The Caudron C.270 Luciole ("Firefly") was a sporting, touring and trainer aircraft produced in France in the 1930s, derived from the C.230.
Design and construction
It was a conventional biplane with single-bay, unstaggered wings of equal span. The pilot and a single passenger sat in tandem open cockpits. It featured a fabric-covered fuselage in place of the C.230's wooden one, and other refinements including revised control surfaces and undercarriage, and an improved and simplified wing-folding mechanism.
Operational history
The type proved immensely successful, with over 700 machines built in the decade leading up to World War II. Of these, 296 were purchased by the French government for its pilot training programme, the Aviation Populaire. Many examples saw wartime service as liaison aircraft, and those surviving the conflict saw postwar use as glider tugs in the Ecole de l'Air.
20th Century Fox used two Lucioles in their 1966 film The Blue Max. These had the rear seat converted into a machine-gun position so that they look like British observation planes. One of these survives on the American registry.
^Mark Carlson, Flying on Film: A Century of Aviation in the Movies, 1912–2012 Duncan, Oklahoma: BearManor Media, 2012. ISBN 978-1-59393-219-0.
Bibliography
Bouhours, Bernard (November 2001). "Courrier des Lecteurs" [Readers' Letters]. Avions: Toute l'Aéronautique et son histoire (in French) (104): 2. ISSN 1243-8650.
Taylor, Michael J. H. (1989). Jane's Encyclopedia of Aviation. London: Studio Editions. p. 240.
World Aircraft Information Files. London: Bright Star Publishing. pp. File 891 Sheet 14.
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Caudron C.270 Luciole.
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