Sud-Ouest Triton – Photos & Video

The Sud-Ouest SO.6000 Triton was the first French jet aircraft to be manufactured and was completed during the 1940s by SNCASO. The SO.6000 design began in 1943, as a clandestine project due to the German occupation, under engineer Lucien Servanty. Shortly after the war, the French government required five prototypes to be built.

Source: Sud-Ouest Triton on Wikipedia

The Sud-Ouest Triton was a French experimental aircraft designed and built in the late 1940s to test the concept of a tailless delta wing. The Triton had a triangular wing with a sweep angle of 60 degrees and a small vertical fin at the rear. The pilot sat in a pressurized cockpit in the nose, and the powerplant was a single turbojet engine mounted in the fuselage. The Triton made its first flight on 11 March 1950, piloted by Jacques Guignard.
The aircraft demonstrated good stability and handling qualities, but suffered from low speed performance and high landing speed. The Triton was modified several times to improve its aerodynamics and flight envelope, but it never reached its design speed of Mach 0.9. The Triton program was cancelled in 1953, after 93 flights and about 40 hours of flight time. The Triton was one of the first aircraft to explore the potential of the delta wing configuration, which would later be adopted by many supersonic fighters and bombers.