Nieuport 16

The Nieuport 16 was a French single-seat sesquiplane fighter of the First World War, designed by Gustave Delage as a development of the Nieuport 11. It had a strengthened airframe and a more powerful 110 horsepower Le Rhone 9J rotary engine, and Dux built further examples under licence in Russia. Its service life coincided with the period when the first air-to-air rockets, the Le Prieur rockets, were used most often, and it is associated with them more closely than any other aircraft. The Royal Flying Corps fitted its Nieuport 16s with the rockets, which the crews called torpedoes, and on 25 June 1916 fifteen German observation balloons were attacked before the Battle of the Somme and six were set alight. Albert Ball, the top scoring Royal Flying Corps ace of the period, made many of his kills in Nieuport 16s, and once obsolete the type served on for advanced training into 1917.