WAR

its
Derivatives. The company had been founded by Armand Deperdussin and was
originally named Societe pour Appareils Deperdussin or, loosely, the Deperdussin
Aeroplanes Society. Shortly before the war Deperdussin resigned as head of the
firm, to be replaced by the famous aviator Louis Bleriot. In 1909 Bleriot had
flown across the English Channel in a monoplane of his own design and in the
five years before the war had won considerable celebrity piloting the speedy Deperdussin
machines. Bleriot had changed the name of the company but had kept
the initials and hence the name of the product—a Spad is a Spad.
The first Spad single-seater was powered with the 1 40-horsepower Hispano
Suiza engine. Hispano Suiza means, in Spanish, "Spanish-Swiss," and the phrase
was chosen to convey the nature of the international collaboration of which it
the name. In 1899 Marc Birkigt of Geneva had gone to Barcelona at the age
of 21 to accept a position with a Swiss engineer who was already established
there. In May 1904 he set up his own company, the Hispano Suiza Motor Company,
with the financial backing of Damien Mateu of Barcelona.
When the war broke out, Birkigt was working on a new aero engine,
which, because of its novel features—concentric connecting rods and one-piece
cylinder heads, for example — provoked considerable interest among the Allies. It
was a superlative design and was produced in great numbers at the home factory
at Barcelona and under license in France, Britain, Italy, and the U.S.A. Engines
from the home factory were called Hispano Hispano; those from contract firms
simply Hispano. So with the airframe—a Spad built
was
by the parent firm was called
a Spad Spad. A really lucky pilot flew a Hispano Hispano Spad Spad. (Pilot
superstition and nothing else caused the parent firm products to be considered
superior.)
The Spad 7 was a hot machine. Its thin wings gave it a high landing speed
and the gliding angle of a brick. It was fast on the straightaway, having a top
speed of 120 miles per hour (or 200 kilometres per hour, which sounds even
better.) The armament was a single synchronized Vickers machine gun mounted
on top of the engine cowling directly in front of the pilot.
The synchronizing gear
fitted to the early Spad fighters was a French variation on the mechanical linkage
system used by Fokker. It was called the Alkan and was one of a series of
similar synchronizers developed and used by the Allies.
As more powerful engines became available, they were fitted, and the
horsepower crept up to 235 in the Spad 13. A score of 300-horsepower Spad 17's
was delivered in the last weeks of the war.
The Spad was the fighter of the 1914-1918 war—nearly 8500 of all versions
were built.
When escadrille N 3 of Groupe de Combat XII re-equipped with Spads
in the autumn of 1916, the aeroplane with its Hispano Suiza engine made such
an impression on the pilots that they adopted the Hispano Suiza trade mark, a
stork, as the squadron insignia. Spa 3 was the lead squadron of the Groupe, the
other squadrons being Spa 26, Spa 73, and Spa 103. All were known eventually
as les Cigognes, the Storks, with stork insignias, but Spa 3 was the original.
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