The Fascinating History of Hours 8000 Men Dying During Their

Welcome to another journey through aviation history! In this article, we explore some incredible early developments in aeronautics.

Key Takeaways

• hours. "8,000 men dying during their 15 hours of pilot training." There was an eagerness
• for many young men to join the Air Force but the main problem was the

The Full Story

hours. "8,000 men dying during their 15 hours of pilot training." There was an eagerness for many young men to join the Air Force but the main problem was the sheer lack of planes the countries had. === Early bombing efforts === Typical 1914 aircraft could carry only very small bomb loads – the bombs themselves, and their storage, were still very elementary, and effective bomb sights were still to be developed. Nonetheless the beginnings of strategic and tactical bombing date from the earliest days of the war. Notable are the raids by the RNAS on the German airship sheds at Düsseldorf, Cologne and Friedrichshafen in September, October and November 1914, as well as the formation of the Brieftauben Abteilung Ostende. == The dawn of air combat == As Dickson had predicted, initially air combat was extremely rare, and definitely subordinate to reconnaissance. There are even stories of the crew of rival reconnaissance aircraft exchanging nothing more belligerent than smiles and waves. This soon progressed to throwing grenades, and other objects—even grappling hooks. The first aircraft brought down by another was an Austrian reconnaissance aircraft rammed on 8 September 1914 by a Russian pilot Pyotr Nesterov in Galicia in the Eastern Front. Both planes crashed as the result of the attack, killing all occupants. Eventually, pilots began firing handheld firearms at enemy aircraft; however, pistols were too inaccurate and the single-shot rifles too unlikely to score a hit. On August 23, 1914, no 5 Squadron British observer Lt Leslie da Costa Penn Gaskell opened fire on a German aircraft with a machine gun for the first time and the era of air combat was underway as more and more aircraft were fitted with machine guns. === Evolution of fighter aircraft === ==== The pusher solution ==== 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, which featured at the 1913 Aero Show in London, a grand fest. and appeared in developed form as the FB.5 in February 1915. This pioneering fighter, like the Royal Aircraft Factory F.E.2b and the Airco DH.1, was a pusher type. These had the engine and propeller behind the pilot, facing backward, rather than at the front of the aircraft, as in a tractor configuration design. This provided an optimal machine gun position, from which the gun could be fired directly forward without an obstructing propeller, and reloaded and cleared in flight. An important drawback was that pusher designs tended to have an inferior performance to tractor types with the same engine power because of the extra drag created by the struts and rigging necessary to carry the tail unit. The F.E.2d, a more powerful version of the F.E.2b, remained a formidable opponent well into 1917, when pusher fighters were already obsolete. They were simply too slow to catch their quarry. ==== Machine gun synchronisation ==== The forward firing gun of a pusher "gun carrier" provided some

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This article was adapted from public domain historical archives to bring you accessible, plain English history.