Wassmer WA-21 Javelot

Javelot
WA 20 G-CJDX
Role	Competition and recreational glider
National origin	France
Manufacturer	Wassmer Aviation
Designer	Maurice Collard
First flight	August 1956
Number built	120+, all variants

The Wassmer WA 20 Javelot (English: Javelin) and its very similar successors the WA 21 Javelot II and WA 22 Super Javelot are single seat gliders built in France in the 1950s and 1960s. Well over a hundred were sold as club aircraft and over fifty remain on the French civil register in 2010.

The Javelot was designed by Maurice Collard to provide a simply constructed glider with good performance to replace pre-war German- designed aircraft like the DFS Weihe and French built DFS Olympia Meise (Nord 2000), as well as the first post war generation of French designs such as the Arsenal Air 100, then widely used by French clubs.

The original WA 20 Javelot, later known as the Javelot I and first flown in August 1956, has an all wood wing of 16.08 m (52 ft 9 in) span and a wing area of 15.5 m² (199.6 sq ft) giving it an aspect ratio of 16.7. It is shoulder mounted and is in two pieces built around single box spars with leading edge D-shaped, plywood skinned torsion boxes. The wing is fabric covered aft of the spar. There are small endplates at the wing tips, partly to protect them on the ground. The airbrakes deploy both above and below the wing.

The Javelot has a flat-sided, polygonal fuselage, shaped by a steel tube frame and with fabric covering. Forward of the wing there are four longerons and the fuselage is deep and flat sided, which together with a deep, flat topped and sided canopy, which curves in side view, forms a blunt nose. The undercarriage is a combination of rubber sprung nose skid and fixed monowheel. Behind the wing the fuselage has only three longerons, tapers and has a prominent dorsal ridge. The wooden fin and rudder have straight edges and a rounded top; the tailplane, which carries a one piece elevator is mounted on top of the fuselage. There is a tailskid.<

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