058: Hansa-Brandenburg B.I (Fd) 76.70
HM0058

The B.I, nicknamed by Czechoslovak pilots “Little Brandy” to differentiate it from the “Big Brandy”, Hansa-Brandenburg’s larger but similar C.I model, was on my to-do list for a long time. It’s a relatively obscure aircraft, despite being one of young Ernst Heinkel’s very first designs and playing a pivotal role in training most early Austro-Hungarian pilots and those of several other countries that used the B.I after the Great War.

The first two (!) aircraft that formed the Czechoslovak Air Corps in late Fall 1918 were B.Is flown in by Czech k.u.k. Luftfahrtruppen pilots following the dissolution of Austria-Hungary. Czechoslovakia used at least 22 B.Is inherited or purchased from Austria post WWI, and build two distinct batches of licensed copies between 1919 and 1923, the first as the Aero Ae.10 (later renamed to A.1) and the latter as Letov Š.10. They were used mostly for training by the Czechoslovak Air Corps and many were sold for token sums to Czechoslovak aeroclubs at the end of their military service. B.I was very easy to fly, in fact so much so that the Air Corps leadership blamed this quality for its slow adoption of more advanced, and consequently more difficult to fly, aircraft designs. One anecdote I came across tells of an aspirant pilot who, following a merry night of drinking, fell fast asleep whilst flying the B.I. Unperturbed, his mount slowly lost height and gently landed in a field, stopped only by a wooden fence an inconsiderate farmer placed in its way.

An article I recently came across, published in the August 2009 issue of a Czech hobby magazine HPM, finally got me moving on the project. In it, the authors tried to shed light on the likely camouflage pattern of the B.I 76.70, a single specific aircraft captured in several well known, and rare, in-flight photographs. According to them, it’s probably a test application of two camouflage colors ordered by the Czechoslovak Ministry of Defense (MNO) during the Fall of 1919 and eventually adopted in 1922, albeit using an additional chestnut-brown color. The color scheme of the B.I 76.70 has been a subject of several color profiles and is one of the decal options in the Legato 7211 kit boxing. The HPM article pointed out that the fuselage, at least most of it, was most likely not painted, contrary to prior interpretations, including the kit’s. It also estimated that the in-flight photographs of the B.I 76.70 were taken in 1920 and not in 1919 or 1923 as published elsewhere. Good stuff!