This plane was developed in the United States.
At the time this course seemed to be justified. The day of the single seater seemed to be over. The lone occupant of the single seater can not keep his attention on all directions at once; and as the planes grew thicker in the air, the casualties among flyers increased.
But the development of formation flying restored the single-place machine to favor. The formation had no blind spot, thus removing the principal objection to the single seater. The end of the war found the one-man airplane more useful than ever.
Our concentration here, however, was upon two-place fighters. On August 25, 1917, we received from abroad a sample of the Bristol fighting plane, a two-seat machine. The Government engineers at once began redesigning this machine to take the Liberty-12 engine and the American ordnance and accessories. The engine which had been used in the Bristol plane developed 275 horsepower. We proposed to equip it with an engine developing 400 horsepower.
The Bristol undertaking was not successful. The fact that later in the airplane program American designers successfully developed two-seater pursuit planes around the Liberty-12 engine shows that the engine decision was not the fault in the Bristol failure. There were repeated changes in the engineering management of the Bristol job. First the Government engineers alone undertook it; then the Government engineers combined with the drafting force of the airplane factory; finally the Government placed on the factory the entire responsibility for the job, without, however, permitting the manufacturer to correct any of the basic principles involved. All in all, the development of an American Bristol was most unsatisfactory, and the whole project was definitely abandoned in June, 1918.
The fundamental difficulty in all of these attempts was that we were trying to fit an American engine to a foreign airplane instead of building an American airplane around an American engine. It was inevitable that this difficulty should arise. We had skill to produce a great engine and did so, but for our earliest models of planes for this engine we relied upon the foreign models until we were sufficiently advanced in the art to design for ourselves. We were successful in making the adaptation only in the case of the De Haviland and then only after great delay.
But eventually we were to see some brilliantly successful efforts to design a two-place fighter around the Liberty-12. We had need of such a mechanism to supplement the De Haviland observation-plane production and make a complete service-plane program.
On January 4, 1918, Capt. Lepere, a French aeronautical engineer, who had formerly been with the French Government at St. Cyr, began experimental work on a new plane at the factory of the Packard Motor Car Co. By May 18 his work had advanced to a stage where the Government felt justified in entering into a contract with the Packard Co. to provide shop facilities for the production of 25 experimental planes under Capt. Lepere's direction. The result of these efforts was a two-place fighting machine built around a Liberty engine. From the start this design met with the approval of the manufacturer and engineers because of its clean-cut perfection.
The performance of the Lepere plane in the air is indicated by the following figures: