L.Opdyke French Aeroplanes Before the Great War (Schiffer)
Deleted by request of (c)Schiffer Publishing
The second major Schmitt design formed the basis for most of his later aeroplanes: a trapezoid-section box frame to carry wings and engine, with some sort of tapered fuselage covered only at the rear to carry the pilot and a single elevator at the tail. This was the first Schmitt to employ his distinctive stabilizing method: by pivoting the wingcell on a pin mounted high in the cabane structure he could vary the incidence to keep the center of lift in the same plane as the center of gravity, allowing the fuselage to remain horizontal during climb and descent. The pilot turned a crank with an attached worm gear to achieve this result: it worked.
This machine was developed up to Type 7. The first development was probably another similar machine with unequal-span wings, a 3-place design with a 70 hp engine built in 1911. There was no rudder: small vertical rudder surfaces were still fitted to the rear outboard wing struts. The single large rear elevator pivoted on the very tip of the long rear fuselage. This may have flown, but was reportedly less successful than its predecessor.
The next Schmitt variant appeared in 1912, a big 3-bay biplane still with the distinctive trapezoid-section fuselage, but with a rudder; the wing-tip rudders were gone. The unequal-span wings had long inset ailerons; there seems to have been no elevator.