Gloster III

The Gloster III was a British racing floatplane built to compete for the Schneider Trophy air race of 1925. Like the Gloster II it was a single-engined, single-seat wooden biplane with single-bay wings, but it used a 700 horsepower Napier Lion VII with Lamblin radiators on the leading edge of the lower wings and, at 20 ft wingspan, was the smallest British aircraft of its power then built. The Air Ministry ordered two in February 1925. In the race Hubert Broad finished second at 199 mph behind the Curtiss R3C of James Doolittle. Both aircraft later trained pilots of the RAF High Speed Flight, and the IIIB variant reached 252 mph.