The Camel was Herbert Smith’s successor to the Sopwith Pup and Triplane. Where the Pup was forgiving and lightly armed, the Camel doubled the firepower to two Vickers guns and concentrated its masses tightly around the centre of gravity for maximum manoeuvrability. The result was less a refinement than a different animal: harder to fly, but far more dangerous to the enemy.

The name was never official. The metal fairing humped over the gun breeches to protect them from freezing gave the aircraft its nickname, and “Camel” stuck so firmly that it eclipsed the formal “Sopwith F.1” designation entirely.

On 21 April 1918 the German ace Manfred von Richthofen — the “Red Baron” — was killed while pursuing a Camel low over the Somme. The Canadian Camel pilot Captain Arthur Roy Brown was officially credited with the victory, but most historians now conclude that the single fatal bullet came from Australian ground fire rather than from Brown’s guns. It remains one of aviation’s most debated moments — and a reminder that Camel claims, like all air-war figures of 1914–1918, carry genuine uncertainty.

The same concentrated mass and rotary torque that made the Camel agile also made it unforgiving. A botched turn on take-off or a stall in a left bank could drop a low-hour pilot into a fatal spin, and training losses were heavy. Contemporary accounts held that the Camel killed a significant number of its own pilots in accidents — a figure often quoted but hard to verify precisely.

In experienced hands the picture reversed. The Camel could out-turn almost anything it met, and its right-hand turn became a signature combat move. Its ideal fighting altitude was low to medium; higher up, where the thin air sapped its rotary engine, it was outclimbed by newer designs.

The standard land fighter was the F.1. The 2F.1 “Ship Camel” had a slightly shorter span, a detachable rear fuselage for shipboard stowage and revised armament, and operated from platforms on warships and from towed lighters. A night-fighter conversion nicknamed the “Comic” moved the guns to the upper wing to keep muzzle flash out of the pilot’s eyes, while dedicated ground-attack Camels carried small bombs for trench-strafing.

The Camel was designed by the Sopwith Aviation Company, but wartime demand meant most airframes were built by sub-contractors — firms such as Boulton & Paul, Ruston Proctor, Clayton & Shuttleworth, Hooper and others — while Sopwith itself concentrated on design and development. Around 5,490 Camels of all versions were completed.

F.1 — the standard single-seat land fighter, built in the thousands.

2F.1 Ship Camel — the naval version, with a shorter span and a detachable rear fuselage, flown from warship platforms and towed lighters.

Night-fighter (“Comic”) — guns relocated to the upper wing to spare the pilot’s night vision from muzzle flash, used against night bombers over Britain.

Ground-attack (T.F.1 trench-fighter and bomb-armed F.1) — Camels carrying small bombs for low-level attacks on trenches and troops late in the war.

Contemporary First World War procurement figures for the Camel are not consistently recorded, but an airframe plus engine ran to several hundred pounds sterling in 1917–18 — treat any single number as an estimate.

There is no meaningful modern cost-per-flight-hour figure for a Sopwith Camel: no original example is airworthy today, and the handful of museum-grade reproductions that do fly are private or institutional aircraft whose running costs are not publicly standardised. Any quoted hourly rate would be speculation.