Naval Aircraft Factory N3N

The Naval Aircraft Factory N3N was a tandem-seat, open-cockpit primary training biplane built by the United States Navy's own aircraft factory in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was designed to replace the Consolidated NY-2 and NY-3 and was tested both as a landplane on fixed landing gear and as a seaplane with one large central float and two small wingtip floats. The prototype XN3N-1 used a Wright J-5 radial engine, the production N3N-1 a 220 horsepower Wright Whirlwind and the later N3N-3 a 235 horsepower Wright R-760-2. The factory built 997 of them from 1935, 179 N3N-1s and 816 N3N-3s, and the Navy bought the rights and tooling to build the engines itself. Students called the bright N3N-3 the Yellow Bird, and the last Navy examples, used by the Naval Academy, retired in 1959, making it the last biplane in US military service.