Saunders A.14

The Saunders A.14 was a one-off British biplane flying boat built to test a new metal hull rather than to enter service. Saunders's earlier flying boats such as the Valkyrie had wooden hulls, so under a joint contract with Supermarine it fitted a hull designed by Henry Knowler to a Supermarine Southampton Mk. II, leaving an otherwise standard large twin-engined, triple-finned biplane. The duralumin hull used external corrugations instead of internal stringers and a simple single-curvature V-form bottom that wooden-trained craftsmen could build cheaply. The A.14 first flew towards the end of 1928 and reached the Marine Aircraft Experimental Establishment at Felixstowe in March 1930, where weakness in the planing bottom had to be stiffened. The corrugated construction was nevertheless used on Saro flying boats until the last London left the works in 1938.