The Henry Farman HF.30 was a two-seat military biplane designed in France around 1915, which became a principal aircraft of the Imperial Russian Air Service during the First World War.

The crew of two (pilot and observer) sat in front in an open cockpit, the wings were of a simple unstaggered) design, while the rear part of the plane was just a wire-braced framework supporting the tail.

Grigorovich, this retained only the 150 hp (110 kW) Salmson and the basic layout of the HF.30, with a modified cockpit, shorter tail and staggered wings of equal length, plus a specialized undercarriage.

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 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.

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,[11] 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.

[16] 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.

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.