One of the many books I am currently reading is Rendezvous With Death, about the American volunteers who joined up with the French Foreign Legion to fight the Germans in World War One. A good number of them ended up joining the Armée de l'Air, becoming pilots and fighting in the sky.
Aviation was still in it's infancy when World War One began, with the Wright brothers' first flight less than 11 years before the 'Guns of August' sounded. Initially aircraft were unarmed and primarily for reconnaissance but it didn't take long before aircrew starting taking weapons with them. A Frenchman was the first to fly with a machine gun and from there air combat really took off.
World War One was a time of experimentation and rapid development, both with the aircraft themselves as well as in air combat weapons and tactics. Much like the plane in these photos, many of the aircraft used were biplanes, although by no means all, with monoplanes and triplanes also seeing use. Made mostly of wood and cloth, these aircraft were fragile and not the most reliable. While looking for some music to go along with the topic of this post I instead came across the video below, which is silent film footage of aircraft in the war being prepared for takeoff and in flight.
(It was used to prepare a video for the 'Over The Front' exhibit at the Australian War Memorial,
One of the earliest challenges the fledgling air forces faced was how to mount forward firing machine guns that a pilot could use and not shoot off his own propeller in the process. From everything I've read it appears the spaghetti method was used in finding a solution, with just about anything remotely feasible being tested. One solution was 'pusher' aircraft that mounted the engine and propeller at the back of the plane and pushed it through the air, leaving the pilot with a clear field of fire to his front. Internal combustion engines were only slightly less new, the ones of the time barely had enough power to push a plane airborne with pilot and machine gun aboard. With the introduction of interrupter or synchronization gears allowing machine guns to fire through the spinning propeller blades to the front, pusher planes were phased out in favor of the faster 'tractor' aircraft with propeller and engine mounted in the front.
Interrupter gears were far from an idea solution as bullets would still occasionally hit the wooden propeller blades even with them but it was the best that anybody was able to come up with during the war. The propellers were surprisingly durable and could survive a few bullets passing through them but pilots still occasionally shot themselves down. Another solution (which can be seen in the video on some of the planes) was mounting a machine gun (Usually a Lewis Gun for the Allies) on the upper wing of the aircraft. While awkward and unwieldy for a pilot to fire or reload, this allowed the use of machine guns that fired from an open bolt as opposed to closed bolt firing machine guns that the interrupter gear required.
With open cockpits, unreliable engines, and nothing to even slow a bullet down, pilots' life expectancy were often measured in mere minutes or hours. An often abbreviated training period for new pilots did little to help this. As the war progressed, new technologies and developments caused the technological edge to swing from one side to the other multiple times. One side would introduce something new (weapons, engines, aircraft, or tactics) that would give them a combat advantage until the other side got their counter to it airborne and then the advantage would swing the other way.
Aerial bombing got its start in World War One as well but it was largely a rudimentary affair. Zeppelins were initially favored but their vulnerability to airplanes quickly reduced their role to a second place status. The first attempts consisted of hand grenades or similar small bombs being dropped by hand over the side of the plane but as the war went on bomb racks and more systematic methods were developed, although nothing to rival what would be put into action a few decades later in World War Two.
There will be a quiz over this next week so I hope you paid attention! Not really, that just sounds unpleasant for all involved but if you have any questions just drop me a comment! I posted the color versions of these a little while back but I wanted to enter these B&Ws into 