Last living WW1 fighter pilot dies.

[gofaster]

Artillery spotters in balloons were issued parachutes on a regular basis, since they made easy targets.

[Ripsnort]

Ah, thks for the clarification!

[Pongo]

Anyone here read the Bandy Papers?

[WineMan]

Originally posted by gofaster
I've been reading a book called "Fighter Aces" that re-printed the memoirs of some of The Great War's fighter pilots and it boggles my mind how those guys could go up in wood and fabric airplanes loaded with easily-punctured gas tanks, no armour, and no parachute.

You might also be interested in "The Canvas Falcons" by Stephen Longstreet.  Out of print, but a great book full of first hand accounts of WWI fighter aces.

Especially interesting is the development of guns onto fighter aircraft.  Went from no guns, to pilots carrying pistols and excahnging fire with enemy recon planes flying the opposite direction, to observers with carbines, to mounting guns on fuselage and shooting off your own prop to the famous first synchronized MG developed by Fokker.

[GScholz]

I belive the Germans issued chutes to their pilots. RFC OTOH tought its pilots would just bail intead of engaging the enemy

[AKS\/\/ulfe]

Ernst Udet bailed out of his Fokker DVII when his radiator was shot out some time in 1918...

Some Germans were given parachutes, while others weren't... and by this time it was late in the war that the German pilots recieved parachutes.

BTW, the gun development did not go from rear observers to shooting through your own prop and getting it shot off.. instead it went to a gun mounted on the fuselage of a 1914 Recce RFC recce machine that fired down and to the right. Shortly after that, the first fighters were born (Morane Parasols and Morane Saulniers) that used deflector gear... which was just a solid triangle mounted on the prop, so any round that would strike the prop ricochetted off it. Then later came the synchronization gear which stopped the gun from firing anytime a propellor blade was in the way by use of a simple pushrod system.
-SW

[WineMan]

Originally posted by AKS\/\/ulfe
BTW, the gun development did not go from rear observers to shooting through your own prop and getting it shot off.. instead it went to a gun mounted on the fuselage of a 1914 Recce RFC recce machine that fired down and to the right. Shortly after that, the first fighters were born (Morane Parasols and Morane Saulniers) that used deflector gear... which was just a solid triangle mounted on the prop, so any round that would strike the prop ricochetted off it. Then later came the synchronization gear which stopped the gun from firing anytime a propellor blade was in the way by use of a simple pushrod system.
-SW

Yes, this is true - I simply didn't want to list each and every step between firing with a carbine to the development of the synchronization gear - it's all in the book

And yes, there are accounts of props having been shot off (it was one of the ones fitted with a deflection plate, btw)

[AKS\/\/ulfe]

Yes, but I wanted to show off my knowledge of the air war in WWI.
-SW

[GScholz]

Didn't Oswald Boelcke, the father of ACM, shoot of his own prop and auger? Some say he did, others say he collided with Erwin Böhme.

[AKS\/\/ulfe]

Books I have say that Bohme collided with Boelcke when a British fighter pursued by Richtofen cut in front of them. Bohme managed to keep his plane in the air, but the fabric on Boelcke's upper wing ripped away and he lost control.
-SW

[gunnss]

Well, My Grandfather was in WW1 in a transportation Co. of the 1st ID, after 3 months in the trenches he caught the flu and spent the rest of the war recovering on the French Reviera
tough war eh.  Somthing Cool that happend to me is that while I was in the Army I was assinged to my Grandfathers company and found his name in the Unit History.  I never got to know him well He died when I was 9 in the early 70s but my father says he mostly talked about french girls on the coast.
Gunns