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A Riesenflugzeug (plural Riesenflugzeuge, German for "giant aircraft"), sometimes colloquially referred to in English as an R-plane, was any member of a class of large World War I German bombers, possessing at least three aircraft engines, although usually four or more engines. These large multi-engine aircraft could fly several hours with larger bomb loads than the smaller Grossflugzeug bombers such as the Gotha G.V.
Some of the earliest Riesenflugzeuge were given G-type designations before being redesignated, but a major distinction was that the requirements for the R-type specified that the engines had to be serviceable in flight. As a result, designs fell into two groups:
The transmission of power from the centrally mounted engines to the remote, most often wing-mounted propellers proved troublesome in practice, and most operational examples of Riesenflugzeug-class aircraft were of the second type, as with the all-direct-drive Zeppelin-Staaken R.VI.
The Idflieg (Inspektion der Fliegertruppen (Inspection of the Air Force), the German Army department responsible for military aviation), assigned the letter R to this type of aircraft, which would then be followed by a period and a Roman numeral type number. Seaplanes were denoted by adding a lowercase "s" after the "R" in the designation.
The Riesenflugzeuge were the largest aircraft of World War I. In comparison, the largest equivalent Allied aircraft were the Sikorsky Ilya Muromets[note 1] with a span of 29.8 m (98 ft), the Caproni Ca.4 with a span of 29.9 m (98 ft), the one-off Felixstowe Fury flying boat with a span of 37.5 m (123 ft) and the Handley Page V/1500 with a span of 38.41 m (126.0 ft). The Riesenflugzeuge that bombed London during the First World War were larger than any of the German bombers in use during the Second World War.[note 2] The largest built, the Siemens-Schuckert R.VIII of 1918, had a wingspan of 48.0 m (157.5 ft). It was not until sixteen years later that an aircraft with a larger wingspan, the Soviet Tupolev Maksim Gorky eight-engined monoplane, was built with a 63.0 m (206.7 ft) wingspan.
The Riesenflugzeuge were operational from 1915 to 1919 and most of them were built as "one-off" aircraft.
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