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Tummelisa

The French Tummelisa biplane was first built In 1919 and was in service from 1920 to 1935. The wooden construction is braced with piano wire and power is from a 90 hp 9 cylinder Le Rhone rotary engine.

Originally it was called Tummeliten (Tom Thumb in Swedish). The type was constructed by the Swedish flight engineer Henry Kjellson as a cheap plane for practicing air combats. The plane shown here is a replica built by captain Mikael Carlsson and flew for the first time in 1989 (thanks to Lennie Odmyr for this information).

Have a look at the movie to see why the Tummelisa was rated so highly for its flying abilities when first released.

Use the controller above to watch the Tummelisa perform a graceful loop during its flying display (this requires Quicktime, and is a moderately large movie). I apologise for the poor quality of this movie but it was originally encoded in the "early days" of internet video!