The Nieuport 11 “Bébé”: how a tiny French sesquiplane broke the Fokker Scourge

What makes the Nieuport 11 special

Nieuport 11 specifications

Figures are for the standard Nieuport 11 “Bébé” with the Le Rhône 9C rotary. Early WWI sources disagree — treat everything here as representative, and where they diverge we have flagged it.

Baseline note: the figures describe the Nieuport 11 C.1 with the 80 hp Le Rhône 9C rotary, the standard production aircraft, as tabulated by Davilla and Soltan in French Aircraft of the First World War and by Pommier. Deltas for the Nieuport 16 with the 110 hp Le Rhône 9J, for the Italian Nieuport-Macchi 11.000 and for the Russian Dux-built machines are in grey. Climb is given as time to a stated height and endurance in place of range, which is how figures of this period were quoted, and the maximum speed below carries the altitude it was flown at — which is why it reads higher than the sea-level figure that British-derived tables print for the same aeroplane.

Armament & payload

The Bébé's gun sat on top of the wing because France had nothing to put it behind the propeller

One Lewis gun above the upper wing, firing over the propeller arc, is the standard armament of a Nieuport 11 — and like the DH.2's nose-mounted Lewis it is there for exactly one reason. In January 1916 the Allies had no synchronisation gear in service and the Germans did. The Nieuport's answer was more elegant than the pusher's: keep the tractor layout, keep the speed and the climb, and simply put the gun where the propeller is not. The price was paid on every drum change, one-handed, standing up, at three thousand metres, in a slipstream.

The Bébé also carried the first air-to-air rocket ever used in action. That is a footnote in most accounts and it should not be, because for about a month in the spring of 1916 it was one of the more decisive weapons on the Western Front. Gun fits varied by air arm: Hotchkiss on many early French aircraft, Fiat-Revelli on Italian ones until Lewis guns arrived in numbers, Lewis in British and later French service, and a synchronised Vickers on a handful of late machines.

Sourcing caveat: the Nieuport 11 is worse documented than its importance deserves and the two main streams of figures disagree throughout. Davilla and Pommier, working from French records, give 162 km/h at 2,000 m, a 5,000 m ceiling, 2½ hours endurance, 320 kg empty and a length of 5.50 m. British-derived tables give 97 mph at sea level, a 14,765 ft ceiling, 2 hours endurance, 772 lb empty and 19 ft 0¾ in. Loaded weight is the one figure both agree on, at 480 kg or 1,058 lb exactly. This page has preferred the Davilla set because it is the only one that states an altitude for its speed. Production totals are worse: no French figure exists at all, Macchi output is given as 646 and as nearly 700, Dutch copies as five and as twenty, and the RNAS batch as eighteen and as twenty-one. Readers should treat any single-number claim about how many Bébés were built with suspicion, including the ones on this page.

Variants

The Bébé had almost no variants of its own, and fathered the entire V-strut family that followed it

There is no mark series here either. Gustave Delage designed one aeroplane, the factory built it, licensees copied it, and the improvements went into new type numbers rather than into new marks. What makes the variant list interesting is that almost everything on it is a descendant: the Nieuport 16, 17, 21, 23 and 24 are all the same idea with more engine and more wing, and the family stayed in service, latterly as trainers, into the 1920s.

The type's claim on history is narrow and solid. The Nieuport 11 reached the French front on 5 January 1916 and had ninety machines in service inside a month. It outclassed the Fokker Eindecker in speed, climb and manoeuvrability, and it was concentrated at Verdun in February and March 1916 in specialist fighter squadrons that could fly in formations larger than the singletons and pairs the Fokkers worked in. That combination — a better aeroplane and a better way of organising it — regained air superiority for the French and ended the Fokker Scourge. The British DH.2 and F.E.2b did the same job on their own front at the same time, and the honest apportionment is that all three mattered and the Nieuport probably mattered most, because it was the one that arrived first, in numbers, and could actually catch what it was chasing.

The sesquiplane layout is the design decision everything else hangs on, and it was a real trade rather than a free lunch. A lower wing of half the chord, carried on a single spar and braced by one V-strut a side, cut drag, improved the climb, made the aeroplane light and quick on the controls and gave the pilot a downward view that no conventional biplane could match — which matters enormously when your job is finding two-seaters below you. It also produced a wing that could twist. On the 80 hp Bébé the weakness was largely latent; Fitzsimons argues the aeroelastic flutter occurred only beyond speeds the type could reach, while Rickard calls the lower wing the aircraft's main weakness outright. What is not in dispute is what happened next: as the same layout was given 110, 120 and eventually 160 hp on the 16, 17, 24, 27 and finally the Nieuport 28, lower wings began to fail in dives and kill people, and the Germans reproduced the flaw faithfully when they copied the layout for the Albatros D.III.

The Italian chapter deserves more attention than it usually gets. Nieuport-Macchi at Varese built close to seven hundred Bébés under licence as the 11.000, six hundred and forty-six of which the Italian air arm accepted, and Italian-built aircraft stayed in first-line service long after French ones had gone to training units — standard equipment over the Isonzo into the summer of 1917 and still flying with 85a Squadriglia a week before the Armistice. That licence is also the beginning of a company: Macchi went from building French fighters under licence to the Schneider Trophy seaplanes and eventually to the MB-339 and the AMX, a line that runs unbroken from a 1916 sesquiplane to the jets in the same factory.

