Antoinette VI

The Antoinette VI was an early French monoplane flown in 1909, one of the numbered aircraft that Léon Levavasseur designed for the Antoinette company after the Gastambide-Mengin monoplane. It was a development of the Antoinette IV, and its major technological advance was that it was fitted with true ailerons, whereas the earlier machine had ailerons mounted as separate surfaces on the trailing edges of the wings. Levavasseur was nevertheless not satisfied with this innovation and later modified the aircraft to use a wing warping system similar to the one fitted to the Antoinette V. The type is a small step in the sequence of experiments through which Antoinette tried different roll control arrangements on essentially the same airframe, between the Antoinette IV of early 1909 and the Antoinette VII in which Hubert Latham attempted to cross the English Channel.