Avro 500

The Avro 500, also known as the Avro Type E, was an early British military biplane that Alliott Verdon Roe regarded as his firm's first truly successful design and a forerunner of the Avro 504. It grew out of the Avro Duigan, being slightly larger and fitted with a more powerful water-cooled engine, and it was a two-bay tractor biplane with a deep rectangular fuselage and a long skid projecting forward of the propeller. The first aircraft flew on 3 March 1912 with Wilfred Parke at the controls. A second example, rebuilt around a 50 horsepower Gnome rotary engine, met the War Office requirements for a military aeroplane, and the authorities bought it and ordered two more. Avro 500s were flown by the Royal Flying Corps and the British Admiralty's Air Department, mostly as trainers in the first years of the First World War, and the type was the first Avro aircraft built in any quantity.