Design and Development
By the middle of 1917, it was obvious that the Nieuport 17 and its immediate developments such as the Nieuport 24bis, with only moderate performance gains, were unable to cope with the latest German fighters. The Nieuport 17 line was already being rapidly replaced in French service with the SPAD S.VII.
The Nieuport 28 design was an attempt to adapt the concept of the lightly built, highly maneuverable rotary engined fighter typified by the Nieuport 17 to the more demanding conditions of the times. It had a more powerful engine, twin machine guns, and a new wing structure – for the first time, a Nieuport biplane was fitted with conventional two-spar wings, top and bottom, in place of the sesquiplane "v-strut" layout of earlier Nieuports. Ailerons were fitted to the lower wings only. The tail unit’s design closely followed that of the Nieuport 27, but in order to provide a more streamlined profile, the fuselage was much slimmer, so narrow that the machine guns had to be offset to the left. Several prototypes were built - testing three different dihedral settings for the top wing, including a totally flat wing, and one with marked dihedral that rested very close to the top of the front fuselage. Production machines had an intermediate configuration, with a slight dihedral in the upper wing, taller cabane struts, and room for the second machine gun to be mounted under the center section.
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