Originally Posted by
fauteuil volant
As far as I'm aware, very little is known and has been written about Miles' Gnat. The main source of which I know is Don Brown's 'Miles Aircraft since 1925' (Putnam). In that he says:
'With the help of a friend, F.Wallis, he [Miles] evolved the 'design' of a small biplane known as the Gnat. Having completed the few drawings they thought necessary, they started construction, using as longerons the ash chassis of a small sports car which Miles had been building.'
'At length, the airframe of the Gnat was practically complete except for covering with fabric. A small two cylinder engine of 698cc was bought, complete with a 4 ft diameter airscrew, still in the author's possession, which had been used in one of the aeroplanes built for the Lympne competitions of 1923.'
Broadly the same information is related by Arthur Ord-Hume in 'British Light Aeroplanes - their Evolution, Development and Perfection 1920 - 1940' (GMS). However he says that the engine was to have been a 698cc Blackburne (which strongly suggests that it was a V twin Tomtit). I've looked carefully, again using a magnifying glass, at the close-up, taken from the original photograph, of the engine of the aeroplane in the photograph. Allowing for the low resolution and concomitant lack of clarity, whilst one might argue that it has features which suggest that it isn't a Tomtit it would be a brave man who, based on that evidence, would assert that it definitely is not a Tomtit! Thus that possibility must remain.
'Shoreham Airport Sussex - The Story of Britain's Oldest Licensed Airfield' (T.M.A.Webb & Dennis L. Bird) contains the following interesting snippet of information concerning the year 1914.
Earlier the Cedric Lee Company had won a contract to manufacture Be.2c wings. With wages earned from this contract, Charles Gates and another carpenter named Fred Wallis started making their own plane using parts from an ancient Bleriot monoplane, and a three cylinder Anzani engine. They built it in a room above a boot-repairer's shop in Southwick, and later in a garage just south of the railway in Southwick.
It resembled a Caudron biplane, and they got as far as making the body, mounting the engine and constructing the wings. However, they were not to complete its construction as Gates would leave Shoreham to join up as a boy mechanic with the RNAS in May 1915. He had wanted to learn to fly, but no-one would take him seriously at Shoreham, so he just went off and volunteered for the RNAS which offered him some hope of learning to fly. In fact it was to be 1916 in far-off Dar-es-Salaam in East Africa before Charles Gates first flew as an air mechanic.
Years later in 1924, Fred Wallis would help a young Fred Miles build his first plane in his father's laundry in Portslade, using components from the partly completed Gates and Wallis plane.
Now I appreciatethat this refers to a three cylinder Anzani and the mystery machinehad a two cylinder V Anzani, but with the Miles Gnat connection, just perhaps ..... ?