With every seventh round a tracer was fired so the gunner-pilot could see his stream of fire and adjust his aim accordingly. The Royal Flying Corps began using it in July 1916 and its pilots found it very useful. It carried a forward-firing Lewis machine-gun and the absence of an engine in front gave the pilot and uninterupted view of his target.Īnother important innovation was the development of tracer ammunition. The DH2 was a single-seater biplane with the engine behind the pilot. It was not long before Britain and France began fitting synchronised machine-guns to their aircraft and pilots such as Rene Fonck and William Bishop developed reputations as flying aces.īy the spring of 1916 the British had produced the Avro DH2 fighter plane. Pilots such as Immelmann and Boelcke, who had more than eight 'kills', became known as Flying Aces. Boelcke went on to claim forty victims before he was also killed in October 1916. Immelmann destroyed seventeen Allied aircraft in his Eindecker before being shot down and killed on 15 June 1916. German pilots such as Max Immelmann and Oswald Boelcke began destroying large numbers of British aircraft using their synchronised machine-guns. Also called a synchronising gear, the propeller was linked by a shaft to the trigger to block fire whenever they were in line. By the autumn of 1915 Fokker was fitting his Eindecker monoplanes with interrupter gear, therefore producing the first true fighter aircraft. It was now possible for a pilot in a single-seater aircraft to successfully fire a machine-gun.Īnton Fokker, a Dutch designer who had set up an aircraft factory in Schwerin, German, was also trying to develop a machine-gun that could fire through revolving propeller blades.
These small wedges of toughened steel diverted the passage of those bullets which struck the blades. In 1915 the French pilot, Roland Garros, added deflector plates to the blades of his propeller. What made the achievement so remarkable was that all three German aircraft were armed with machine-guns.
After forcing it to land he brought down two more enemy planes. Flying a single-seater Bristol Scout and armed with a single-shot cavalry carbine mounted on the starboard side of the fuselage, Hawker attacked an enemy two-seater over Ypres. The first Victoria Cross for air combat was won by Captain Lanoe Hawker on 25th June, 1915. As well as using guns, some crews carried grenades which they tried to drop onto enemy fliers below them. By October 1915 the Royal Flying Corps decided to fit this safety harness to all their aircraft. Strange's gunner, Rabagliati, used a Lewis Gun and was soon bring down German aircraft over the Western Front. He devised a safety strap system in his Avro 504 so that it was possible for his gunner to "stand up and fire all round over the top of the plane and behind". One of Britain's first star pilots was Louis Strange. This was an amazing achievement as his Sopwith was not armed. The first dog-fight is believed to have taken place on 28th August 1914, when Lieutenant Norman Spratt, flying a Sopwith Tabloid, forced down a German two-seater. Dogfights were extremely difficult because the pilot would have to dodge other enemy aircraft while listening to the commands of the gunner as to where to fly to get the enemy into his sights. These early fighter aircraft had two two seats, with a man sitting in the rear controlling the guns. The first fighter planes were only equipped with machine-guns which were fixed onto the top wing. As the First World War broke out not long after the aeroplane had been invented, there had not been time to develop guns which could be built into the body of a plane. The early definition of the word 'dogfight' meant an aerial battle between two or more aircraft.
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