At the start of the
First World War the Farman type pusher biplane was widely regarded as the best available design for a combat aircraft. The unencumbered position of the cockpit provided a very wide field of fire for a forward-facing gun, not to mention a good view ahead and to the sides for piloting,
aerial reconnaissance and
artillery spotting. The greater
lift of a biplane design enabled the plane to carry a heavier cargo, such as a payload of bombs under the wings. The relatively simple airframe was also seen as suitable for
mass production, especially before
synchronization gear became widely available, these criteria were enough to outweigh the superior speed and flight performance offered by
monoplane designs with a tractor propeller. Other contemporary Allied warplanes, such as the French
Breguet Bre.5 and the British
F.E.2,
DH.1 and
D.H.2, used the Farman pusher layout. Unusually the HF.30 was used exclusively by the
Imperial Russian Air Service, and serial production appears to have taken place principally or entirely in Russia. The Air Service was already using Farman type aircraft extensively, and had substantial experience of manufacturing them under license. At an early stage, there had been talk of making the
MF.11 the Air Service's primary plane, and in 1913 a HF.15 had been their first armed fighter. Details on how and when the HF.30 was procured seem sketchy, with vaguely indicated dates for its front-line deployment ranging from late 1915 to late 1916. The new type was known as the
Farman Tridtsat' (Фарман тридцать, "Farman Thirty", often written Фарман-XXX) and was nicknamed the "Fartri", or sometimes the "Farsal" (Фарсаль) from its Salomon engine. The HF.30 appears to have been produced principally by the
Dux Factory in Moscow, although some level of construction seems to have also taken place at several of the other major Russian aircraft factories. With over 400 planes built at Dux alone, it far outnumbered the Lebed and Anatra designs or the limited numbers of fighters assembled from imported components, although the situation is less clear with the Voisin V. Alongside the HF.30, limited numbers of both the F.27 and the F.40 bomber were also procured. In spite of its apparent ubiquity, there is little detailed information available about the combat role of the HF.30. As an Imperial military doctrine for the use of aircraft developed in 1914, armed Farman type biplanes (and a few
Sikorsky S-12s) were designated for important fortress garrisons and each numbered army's headquarters, with unarmed monoplanes serving as high-speed scouts for front-line army corps, but by the outbreak of hostilities, this distinction seems to have been abandoned: for example, the squadron attached to 1 Corps flew the F.22, an immediate precursor of the HF.30. There are sketchy references to the type's involvement in air combat, but it is not clear how far the HF.30 had been deployed before two consecutive developments in 1916 that curtailed its usefulness. Firstly, the Air Service began to restrict the
air superiority role to new high-performance planes equipped with
synchronization gears, like the imported
Nieuport 11; then, the HF.30 was definitively outclassed in combat by new opponents, beginning with the
Albatros D.I fighter and the
Albatros C.V scout. Furthermore, the HF.30's "pusher" engine came to be regarded as a large, exposed target for attackers from the rear. Nonetheless, a large production run and relatively good performance ensured that the HF.30 saw wide use. It flew in a battlefield reconnaissance role, including
photo reconnaissance, and probably on bombing raids in early Soviet squadrons in 1918. At least some individual planes were still assigned to fighter units, presumably to provide them with a reconnaissance and
liaison capability: in late 1917, the 19th Fighter Squadron used a single HF.30 alongside its five up-to-date Nieuports. A measure of its relative capability can be gauged from the fact that the HF.30 was the only warplane design with a large-scale production line which was
not mentioned when the
First All-Russia Aviation Congress demanded an end to the manufacture of obsolescent planes in August 1917. The type was used by both sides in the
Russian Civil War, and continued in production under the
Red government. The
Berdyansk factory was still producing planes in 1919. There were 147 HF.30s in the Soviet inventory in 1921, still in the front-line reconnaissance role; shortly afterwards it was decided to reassign them to a training role, but in 1922 there were still five front-line squadrons with 63 planes and just eight trainers. By 1924, there remained at least nine trainers and eight planes in front-line service. Subsequently, at least ten were transferred to the new
civil aviation organization, where they were apparently used to for "propaganda and recruitment" across the Soviet Union: some continued to fly until the end of the 1920s. The wide availability of the type also meant that it was acquired by other emerging states of
Eastern Europe. In late 1917, a report for the nascent Ukrainian People's Army Air Force reported an inventory of 22 aircraft in the territory controlled by the
Central Rada, while two more examples were serving with the ex-Imperial units that became the founding squadrons of the
Polish Air Force, and a further seven were captured by them subsequently. In 1918 an L.30 became one of the first two planes of the nascent
Czech Air Force, with at least one more acquired soon after while six of the M-16 snowplane/seaplane variant were acquired by the
Finnish Air Force and served until 1923. In 1919, a captured example became the first plane of the
Estonian Air Force. ==Variants==