Electric reality?
Technical
Richard Vary reports on the trials, tribulations and ultimate triumph of building his award-winning Nieuport Baby SSDR biplane
Bringing up Baby
I
was quite happy flying AX3s at Popham. Popham, if you don’t know it, is a delightful airfield set in rolling Hampshire countryside. The landscape around it could satisfy a lifetime of low and slow summer evening flying, buzzing about over fields and streams, out over the scarp edge of Watership Down and above the valley beneath. If feeling brave, I might venture south, out over the blue waters of the Solent and across to the Isle of Wight. I was happy doing this until one day, there on the grass in front of the Popham café, appeared a thing of beauty: G-BUCO, an immaculate Pietenpol Aircamper built (I now know) by a gentleman called Alan James. Next to it my AX3 looked like, well, it looked like a flying tent. There was no choice. I had to get a better looking aeroplane. The UK’s Light Aircraft Association has a treasure trove of plans, particularly of the low and slow summer-evening variety of aeroplane. The problem was that the aircraft that I liked the look of – Currie Wot, Luton and Turbulent – were mostly wood and
38 | FLYER | January 2022
needed to be kept in a hangar. I could not see myself being able to find, let alone afford, an indoor hangarage near London. There was, however, a design being built extensively in the US which caught my eye: the Circa Nieuport. I have a particular weakness for anything that could be called a ‘flying machine’ rather than an aeroplane, and this almost perfectly scale replica of a Nieuport 11 (‘Bébé’) biplane falls close to that category. Particularly if one were to cover it in translucent doped linen and omit anything as war-like as a Lewis gun… As the design was made of aluminium tube, not wood, it would not mind being left out in the rain occasionally, at least during the summer. The only problem, and admittedly it was a pretty large one, was that it was not an approved design in the UK, so it could not be flown here. In April 2007, everything changed. The Civil Aviation Authority de-regulated single-seat microlight aircraft. I could build the Nieuport if the weight and stall speed fitted within the microlight category.