Nieuport 11 C.1 (1915–16 / French total unrecorded)

The production aircraft and the only French form. 80 hp Le Rhône 9C, one over-wing gun, no synchronisation gear. Also called the Nieuport Bébé or Nieuport Scout, though both names were applied loosely to any small Nieuport fighter.

Nieuport-Macchi 11.000 (1916–18 / about 650 to 700)

Italian licence production with detail modifications, often armed with the Fiat-Revelli Modello 1914 until Lewis guns were available. 646 accepted by the Corpo Aeronautico Militare; the last were withdrawn on 4 November 1918.

Dux-built Nieuport 11 (1916–17 / unrecorded)

Russian licence production at the Dux factory in Moscow for the Imperial Russian Air Service, which used the type extensively and kept it in service later than the French did.

Dutch copies (1917–18 / 5 to 20)

The Luchtvaartafdeling interned one Nieuport 11 that came down in the Netherlands and had copies built at Trompenburg. Sources give the number as five and as twenty.

Nieuport 16 C.1 (1916 / unrecorded)

A strengthened Nieuport 11 airframe with the 110 hp Le Rhône 9J, a headrest and a larger cowl aperture. Faster, less manoeuvrable, nose-heavy, and the aircraft most closely associated with the Le Prieur rocket. An interim type pending the Nieuport 17.

Nieuport 17 C.1 (1916–17)

The definitive V-strutter: larger wing area, the 16's balance problems cured, a strengthened lower wing and — at last — a synchronised Vickers on French aircraft via the Alkan-Hamy gear. British squadrons kept the Foster-mounted Lewis instead, and the S.E.5a inherited the idea.

Nieuport 21 C.1 (1916–18)

A Nieuport 17 airframe with the 80 hp Le Rhône of the Bébé put back in. Used widely as an advanced trainer and supplied to Russia and to the American services, which is how a great many pilots first met the family.

German study copies (1916–17 / 95 plus a handful)

Idflieg handed captured aircraft to German firms with instructions to copy them. The Euler D.I and the Siemens-Schuckert D.I were the result; the SSW D.I, 95 of which were built, was a copy of the Nieuport 17 rather than the 11, was obsolete by the time it was available and served mainly as an advanced trainer.

Captured and rearmed aircraft (1916 / several)

Repaired French machines fitted with a synchronised lMG 08 and flown operationally by German pilots. The type impressed its opponents enough that they preferred flying it to shooting at it.

Trainers (1917 onwards)

The Bébé's long second career. Pushed out of the front line by the 16 and 17 from March 1916, surviving airframes taught fighter pilots in France, Italy, Russia and Britain, and the V-strut Nieuports went on doing that job into the 1920s.

Survivors, stated precisely, because for a First World War type the distinction between an original airframe and a reproduction matters far more than the count. Exactly one original Nieuport 11 exists: the aeroplane at the Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace at Le Bourget, currently displayed as N556 in the personal markings of Commandant Charles de Tricornot de Rose — the officer who created the first dedicated French fighter squadrons and whose organisational idea the Bébé existed to carry out — and previously shown as N976. One aeroplane, out of a production run whose French total was never recorded and which certainly ran well into four figures once Macchi's six hundred and forty-six and the Russian Dux output are added. Everything else in the world that carries the name is a reproduction, and they are not all the same kind of reproduction, which is worth spelling out. Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in New York flew a full-scale reproduction for years in Victor Chapman's colours behind a genuine 80 hp Le Rhône 9C, the correct engine, and it is under rebuild after a crash. The Vintage Aviator in New Zealand flies an American-built full-scale reproduction in the markings of the Italian ace Alvaro Leonardi. Two Canadian museums, in Saskatchewan and New Brunswick, hold flying seven-eighths-scale replicas, deliberately built undersize so as to fall inside Canadian amateur-built rules — correct in shape and wrong in every dimension, which is a real distinction and not a pedantic one. And the Bébé is among the most-copied shapes in homebuilt aviation, with kit and plans-built Nieuport 11s flying on modern flat-four engines all over North America. One original in a museum at Le Bourget. The rest is homage, and mostly good homage, but none of it is a 1916 aeroplane.

The Nieuport 11 through the war

The Nieuport 11 in the words of those who flew it

The Nieuport 11 in pictures

The Nieuport 11 in the air

A quality showcase of an airworthy Nieuport 11 reproduction in flight, filmed by the Historical Aviation Film Unit (~67,000 views). It shows the Bébé’s light, agile handling and the sound of its Le Rhône rotary.

Where the Nieuport 11 flew

Designed and built in France, the Bébé fought on the Western Front and at Verdun, served with Britain’s RNAS, Italy, Russia and Belgium, was licence-built in Italy and Russia, and survives today in a few museums and airworthy replicas. Toggle the categories to explore.

The record the Nieuport 11 left behind

Victory tallies from the First World War are unreliable and were often shared or unconfirmed, so the Bébé’s exact combat record cannot be tabulated. What is clear is its strategic effect: alongside the Airco DH.2 and F.E.2b it helped end the Fokker Scourge and restore Allied air superiority in the first half of 1916.

Nieuport 11: your questions answered