Near dawn on April 2, 2022, a vision from the past accelerated down a grass airstrip in rural Sweden and lifted smoothly off the ground. The French biplane, the world’s only flyable Nieuport 28, was making its first flight since the 1970s, following a lengthy restoration by Swedish pilot and vintage aircraft restorer Mikael Carlson. Built in France in 1918, the Nieuport—serial number 512—had not seen combat in World War I but it had served with the United States Army Air Service (USAS) after the Armistice and appeared in several Hollywood war films following its retirement from service. In 2019 its owner donated the venerable airplane to the Collings Foundation’s American Heritage Museum in Hudson, Massachusetts.
The airplane was shipped to Sweden for restoration and Carlson went to work. Overall, he found the Nieuport to be in excellent shape, and that included the original 160-hp Gnome Monosoupape 9N rotary engine. The cowling was not authentic and had to be replaced, part of the upper wing needed to be reconstructed and some other parts had to be refabricated and replaced. Carlson then had the entire airframe covered with authentic Irish linen. When it came time to choose a color scheme for the airplane, Carlson chose one that was both historic and unique: that of Nieuport N6164, which 1st Lt. Douglas Campbell was flying on April 14, 1918, when he scored the first aerial victory by an American-trained fighter pilot in the USAS in World War I.
And how did the vintage aircraft fly? “Put it this way,” Carlson said. “I can understand why the French gave the Nieuport 28 to the Americans and kept the better Spad XIII to themselves.”
One of the most elegant looking warplanes of its time, what was formally classified as the Nieuport 28.C1 (the “C” signifying , or fighter, and the “1” its single seat) first flew on June 14, 1917. Its biplane configuration marked an overdue departure from a
