Short Brothers: No.2 Biplane
Note: This is a sub-section of Short Brothers.
The Short No.2 was an early British aircraft built by Short Brothers for J.T.C. Moore-Brabazon. It was used by him to win the £1,000 prize offered by the Daily Mail newspaper for the first closed-circuit flight of over a mile (1.6 km) to be made in a British aircraft.
The layout of the aircraft was similar to that of Wright Model A, which the Short Brothers were building under license, being a biplane with a forward elevator and rear-mounted tailplane driven by a pair of pusher propellers chain driven by the single centrally-mounted engine, but differed in a number of significant respects. It was designed to take off using a dolly and launching-rail, like the Wright aircraft, but the landing skids were incorporated into a considerably more substantial structure, each forming the lower member of a trussed girder structure resembling a sleigh, the upturned front end serving to support the biplane front elevators, behind which the rudder was mounted.
On 7 January it was flown the four and a half miles from Shellbeach to the Royal Aero Club's new flying field at Eastchurch, by which time a revised tail consisting of an elongated fixed horizontal and vertical surfaces carried on four booms had been fitted to improve stability.
It was now Moore-Brabazon's intention to make an attempt to win the British Empire Michelin Cup, and on 1 March he made a flight covering 19 miles (31 km) in 31 minutes, being forced to land when the engine crankshaft broke. Although a new engine was fitted, the aircraft was due to be exhibited at the Aero Exhibition at Olympia, and was therefore not flown again until 25 March, by which time it was obvious that nobody else was capable of bettering his flight, and the prize was formally awarded to him. By this time Moore-Brabazon had ordered a new aircraft of the Short S.27 type, and made no subsequent flights in the aircraft.
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