1:32 Gnome 7 Omega

Fifty horses that set aviation moving

The seven-cylinder Omega is the forefather of the whole family of rotary engines. Louis and Laurent Seguin presented it in 1909 and gave airmen something that had not existed until then: a light, air-cooled unit that ran long enough for flying a circuit and between distant towns to be possible with it. Fifty horsepower sounds laughable today, but at the time it meant the difference between hopping about a meadow and real flight. What was decisive was not so much the output itself as the ratio between it and the weight of the whole unit.

The era of aviation meetings

With this unit the machines of Henri Farman made their name at the first great aviation gatherings, and the Omega quickly became the measure against which other designs were compared. Its principle then remained unchanged until the end of the First World War: a fixed crankshaft, rotating cylinders and a propeller bolted straight onto the block. The later Lambda and Delta types only added capacity and cylinders; the basis was thought out by the Seguins here.

A casting for an uncovered nose

Prewar and early wartime biplanes carried their powerplant practically naked, without any cowling at all, so there is nowhere to hide it on a model. A seven-cylinder in 1:32 is therefore built as an object in its own right: the cylinder star, the crankcase, the propeller flange and the valve gear. It pays to finish and paint it before it disappears among the struts and bracing, where a brush can no longer reach. On the finished model it then forms, together with the propeller, the natural visual center of the whole nose.