Triplane - Tandem Triplanes

Tandem Triplanes

A tandem triplane has two sets of triplane wings, fore and aft. Few have been made.

Dufaux produced Switzerland's first native aircraft design in 1908, as a tandem triplane with a smaller biplane horizontal stabiliser.

The 1909 Roe I Triplane has also been described as a tandem triplane due to its relatively large triplane aft plane.

The Fokker V.8 of 1917 was another tandem design although not a true tandem triplane, having a triplane fore wing, biplane rear wing and monoplane tail stabiliser.

In 1921, the Italian Gianni Caproni mated three stacks of triplane wings from his Ca.4 series to a single fuselage in a tandem triple triplane arrangement, to create the Caproni Ca.60 Noviplano prototype transatlantic airliner. It proved unstable and crashed on its first flight.

A further example was under construction in Kansas City, USA as late as 1922.

Recently, the term "tandem triplane" has been used for some new monoplane types that have active "canard" foreplane surfaces in addition to conventional wings and horizontal tailplane. A configuration having three comparable lifting surfaces in tandem is more correctly referred to as tandem triple or tandem triplet, and is not a triplane as such. These modern types may also be compared to the pioneer Voisin-Farman I and Curtiss No. 1 which also had a large main wing with smaller fore and aft planes; the smaller planes were not regarded as part of the main wing arrangement, and they were not described as tandem types.