Pinned
This community is for the celebration of First World War aircraft, in all their glory and foibles.
Feel free to post photos of any aircraft of the period that strike your fancy, including the weird, the wonderful and the why did they do that varieties.
Of course, members should be civil towards one another and no one should violate Wheaton's Law.
Poppet
Actually, yes they did, but not having them led to some rather amusing attempts at aerial warfare from the Russians.
Two such examples of how the Russians got creative are from pilots Pyotr Nesterov and Aleksandr Kozakov, both men flying Morane Saulnier G models.
By the time war broke out in August 1914, Nesterov was already a well known pilot, and not just in his Russian homeland.
In August 1913 Nesterov, piloting a Nieuport IV, became the first pilot to perform a loop. Previous to Nesterov's historic flight, the prevailing thought was the aircraft of the day, with wimpy engines and fragile airframes and wings, could break apart under the stress of "looping the loop" as it was called at the time. Au contraire said Nesterov (but probably in Russian rather than French), as he took to the air to prove the haters wrong.
When Nesterov, all aflush with exuberance for his great performance, landed he was promptly brought before his superior officers and arrested for endangering government property.
While Nesterov was serving his sentence of ten days close arrest he was also being heralded the world over. After Frenchman Adolphe Pegoud became the second flier to loop and was immediately promoted and given a medal, the shamefaced Russian brass decided to do the same for their boy.
Fast forward one year later (what a difference a year makes) and Nesterov is flying Moranes against the Austrians in the early days of the Great War.
But it wasn't a great war for Nesterov, in fact it wasn't even an okay war; it totally sucked. The unarmed nature of aircraft at the time frustrated Nesterov, as he truly wanted to stick it to the Austrians. The question was, how?
The answer was easy, but had the drawback of being suicidal. In the last days of August Nesterov formed his plan and when duly given the chance, put it into action.
Flying along the front Nesterov encountered an Austrian Aviatik B.II observation plane.
Without hesitating (or maybe a bit of hesitating, no one really knows for sure), Nesterov dove down upon the aircraft in an attempt to give it a glancing blow that he hoped would send it spiraling to the ground. He was half right.
It was more than a glancing blow that the fragile Morane gave the Aviatik, and both planes spun into the ground. Nesterov was thrown from his craft and died the next day, while both occupants of the Aviatik were killed outright.
Thus the first pilot to do a loop had become the first Russian pilot to down an enemy aircraft in WWI, but in both cases got little reward for his efforts.
But Nesterov wasn't the only Russian pilot frustrated by aerial impotency. Aleksander Kozakov was also flying Morane Saulnier Gs and was equally unhappy at not being able to send his enemies crashing to the ground.
It was by now March of 1915, and some aircraft were beginning to be armed, but only in a most rudimentary fashion, with some pilots taking to the air with small arms and even bricks.
Kozakov was not among them. He wanted to dispatch enemy aircraft in a more sinister way, and thus was born The Hook.
The intrepid Russian decided to tie a large hook to a rope and attach the rope to his Morane. His plan was thus: when he met an enemy aircraft he would fly over it with the hook trailing menacingly from his plane, grapple the enemy plane, ripping it apart, and laugh maniacally as he watched his unfortunate adversary spin to the ground. This was the 1915 version of sharks with lasers.
Soon Kozakov had his chance. On March 31, 1915 Kozakov met an Austrian observation aircraft and attacked. He released the hook and the rope spun out behind his Morane. Flying over the enemy aircraft he watched as the hook hurtled towards his opponent. It missed. Instead of a hardy tug that meant the grapple had found its mark, Kozakov felt nothing but the slack pull of an empty hook.
Disappointed but not deterred, Kozakov next did the only other thing he could think of; he rammed the enemy plane.
Taking a page out of Nesterov's rather short book, Kozakov dived again on the enemy, this time giving it the type of glancing blow Nesterov had envisioned, and watched as the aircraft plummeted to earth. A victory, and one that Kozakov would be alive to describe.
Kozakov landed safely and went on to become Russia's greatest World War One flying ace. After the Moranes became obsolete Kozakov switched briefly to the Spad A2 (yikes!) before finding his niche in Nieuport 11s and 17s. He finished with an official count of 20 victories, but more than likely downed over 30 enemy machines.
The Nieuport 10 was the precursor to the great Nieuport series of fighter aircraft, including the iconic Nieuport 17.
The N.10 came in two varieties: the store bought, factory designed two seat observation craft and a single seat scout produced in the field through a conversion kit.
The two seater featured a machine gun for the observer, located in the rear, and some carried an additional forward firing gun on the top wing.
The single seat scout had a single machine gun on the top wing.
The N.10 became an effective counter measure against early Fokker aircraft until its designed scout version, the Nieuport 11, came into service.
It was in 1915 that the good people at the SPAD aircraft company decided to make an airplane that would solve all of France's worries. It would be able to fire a machine gun forward to ward off those pesky German Fokkers, and also give the observer one heck of a view. The plan was to put a nacelle in front of the propeller where the observer would sit snugly, content in the knowledge that he had a perfect field of fire and that a sturdy wire shield protected him from the whirling blades of the propeller, just inches behind his head. What joy.
There were problems from the get go. First, after people became convinced that the good people at SPAD were serious in trying to sell this piece of flying death, the question arose as to how the pilot and observer would communicate, what with that whirling blade separating them and all.
The answer was simple they don't. SPAD felt the pilot and observer could communicate just fine on the ground, which is where most observers wanted to stay when they saw this death machine.
The next question was, what happens when a less than skilled pilot makes a less than skilled landing.
Again the answer was simple:
The observer ends up something akin to ground beef.
The S.A.2 was not only a nightmare of a design, upon entering service there were some notable defects that made one wonder just what they had been smoking over at SPAD.
The worst of these were that the observer's nacelle had the nasty habit of vibrating intensely and then separating itself from the fuselage, thereby giving the observer an extraordinary view he would enjoy but quickly and only once.
When the nacelle detached itself it also had the bad habit of removing the top wing as it dropped earthward. This made even pilots refuse to fly it, and with no observers stupid enough to go aloft nor pilots to take them, the French air force was left with 57 of the damn things.
What to do with them?
Yet again, the answer was simple: Give them to the Russians.
In a backwards country with a backwards education system and horrendous standard of living, it should not be surprising to find the Russian air service as backward as the rest of the country.
Very few domestic designs existed (strangely with the exception of some genuinely innovative and well designed bombers), the Russians were desperate for anything that could more or less fly and carry a gun.
They gladly took the SPADs and had no problem putting observers into them. The Russian's greatest resource was (and still is) people. They had lots of them, so a few plummeting to earth with their nacelles didn't really matter much in the scheme of things. There is even one documented case of a Russian SPAD shooting down an enemy aircraft.
Though the SPAD was a poorly thought out design, it did provide the experience that would lead to the design of the SPAD VII and XIII, which, unlike the S.A.2, would prove to be much more deadly to the enemy than to its own pilots.
