Nieuport 31

The Nieuport 31 was a French single-engine, single-seat fighter of 1919, built either as a monoplane or as a sesquiplane. Its immediate predecessor was the Nieuport Madon, which had an extra lifting surface built around the axle of a wide-track undercarriage. Like the Nieuport 29 before it, the fuselage was a smooth wooden monocoque shell of tulipwood, made by winding thin spiral strips around a mould in alternately handed layers and glueing them together. Power came from a nine cylinder Le Rhone 9R rotary engine of 130 kilowatts, and the aircraft weighed about 500 kilograms empty and 780 kilograms loaded, with a maximum speed of 230 kilometres per hour. It was a prototype that did not go into series production, but it formed part of the line of refinement that led from the Madon to the later Nieuport-Delage fighters.