The Aeroplane and World War I

The American aviators Wilbur and Orville Wright made the world's first powered, controlled, heavier-than-air flights on December 17, 1903. However, before long, unsophisticated kite-like aircraft were flying at Farnborough (now home of the United Kingdom's biennial Society of British Aircraft Constructors air show), and the French and Germans were trying out a wide variety of designs, including the first monoplanes. Within six years leadership in the new technology had passed to Europe, where government leaders supported aviation through the sponsorship of races and competitions, subsidized programmes of research and development, the purchase of aircraft, and the establishment of the earliest military flying units. In Britain, pioneers worked on new designs at the Royal Aircraft Factory, set up at Farnborough. In Germany, while heavier-than-air flight developed slowly, Count Zeppelin was building giant hydrogen-filled airships at his factory in Ludwigshafen. The Imperial German Navy was quick to see the possibilities of the relatively fast and mobile airships for reconnaissance, with their relatively great lifting capability making possible bombing from the air.

Soon after the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, pioneer military aviators demonstrated their value as aerial scouts and observers, although not, perhaps, to the complete satisfaction of members of the high commands, who had learned most of their tactics and strategy 40 years earlier. The early aircraft on both sides were mainly two-seaters carrying the pilot and an observer to spot the fall of artillery shells. Formerly the Royal Aircraft Factory, Britain's Royal Aircraft Establishment, set up in 1918, produced the BE2 and FE2, the latter a so-called "pusher" design, with the engine behind the two seats, driving a rear-facing propellor. On the German side of the lines, early Rumplers and Aviatiks struggled into the air.

The need to prevent enemy fliers from observing activity behind the lines led to the development of the first fighter aircraft. For a brief period early in the war, high-flying aircraft were almost invulnerable from the ground, and fliers of both sides saluted one another as fellow pioneers. That soon changed as trench warfare bogged the armies down and fliers began to take guns aloft.