| Terrence Murphy, e-mail, 15.12.2012 22:12 This is the way I wrote it up for my book:
The Boulton & Paul P.12 Bodmin was an experimental British twin-engine biplane bomber with its engines mounted in a fuselage engine room and with tandem pairs of tractor and pusher airscrews mounted between the wings. The two Bodmins built flew successfully in 1924 proving the concept but the layout was not developed to production.
The Boulton & Paul Bodmin was one the few multi-motor propeller-driven aircraft to have its engines in its fuselage. The Bodmin was a large three bay biplane with unswept and unstaggered square tipped wings of equal span and constant chord. These had leading-edge-balanced ailerons on both upper and lower planes and the rather rectangular fin and tailplane carried similarly balanced control surfaces. The rudder extended below the fuselage underside.
The fuselage centre section contained the "engine room" with its two 450 hp Napier Lions in tandem. One was ahead of the wing leading edge and the other at the wing centerline, with an enclosed, illuminated space between them where the engineer could stand upright and monitor and manage them. The engines were mounted on the upper fuselage longerons, leaving a crawl space beneath. The rest of the fuselage was conventional and of square cross section with rounded decking. reply |
