Why a triplane?

Ricky wrote in news:87914aea-450f-4f96-bf63-
:

On Feb 2, 4:40*pm, Matt Whiting wrote:
Ricky wrote:
After reading more on this I have found that the German's were very
concerned with the ability of their aircraft to get above the enemy
as
quickly as possible. An attack from above (especially from out of
the
sun), was found to be an extremely effective method of victory. The
amount of lift generated from 3 wings was found to enhance climb
performance quite significantly, thus affording German pilots the
abilty to attack from above as was desired.

I really doubt that was the reason as lift can easily be increased in
a
number of ways other than adding wings. *I think structural strength
was

the primary reason for more wings in that era.

Matt

Well, hey, that's what I read from a guy who spent years of research
on the Fokker Triplane and then built one himself from scratch. Maybe
he's mistaken? I doubt it.

Well, unles he's an aeronautical engineer, he probably is. A lot of
stuff has been written about that airplane over the years and it just
gets regurgitated. There's no doubt about it, the thing climbed well,
but it would have gone up faster if he had sawn off the middle wing. To
make matters worse, there was no difference in the incidence between the
planes. Each plane affects it's neighbor and each wing has to be set at
the best incidence to take advantage of the available airflow. Sinc the
wing above and the wing below are affecting the flow around the center
it was pretty much just cancelled out.
The Air and Space article mentions that the prop was pitched pretty fine
on the triplane, which may have explained it's climb rate. But Fokker
and the Air Ministry must not have been all that impressd with it since
only a few undred were made as opposed to several thousand Albatros D-
V's. Fokker abandoned it and went the other way with first the D-VII and
then the E-V,/DVIII. The D-VII initialy had a relatively short fuselage
like the DR-1, but test flights ( done by Richtofen, I think) showed the
airplane to be desperately unstable. They lengthend the fuselage over
night and tried again, and probably the best fighter of the war was
born.
He went even further form the multiplane arrangement with the next one
of course.. the EV/D-VIII


Bertie