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  • Finest Hour

    THE SOPWITH CHURCHILL: THE FIRST LORD‘S CUSTOM-BUILT, 1914, TWO-SEAT RNAS BIPLANE

    Aug 02, 2019 4 minutes
    By Fred Glueckstein

    October 1913 On the 29th Mr. Winston Churchill, flying with the late Captain Lushington, R.M.A., took control of the aeroplane himself during the greater part of an hour’s flight, thus becoming the first Cabinet Minister of any nation to pilot an aeroplane.1

    The most successful British fighter of the First World War, the Camel was built by the Sopwith Aviation Company. The highly maneuverable Sopwith Camel was a biplane, a fixed-wing aircraft with two main wings stacked one above the other. It proved far superior to all German types of dogfighters until the introduction of the Fokker D. VII in 1918.

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