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Concept
Nieuport 16
Summary
The Nieuport 16 C.1 (or Nieuport XVI C.1 in contemporary sources) was a French World War I single-seat sesquiplane fighter aircraft, designed by Gustave Delage as a development of the Nieuport 11 with a more powerful engine. The Nieuport 16's service life coincided with the period when the first air-to-air rockets, the Le Prieur rocket, were used most frequently, and the type has a closer association with them than any other aircraft.
The Nieuport 16 was an improved Nieuport 11 developed in 1916, with a strengthened airframe powered by a more powerful Le Rhône 9J rotary engine. Visible differences included a headrest for the pilot and a larger aperture in front of the "horseshoe" cowling. The Nieuport 16 was an interim type pending the delivery of the slightly larger Nieuport 17 C.1, whose design was begun in parallel with the 16, and which remedied the 16's limitations, as well as improving performance. Additional Nieuport 16s were built under licence in Russia by Dux, which also added a headrest to the Nieuport 11s they were still building, making identification more difficult.
As with the Nieuport 11, no synchronizer was initially available, which meant the Nieuport 16's Lewis machine gun was similarly mounted to fire over the propeller. Some of the first examples delivered to the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) were fitted with a Lewis mounted on the cowl in front of the pilot and fitted with an Alkan-Hamy synchronization gear: however the Lewis's open bolt firing cycle resulted in an unpredictable rate of fire which played havoc with the timing and these soon reverted to the overwing mounts. The Alkan-Hamy gear was then applied much more successfully to a fuselage-mounted Vickers machine gun, which was used on later French Nieuport 16s. However this configuration made the aircraft dangerously nose-heavy and increased the wing loading which compromised manoeuvrability. The British would continue with the overwing gun for all of their Nieuport scouts, and developed their own Foster mounting to improve on the numerous French designs.
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