The first airplanes to join the First World War were not made for combat.
They merely played the role of an observer, scouting enemy positions and movements.
A British World War One era fighter aircraft.
Photo:Keith Tarrier/Shutterstock.com
The first dogfights were made with pistols.
Then a second crew member, the gunner, was added.
Euler patented his design in 1910four years before war started.
But many senior officers remained skeptical.
The idea of coupling the firing mechanism to the propeller’s rotation is an affectation.
Under certain circumstances this is highly undesirable, wrote German Major Siegert.
Duel in the air.
An artwork that appeared on The Illustrated London News
A British two-seater monoplane fires on a German Taube fighter.
Photo:Everett Collection/Shutterstock.com
Nevertheless, airplane designers continued to file patents.
The patent attracted little interest and nobody actually tried to build it.
That same year, French engineer Raymond Saulnier also filed patent for a different design.
Unfortunately, Saulniers design scarcely worked.
The system was crude but it worked.
About 75 percent of all rounds fired passed through the propeller without hitting the blades.
It was estimated that each blade could take several hits before there was any danger of its failing.
French pilot Jules Vedrines in the cockpit of a Morane-Saulnier airplane in September 1915.
The wedge-shaped bullet deflectors is visible on his propeller.
Garros was captured and his airplane was sent for evaluation.
The Germans were impressed by the armored propeller blades and wanted these fitted on their airplanes too.
But Fokker found the engineering sloppy.
Diagram of Anthony Fokker’s machine gun synchronization gear.
German pilots could use the airplane itself as a weapon, aiming the entire aircraft at the target.
If the target was not destroyed, the German pilot could climb up again and repeat the process.
This maneuver, now common in dogfights, was invented by the German fighter ace Leutnant Max Immelmann.
A 3D model of a Fokker Eindecker.
TheNieuportwas light and nimble, outclassing the FokkerEindeckerin every respect, including speed, climb rate and maneuverability.
The captured aircraft was found not to have the superior performance it had been credited with.
The usefulness of synchronization gears disappeared altogether when jet engines eliminated the propeller in fighter planes.