Alcock Scout

In 1916 John Alcock, a Royal Naval Air Service pilot who had trained as a mechanic before the war, was posted to Mudros, the British naval base on the island of Lemnos from which the Aegean and the Dardanelles were watched. Far from the English factories and short of spares, the base had accumulated the remains of crashed aircraft, and Alcock decided to use them to build a fighter of his own.

The result was a hybrid biplane. From the Sopwith Triplane he took the forward fuselage and the lower wing; from the Sopwith Pup, the upper wing; from the Sopwith Camel, the tailplane and elevators. The rear fuselage and the fin were new parts, credited to Alcock himself. It was a fabric-covered wooden aircraft, powered first by a 100 hp Gnome Monosoupape rotary engine and later by a 110 hp Clerget 9Z and armed with a 7.7 mm Vickers machine gun. It spanned about 7.4 m and was 5.8 m long; the published figures are approximate, because very little documentation on the aircraft survives. His colleagues nicknamed it the «Sopwith Mouse».

Alcock never flew it. On 30 September 1917, after shooting down or forcing down enemy aircraft while flying a Camel —an action for which he received the Distinguished Service Cross—, he took off at the controls of a Handley Page bomber to attack Constantinople. An engine failure forced him to turn back near Gallipoli and the aircraft ended up ditching off Suvla Bay; Alcock and his crew were taken prisoner by the Ottomans before the fighter was finished.

His colleagues completed it, and Flight Sub-Lieutenant Norman Starbuck made the first flight on 15 October 1917, followed by a few more. In early 1918 the aircraft crashed, was written off and never flew again. It was never given a serial number.

The Alcock Scout remained a workshop curiosity, but it illustrates the ingenuity of the remote bases of the Aegean front. Its creator would soon become famous: in June 1919, together with Arthur Whitten Brown, Alcock made the first non-stop transatlantic flight.