The RFC remained the sole operator of the DH.2. She served with distinction within squadrons No.5, No.11, No.17, No.18, No.24, No.29, No.32, No.41, No.47 and No.111.
It may be hard for the modern-day reader to imagine such skeletal-looking mounts as the DH.2 to instill any sort of fear in her opponents but by World War 1 standards, she was a fighter by any definition of the word. The fuselage was contoured as an aerodynamic shape - curved along the front and top surfaces with slab sides and a flat underside - and held the armament, pilot, controls, fuel and engine. The pilot sat in an open-air cockpit "tub" like design. This forward placement meant that he was offered unparalleled views of the upcoming action. A single machine gun was fitted to the front of the fuselage. Fuel was held directly aft of the pilot and ahead of the engine, the latter mounted to the extreme end of the fuselage rear. A large, two-blade wooden propeller was powered by the engine. Wings were arranged in a two-bay setup with parallel struts additionally held in check by cabling throughout. Both upper and lower wing assemblies sported slight dihedral. Structures protruded from the innermost set of wing struts to become the empennage. The empennage tapered off to become a single vertical tail fin with a high-mounted horizontal plane affixed. Like other World War 1 mounts, the undercarriage was fixed in place and featured two large main landing gear wheels attached to the fuselage underside. The rear of the aircraft was supported by a simple tail skid when at rest on the ground.
Armament was fitted directly to the pilot's front for easy access in operation and clearing a jam. This consisted of a single semi-trainable .303 Lewis type machine gun fed by a 47-round drum magazine. The machine gun could be mounted within three pre-set positions about the cockpit, allowing the pilot to fix the weapon at advantageous angles of fire. Of course this proved highly impractical once in action. The gun would need to be physically removed from one mount and fixed onto another while in flight, the weapon along weighing some 17.5lbs. Training the machine gun in such a way against a target while also dealing with the responsibilities of flying often led to pilots running out ammunition while exercising inaccurate fire in the heat of the moment. This action also distracted the pilot from the fight at hand. Although meant for good, these three pre-set positions became largely ignored as most pilots soon learned to fix the machine gun in place and aim the entire aircraft at the intended target instead. Top ranking members, of course, disapproved of such in-field improvisation and restricted it until a formal clip could be designed and implemented. Major Lanoe Hawker produced such a clip and even revised the gunsight for improved accuracy by allowing for leading of the target. Once enacted, the new clip and gunsight - along with the fixed machine gun - lessened the pilot's workload substantially by allowing him to concentrate on flying his machine and only firing when optimal. This new armament arrangement soon made aces out of various DH.2 pilots and shooting accuracy steadily rose, as did kill tallies.
The DH.2 maintained a length of 25 feet, 2.5 inches with a wingspan of 28 feet, 3 inches. Her height was listed at 9 feet, 6.5 inches. Her empty weight was 942lbs while her maximum take-off weight was listed in the area of 1,441lbs.
Power was supplied from a single French-based Gnome Monosoupape (meaning "single valve") rotary engine delivering 100 horsepower. This supplied the DH.2 with a maximum speed of 93 miles per hour and a range of 250 miles. Total engine endurance was a reported 2.75 hours. Service ceiling was listed at 14,000 feet while rate-of-climb was a then-respectable 545 feet per minute.
Some 453 DH.2s were produced by Airco.
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