Zeppelin-Lindau Rs.I

The Zeppelin-Lindau Rs.I, also called the Dornier Rs.I, was a large three-engined biplane flying boat designed by Claudius Dornier and built in 1914 and 1915 on the German side of Lake Constance. It was the first Dornier design to be built, after Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin made him chief designer at the Zeppelin works at Lindau, where large patrol flying boats were to be built. The Rs.I was a Riesenflugzeug, the German class of giant aircraft, and was made largely of high-strength steel for the highly stressed parts and Duralumin for the lightly stressed ones, with Warren-style V struts between the wings in place of drag-inducing wire bracing. Its two outboard engines first sat inside the fuselage and drove pusher propellers through shafts and gearboxes; after a gearbox or propeller failure on 23 October 1915 they were moved into nacelles between the wings. It was the largest aeroplane in the world at its launch, but a Foehn wind on 21 December 1915 broke its moorings and dashed it to pieces on the lakeside rocks.