M.Goodall, A.Tagg British Aircraft before the Great War (Schiffer)
Deleted by request of (c)Schiffer Publishing
KING monoplane (Alec or Alick King, Kessingland, Suffolk)
This machine was built in 1908-1909 at Kessingland, and was tested on Benacre Denes, where it lifted off and was then damaged by running into a bank of earth. After repair it was removed, in October 1909, the few miles inland to Beccles Common, where Capt. Sanders proposed to fly and to build a hangar. The King monoplane was housed in a tent but was wrecked when this was blown down during a gale and was not rebuilt.
The aircraft had some similarity to a Howard Wright monoplane, but with a Bleriot type undercarriage with cycle wheels. The machine had a fuselage structure made of bamboo, which was parallel in elevation, but tapered in plan to the vertical sternpost. To this was attached the rudder, a light five sided unit with wire boundaries; there was no fixed fin. The tailplane with Bleriot-like end elevators, was fixed ahead of the rudder to the lower longerons.
The wings were of parallel section with square tips, and with spars in a diamond pattern. They were braced by cables and kingposts to the undercarriage and fuselage pylon, which also served to provide a pivot point for the warping control cables, which apparently warped the leading edge.
The sides of the center fuselage were fabric covered; the rear fuselage and engine bay were uncovered. The engine itself is believed to have been made by a local man named Talbot and was a horizontally opposed, air-cooled type of fourcylinders, although other reports referred to a three-cylinder engine.