that month. However, the B.E.2 type was soon replaced from combat over the Western Front by new observation types such as the Armstrong Whitworth F.K.8, the Royal Aircraft Factory F.E.8 (nicknamed the “Harry Tate” after a popular music hall performer), and the Bristol F.2 Fighter, which in turn relegated the B.E.2 to training roles away from the frontlines.
There were attempts to add forward-firing guns to the B.E.2 family of aircraft to make them more potent against the Fokkers. The first attempt was the B.E.9, with a wooden box nicknamed a ‘Pulpit’ placed ahead of the propeller for a gunner to be positioned with a machine gun. This put the gunner literally in a perilous spot, being liable to serious injury or death from the propeller spinning right behind him and being at the point of impact in any crash. Unlike the similar concept SPAD S.A, the B.E.9 never advanced past the prototype stage, as, thankfully, the Allies were successfully developing their own synchronization gear. Synchronization equipment led to the B.E.12, a single-seat version with a single fixed synchronized Vickers machine gun. It was originally intended as a long-range light bomber/reconnaissance aircraft, but the B.E.2 family’s stability in flight – causing poor maneuverability, prevented the B.E.12 seeing service over the Western Front, but its long range made it suitable for Home Defense squadrons and for operations in the Middle East.
However, this was far from the end of the Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.2’s story. In 1915, B.E.2s were assigned to Home Defense squadrons in an attempt to destroy German Zeppelin airships that launched night attacks on British cities in London. With no radar, and other such aids decades in the future, the crews had to scramble on any report of the sighting of a Zeppelin and set out into the darkness to seek out and destroy the marauding giants of the air. It was originally intended for the aircrews to destroy the Zeppelins by dropping grenades and Ranken darts from above, but a more practical plan of attacking the Zeppelins from below was devised, using a Lewis machine gun mounted in the forward cockpit to fire at 45 degrees upwards from the centerline, ahead of the pilot (in the rear cockpit) and loaded with a mix of explosive and incendiary bullets.
The first success with this new tactic was made on the night of September 2-3, 1916, when Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson, flying his B.E.2c, spotted Schütte-Lanz SL 11 bathed in the glow of searchlights with anti-aircraft shells bursting all around the Zeppelin. After emptying two drums of ammunition into SL 11 with seemingly no effect, Robinson concentrated his fire on the rear of the Zeppelin, which then burst into flames. For over a year, the Zeppelins had bombed England with near impunity. Now, the citizens of London cheered as Schütte-Lanz SL 11 fell near the village of Cuffley. William Leefe Robinson was hailed as a national hero overnight, earning the Victoria Cross, and soon, other Zeppelins were brought down by night pilots flying B.E.2s, but when the German airships began increasing the altitude of their bombing raids to 15,000 feet, followed by the introduction of the faster heavier-than-air Gotha bombers, the B.E.2 was retired from Zeppelin hunting.
There were other, less well-known roles too. The B.E.2 saw service in the Balkans and the Middle East. A pair of B.E.2s from No.3 Squadron RFC were sent to Gallipoli to provide artillery spotting services for the naval bombardment of Turkish fortifications, while B.E.2s were used for reconnaissance work in the Middle East against the Ottomans and in the Balkans against Bulgarian and Austro-Hungarian forces, until the deployment of the most advanced types that had already replaced the B.E.2 over the Western Front. In August 1918, 12 B.E.2 aircraft were allocated to the United States Army Air Service at their training bases in England, but, unsurprisingly, were only little used.
The B.E.2 was also credited with performing the first aeromedical evacuation in British military history. During a raid against the Ottomans at Bir el Hassana in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula in February 1917, Lance Corporal McGregor of the Imperial Camel Corps was wounded in the ankle, being the sole British casualty in a raid that resulted in the capture of 22 Ottoman Turks. On February 19, a B.E.2c was flown to Bir el Hassana to fly the wounded Lance Corporal to the British garrison at Arish, on the Mediterranean coast. The journey that would have otherwise taken days over rocky, sandy terrain on a ‘cacolet litter’ strapped to the back of a camel was made in about 45 minutes with the Corporal sitting in the forward observer’s cockpit wearing a box splint.
From 1917 onwards, most B.E.2s were relegated to training squadrons, though some were employed to spot German U-boats for Royal Navy destroyers and anti-submarine flying boats to destroy. Some B.E.2 fuselages were even employed as makeshift airship gondolas for SS-class non-rigid airships that came to be called “blimps” from May 1915 until the introduction of purpose-built gondolas.
