How WWI Gave Birth to the Age of Flight

Between 1903 and 1918, aviation changed from a pastime of hair-brained inventors to a technology that promised to shrink the world. The change was part inevitability and part good timing: the airplane was born and reached maturity in the years before the First World War, the first shots of which were fired 200 years ago this year. The conflict served to drive money and minds to bettering the nascent technology with the result being airplanes dominating the war-time skies.

The Wright brothers pioneered heavier-than-air powered flight on Dec. 17, 1903. It was short but sweet, lasting 12 seconds and covering just 120 feet. The brothers continued their work on airplanes after securing the first flight, but without fanfare. Subsequent flights in both North Carolina and their native Ohio were reported but no technical details were published widely abroad. As such, inventors experimenting with aviation in Europe questioned whether the Wrights had flown at all. The American brothers finally demonstrated their honed controlled airplane in Paris in 1909, putting doubts to rest.

But in the years before the Wrights brought their airplane to Paris, European inventors had already made some major advances to the nascent science of aeronautics. At the time, structural decisions and modifications were based on intuition and experience rather than hard data. Consequently, an airplane stable in level flight might lose a wing turning at high speed, for example.

Learning lessons the hard way, pieces of the airplane began to move. The forward elevator the Wrights’ flyer had included in their design for pitch control was moved to the rear of the airplane, changing its centre of gravity and increasing stability. The rear elevator was paired with an independently-acting rudder; the tail section was born. Wings changed, too. Struts between the surfaces of bi-plane added structural stability and allowed the plane to carry heavier loads. Movable surfaces between the wings added roll control, a precursor to modern-day ailerons.

One of the most visible changes to the airplane came in 1912 via French engineer Armand Deperdussin. Inspired by insects’ exoskeletons, he pioneered the monocoque fuselage. The fabric-covered wood enclosed body made an airplane structurally sound without the need for struts.

It was around 1910 that European national militaries started looking at the airplane as something that could be useful in war, but not as a weapon. Airplanes instead would make excellent sighting aides. Flying to the front lines ahead of the cavalry, airplanes could gather reconnaissance for strategists and fire on troops from a raised vantage point. And it wasn’t just airplanes. Balloons like Zeppelins offered another way for militaries to have eyes in the sky, carrying out tasks from observation to precision bombing.

Seeking to explore the airplane use in combat, Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Russia all added very small air forces to their armies and began training small groups of pilots. And these air forces were very small. In 1911, Great Britain’s Air Battalion was a unit of the Royal Engineers consisting of five airplanes and less than a dozen pilots. The French had the largest air force with an airborne unit of 260 planes in 1913.

It wasn’t long before Italy put its fledgling air force to use. During the Italo-Turkish War, the WWI precursor conflict between Italy and the Ottoman Empire, Italian Captain Carlo Piazza flew the first combat mission. It was a reconnaissance flight along the road connecting Tripoli and Aziza. It was a minor role, but a role that was about to take centre stage in the First World War.

The First World War began—even if its main actors didn't know it yet—on June 28, 1914 when Franz Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria, was assassinated. A month later Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Then Germany declared war on Russia and France. Then the United Kingdom got involved, declaring war on Germany after it invaded Belgium. Austro-Hungary declared war on Russia. Serbia declared war on Germany. The first battle, the Battle of Tannenberg, began on August 26. Airborne German troops spotted advancing Russian troops before anyone on the ground. Already it was clear that airplanes would play a vital role in the war.

Initially, airplanes flew reconnaissance missions with two man crews, one to fly the plane and one to observe. And although these planes were fitted with guns, the pilots were armed; it was the easiest way to protect themselves and their low-flying planes from ground fire. The same division of labour in reconnaissance flights saw success against enemies. The pilot could focus on flying and the observer on aiming and shooting his guns.

With planes filling the skies, it was clear pilots would need more reliable ways to fight back not only against weapons on the ground but weapons in other airplanes. It wasn’t long before engineers sought to unite the two roles, adding guns directly to the airplane such that the pilot could aim his weapon by directing his flight path.

Paris-born pilot Joseph Frantz was the first to weaponize his airplane. Working with mechanic Louis Quénault, they attached a Hotchkiss machine gun to a Voisin biplane and opened fire on a German Aviatik on Oct. 5, 1914. They downed the enemy plane, shooting with a rifle when the machine gun’s ammunition ran out. It was the first confirmed air victory of the war.

The problem with attaching guns to airplanes was the propellors. Pilots’ early attempts to fire over or through their propellor blades ended badly. Bullets ripped the blades apart and often ricocheted off the propellors to hit the pilots.

One of the first pilots to come up with a solution was Roland Garros, another Parisian flying for the French Army. He helped design an automatic weapon that could fire bullets between the propellor blades as they rotated. It was an imperfect device that necessitated Garros add another novel modification to his plane: steel wedges on his propellor blades to deflect stray bullets.

Garros’ modifications allowed him to dominate the skies for three weeks before he was downed by German groundfire on April 18, 1915. The pilot was sent to a prisoner of war camp; his plane was sent to the Fokker aircraft company so German engineers could study its modifications.

Fokker developed synchronization (or interruption) gear, an improved version of Garros’ basic design that timed a machine gun to fire through the propellor blades with good precision. The first armed Fokkers reached the front lines in the summer 1915, and within months the kinks had been ironed out and the first fighter planes were fast becoming a formidable opponent for the Allies.

Aerial warfare matured quickly. By early 1916, both sides were taking advantage of the new fighter planes to develop aerial fighting maneuvers and exploit the latest innovations to airplanes. The German Fokker’s were soon made obsolete by improved Allied airplanes. The Germans responded with the Albatross, another biplane fighter plane flown by some of the war’s top aces, including the Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen. Wooden airplanes were made obsolete by the introduction of the all-metal airframe. This was another German innovation from Fokker, a lightweight design that gave pilots inherent protection against enemy fire in the air.

The use of airplanes in combat developed and matured over the course of the war. The technology was still new and modifications came by way of trial and error. Pilot skill was also lacking at the time. Airplanes were simplistic enough that pilots frequently went into combat scenarios with just a few hours of training under their belts. And throughout the war national air fores remained relatively small. Between 1914 and 1918, the British trained some 22,000 aviators, the French 16,600 aviators and 2,000 observers, and Germany had about 5,000 active pilots at any given time with 750 waiting to take the spot of a fallen pilot.

The First World War secured the airplane’s place in war from a popular perspective. With most soldiers in trenches dying from disease and errant fire rather than combat, soldiers attached a kind of glamour to dying in a swirling dogfight in the air.

Aviation properly matured between the two world wars, a period sometimes called the golden age of aviation. Wooden biplanes were replaced by all metal designs, and a deeper understanding of the physics behind flight yielded high performace aircraft that could easily outstrip their predecessors. But while the major advances came later, it was the initial pre-war interest of using airplanes in combat that saw the first dedicated financial support and scientific study of aviation that ultimately turned it into a viable technology.

Additional sources: WWI Timeline; Wings: A History of Aviation from Kites to the Space Age by Tom Crouch; The Airplane: How Ideas Gave Us Wings by Jay Spenser