Sopwith Cuckoo

The Sopwith T.1 Cuckoo was a single-seat biplane torpedo bomber of the Royal Naval Air Service and the Royal Air Force, and the first landplane designed specifically for carrier operations, though it was finished too late for the First World War. Sopwith built it after an October 1916 request from the Admiralty for an aircraft that could carry a 1,000 lb torpedo with four hours of fuel. The wings folded back for stowage, a split-axle undercarriage cleared the torpedo, and the aircraft could take off from a deck in four seconds but had no arrester gear for a carrier landing. The prototype first flew in June 1917, 232 were completed by 1919, and no complete airframe survives.