At the war’s end, as a completely obsolete type, the remaining B.E.2s were disposed of. However, one postwar record was set by an Australian B.E.2, which was flown right across the island continent from the south-east to the center of the Northern Territory. This Central Flying School (CFS) machine was sent to meet the finishers of the 1919 air race being flown from Britain to Australia. The crew were pilot Henry Wrigley with mechanic Arthur William Murphy, and they completed the first Australian transcontinental flight: from Point Cook, Melbourne on November 16, 1919, arriving at Port Darwin on December 12, having covered over 4,500 kilometers (2,800 mi) of uncharted outback with minimal ground support or specialized equipment in forty-seven open cockpit flying hours. This, unnumbered machine was allocated in 1920 to the Australian War Museum (now Australian War Memorial) for possible later display but disappeared from the records after 1922.
In total, the RAF B.E.2 would see service not only with the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service (which were merged to create the Royal Air Force on April 1, 1918), but also with the Australian Flying Corps, the Belgian Air Force, the Estonian Air Force, Greece’s Hellenic Navy, the Royal Netherlands Air Force (which operated only a single example), the Norwegian Army Air Service, the South African Air Force (where it was the first aircraft in their air force), and even the American Expeditionary Force employed some B.E.2s as trainers in England during the war.
Today, very few original examples of the R.A.F. B.E.2 family survive. The Imperial War Museum has an original B.E.2c, RFC s/n 2699 on display at its Duxford location after previously being displayed in London, with another B.E.2c, RFC s/n 5878, being displayed at the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa, B.E.2c RFC s/n 9969 is in storage with the Musée de l’air et de l’espace at Paris-Le Bourget Airport, and the Norwegian Armed Force Aircraft Collection in Gardermoen, Norway, outside Oslo, has a former RFC B.E.2f that flew with the Royal Norwegian Army Air Service (RNoAAS) with the serial numbers 59, and later 131. Several reproductions (some with original parts incorporated into their construction) can be found at the Royal Air Force Museum in Hendon, London, the Royal Australian Air Force Museum in Point Cook, and the US Army Aviation Museum at Fort Novosel (formerly Fort Rucker), Alabama.
A few varying accurate replicas were built in the latter part of the twentieth century for film and TV use, including ‘The Biggles Biplane’, a B.E.2 replica G-AWYI, made in 1968 from a de Havilland D.H.82 Tiger Moth that was rebuilt to fly airshows in the UK in the twenty-first century with owner-pilot Matthew Boddington. It is currently under rebuild after a serious, but thankfully non-fatal crash in 2020.
In recent years, several B.E.2c and B.E.2f reproductions have been to exact dimensions and sometimes with original 100+ year old engines by The Vintage Aviator, Limited of New Zealand, which was gained a reputation around the world for their meticulous airworthy reproductions and restorations of original WWI aircraft.
Perhaps the most noteworthy of the TVAL projects relating to the B.E.2 family is an original B.E.2f, which was accepted into the Royal Flying Corps as s/n A1325. In 1917, it was exported to neutral Norway, where it served in the Norwegian Army Air Service as s/n 133. Placed into storage after its retirement from military service, s/n 133 was exported back to Britain through the de Havilland Aircraft Museum in London Colney. Registered on the British civil aviation registry as G-BVGR. it was exported again, this time to New Zealand to be restored by The Vintage Aviator Limited in Masterton. Having been restored to flying condition, it is the only original B.E.2 currently flying, and the oldest flying aircraft originally designed by Geoffrey de Havilland, who would go to become one of the most prolific aircraft designers in British aviation.
The Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.2 may have had an ungainly reputation in the popular histories of aviation during WWI, but the fault in the aircraft lies not in its lack of merit but in the fact that it was a prewar design that was never intended for air-to-air combat but thrust into combat against more agile fighter aircraft. But the B.E.2 was a record-setter of pre-WWI military aviation, and its use in the early stages of the war before the “Fokker Scourge” and in being the first aircraft to down a German Zeppelin over English territory that with the right tactics and in the hands of capable young men, it held the line until it could be relieved by newer aircraft that were designed on the lessons learned from the B.E.2, and the fact that several exact reproductions still fly today is a fitting tribute to the brave men who flew and maintained these aircraft during the Great War.
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