When the world went to war in 1914 the Wright Brothers had made the worlds first powered
flight only a decade earlier and the airplane was still in its infancy, but the remarkable
advances made in aviation during World War One are still at the core of air power today.
I’m Indy Neidell, and welcome to a Great War special episode about the war in the air.
To say the first airplanes used in the war were basic is an understatement. Cockpits
were open and instruments were rudimentary. There were no navigational aids and pilots
had to rely on whatever maps could be found, which might even be a school atlas or a roadmap.
Getting lost was commonplace and landing in a field to ask directions was not unusual,
as was flying low alongside railway lines hoping to read station names on the platforms.
But throughout the war there was an upward spiral of technological developments, as first
one side and then the other gained the advantage and ever more effective aircraft replaced
the basic machines that took to the skies in 1914.
The first airplanes were not seen as offensive weapons, but as “scouts”. Even at the
end of the war, the fighter types such as the Sopwith Snipe and Fokker D8, were still
classified as scouts. Men on horseback were used traditionally to scout out the enemies'
position, but they had obvious limitations while the scout planes had a greater freedom
of movement, a much wider range of operation, and the unparalleled speed to accomplish these
missions, and aerial photography became a vital operation for both sides of the war.
This was a continuation of the successful use in earlier conflicts of tethered lighter-than-air
balloons for reconnaissance, such as those used in the American civil war, but flying
reconnaissance missions was dangerous. The pilot was required to fly straight and level
to allow the observer to take a series of overlapping photographs, and there was no
better target for anti-aircraft guns or stalking fighters, and long range reconnaissance meant
flying well behind the front lines.
Perhaps the best reconnaissance plane of the war was the Italian Ansaldo SVA 5. This plane,
produced in both single seater and two seater variants, had a range and altitude allowing
it to cross the Alps, and with a top speed of 230 km/h it could fly fast enough to outrun
enemy fighters. And here’s a little side note: it was more important, if less romantic,
for a fighter pilot to shoot down an observation plane than to shoot down another fighter.
More than half of Manfred von Richthofen's record setting 80 victories were scored against
reconnaissance and observation planes.
When war broke out the number of aircraft in use was tiny. France, for example, had
fewer than 140 aircraft at the start of the war. By the end of the war she fielded 4,500
aircraft, more than any other protagonist. This may not seem like too much, but it doesn’t
give a true indication of the amount of aircraft involved. During the war France produced no
less than 68,000 aircraft. 52,000 of them were lost in battle for a loss rate of 77%.
The period between 1914 and 1918 saw not only tremendous production, but also tremendous
development in aircraft technology. A typical British aircraft at the outbreak of the war
was the general purpose BE2c, with a top speed of 116 km/h. Powered by a 90 hp engine, it
could remain aloft for over three hours. Three years later, the SE5a fighter was powered
by a 200 hp engine and had a top speed of 222 km/h. Nearly twice as fast. Britain's
most famous bomber, the Handley-Page O/400, could carry a bomb load of 900kg at a top
speed of 156 km/h for flights lasting eight hours. It was powered by two 360 hp engines.
In 1914 it was important that aircraft be easy to fly, as the amount of training that
pilots received was minimal, to say the least. Some pilots began flying combat missions having
completed only three and a half hours of actual flying time. For this reas on aircraft were
designed for stability, but by the end of the war stability had given way to maneuverability.
The famous Sopwith Camel was, for example, a difficult aircraft to fly, but supremely agile.
Many earlier common technologies became obsolete as the war progressed, Like a lot of the aircraft
in 1914 were of "pusher" layout. This is the same configuration that the Wright brothers
used, where the propeller faced backwards and pushed the aircraft forward. The alternative
layout, where the propeller faces forwards and pulls the aircraft, was called a "tractor"
design. It provided better performance, but in 1914 visibility was deemed more important
than speed. World War One marked the end of pusher aircraft.
Now, as early as 1912, designers at the British firm Vickers were experimenting with machine
gun carrying aircraft. The first concrete result was the Vickers Experimental Fighting
Biplane 1. This was a pusher type of plane. This provided an optimal machine gun position,
from which the gun could be fired directly forward without an obstructing propeller,
and also reloaded and cleared in flight. An important drawback was that pusher designs
had inferior performance to tractor types. They were simply too slow to catch their quarry,
so there was an obvious need for some means to fire a machine gun forward from a tractor
aircraft. It would seem most natural to place the gun between the pilot and the propeller,
firing in the direct line of flight, so that the gun could be aimed by "aiming the aircraft".
It was also important that the breech of the weapon be readily accessible to the pilot,
so that he could clear the jams and stoppages to which early machine guns were prone. However,
this presented an obvious problem: a percentage of bullets fired "free" through a revolving
propeller will strike the blades, with predictable results.
The Morane-Saulnier company designed a system of "deflector blades", metal wedges on the
propeller. Roland Garros tried out this system in April 1915. He managed to score several
kills, before being forced by engine failure- possibly caused by the repeated strain on
his aircraft's crankshaft of the "deflected" bullets- to land behind enemy lines, where
he and his plane were captured. The German High Command passed Garros' captured plane
to the Fokker Company with orders to copy the design. The deflector system was totally
unsuitable, though, for the steel-jacketed German ammunition so the Fokker engineers
finally came up with a machine gun that was synchronized with the propeller by using interrupter
gear. This produced the Eindecker series of planes, and crude as these little monoplanes
were, they gave a period of German air superiority, known as the "Fokker Scourge" by the Allies.
The psychological effect exceeded the material – the Allies had up to now been more or
less unchallenged in the air, and the vulnerability of their older reconnaissance aircraft, especially
the British B.E.2 and French Farman pushers, came as a very nasty shock.
Everybody knows about flying aces, right? The dashing and daring heroes of their homelands.
Here are the greatest aces of the war:
Manfred von Richthofen: German, 80 victories. Also known as the Red Baron.
Ernst Udet: German, 62 victories. Also famous for using a parachute to survive being shot down.
Mick Mannock: British, 73 victories. The most
victories of any British ace, although some of his kills are now disputed, in which case
that honor falls to: Billy Bishop: Canadian ace, 72 victories,
and Rene Fonck: French, 75 victories. The most
victories of any Allied ace.
So there you have it; a brief introduction to the war in the air. While airplanes did
It was during this period that the key tasks
that aircraft could perform were experimented with and refined: observation and reconnaissance,
tactical and strategic bombing, ground attack, naval warfare, and with the growing importance
and influence of aircraft came the need to control the air, and thus the fighter was born.
Brigadier General Billy Mitchell put it very well: “The day has passed when armies on
the ground or navies on the sea can be the arbiter of a nation's destiny in war. The
main power of defense and the power of initiative against an enemy has passed to the air.”
We will of course do future specials on flying aces and the actual planes used in combat,
and also we’ll have features and links about aircraft of the war on our Facebook page.
You can also see our bio special on the Red Baron right here:
See you Thursday.