Latécoère 6 French Bomber

The Latécoère 6 was a French four-engined biplane bomber of the early 1920s built using an advanced geodetic structure. The Latécoère 6 first flew in the summer of 1924 at Francazal, piloted by Achille Enderlin. It soon became obvious that the aircraft was underpowered, perhaps because of weight gains during construction. Despite this and damage sustained during testing there was considerable official interest and a new contract enabled Latécoère to modify the aircraft to take four more modern and powerful engines, 420 hp (310 kW) Gnome et Rhône 9A Jupiter engines. This revised machine was known as the Latécoère 6 M. Externally, as well as the obvious change to partially-cowled air-cooled engines with their protruding cylinder heads, a very broad chord strut, narrowest at its midpoint now braced each engine to the upper wing, and each single main wheel was replaced by a pair. The 6 M first flew in 1925 and made a successful series of tests towards the end of that year. Despite interest shown in the design, no order was placed.