It was the First World War that introduced airplanes to a military role and pressed both sides with the desperation of conflict to achieve an unprecedented technological metamorphosis that arguably would not have been possible in peacetime. In 1914 and 1915, pilots rode what the day offered them: canvas-and-wood planes, their roll controlled with a cord system that twisted the wings sympathetically to directional intent, known as wing-warping.
The airplane was initially intended for observation and reconnaissance. Combat usage was minimal and inconsistent; stories tell of early Allied and German pilots waving to each other, briefly enjoying the status of an echelon privileged enough to escape the horror of trench warfare. Inevitably, conflict worked its way into aviation; in the proverbial sense, one man bid good day to another with lead, and the race began.
Firearms and flying machines were a rough match. A pilot's ability to fire was greatly dictated by his imperative need to fly the aircraft; unfortunately, the only logical location for a gun requiring the least distraction and aiming correction - the nose of the plane - invited a dangerous intersection of propeller and bullet. Two-seater scouts allowed for a gunner to fire rear-mounted machine guns, but a restricted field of fire combined with the ponderous gait of the primitive craft amounted to a marginal defense at best.
The Germans revolutionized air combat with the Fokker Eindecker E.1 monoplane in May of 1915. Equipped with a mechanism that synchronized the engine's propeller rotation with a nose machine gun's discharge in order to prohibit a bullet from firing into a propeller blade, a pilot could easily and safely target enemy aircraft. The Fokker Scourge, a direct result of this enormous advantage over the Allies, continued throughout the rest of the year.
Thus began a tight struggle of deadly one-upmanship: the French Nieuport 17 and Spad 13 biplanes - the former light and maneuverable, the latter rugged and fast - utilized the same fire-synchronization technology and, with ailerons for rolling instead of wing-warping veins, immediately outmatched the Eindecker E.3.
The Germans responded in 1916 by introducing the enduring Albatross series and reclaimed air superiority with the well-powered and heavily armed D.1. Months later the British deployed the successful RAF SE5a and the first of the Sopwith series, the Pup. The 1917 Albatross D.3 entered combat as a respected fighter that controlled the skies but the mediocre D.5 allowed the Allies a stumble in technological escalation for the British Sopwith Triplane to rattle German pilots and the Sopwith Camel to reign supreme.
The Camel was idiosyncratic to say the least; deadly to inexperienced pilots but a terrifying weapon at the hands of veterans. Its rotary engine produced a clockwise torque that heavily influenced the plane's handling; left rolls pulled the nose skyward and bled airspeed and right rolls would pull the aircraft in an extremely tight turn, threatening a fatal spin without proper counteradjustments. The characteristics, however, allowed the Camel to outperform even the legendary German triplane, the Fokker Dr.1.
Copied directly from the Sopwith Triplane, the Dr.1 performed with similar strengths and weaknesses; it was underpowered, light and slow but boasted climbing rates and maneuverability that easily flew circles around all aircraft but a well-piloted Camel in a right turn. Unlike its British inspiration - and rather unique unto its own - the Dr.1 lacked a vertical stabilizer and a pilot, using nothing but hard rudder, could simply yaw through a turn nearly as fast as other planes could roll. More heavily armed than the Sopwith Triplane, the Dr.1 succeeded as far more on the battlefield than a competitive technical experiment. Though Manfred von Richthofen - the infamous man we all know, minus the fallacious mustache - made most of his kills at the controls of biplanes, the Dr.1's lethality endeared itself to him in some respect and was the plane the Red Baron rode to the ground to his death in 1918.
The loss of Richthofen came as the Allies were overwhelming a flagging Germany with numerical advantage. Not even the authoritative Fokker D. VII - an airplane that legendarily would be seen in formation on vertical climbs and was indeed the best fighter of the war - could prevent the inevitable collapse of German warmaking. Following the Armistice, in a gesture split between respect, awe, envy and fear, the Allies specifically ordered for the destruction of every D. VII through the Treaty of Versailles.
In 1914, airplanes were sluggish curiousities that were limited with low operational ceilings, climbed poorly and could barely maintain 80 or 90 miles per hour in level flight; by 1918, they were nimble and irrepressible, or else so well-built that they could sustain power dives in excess of 200 miles per hour. In the face of pandemic destruction and death caused by the war, four years managed to accomplish more for aviation technology than the eleven preceding them.
Despite the grim nature of the warrior biplane's inception, American culture has attached a particularly tenacious romance to the thought of a sky staggered with tiny, frail airplanes from a younger world, each piloted by a gentleman without a parachute who, above the faceless slaughter of the front lines, would seek to best his adversary in an aerial duel.
Another employment for aviators in the war were tethered balloons for observation and artillery sighting. Balloons were as predictable as the wind and logistically simple, providing stable, inexpensive platforms for static reconnaissance. More than twenty years before the Hindenburg's crash, design philosophy and industrial convenience resulted in the balloons that weren't hot-air powered to be filled with hydrogen. As with any early modern mechanism, this was an act of placing superior performance over operator safety. Far more buoyant and exceedingly more abundant than helium, hydrogen was, unlike its inert cousin, dangerously flammable.
Precautions were taken. Each side would hoist groups of two or three of them several hundred feet in the air from the front lines, barricade them within a veritable phalanx of zeroed antiaircraft and machine guns, and have crews ready to winch the balloons back down as quickly as possible if aircraft approached. British crews were, not unexpectedly, issued parachutes.
And airplanes came. Using special incendiary bullets to set the gas alight, audacious pilots would brave forbidding walls of flak hurled from below in attempts to flame as many balloons as they could before the balloons reached an altitude point well within deadly range of ground fire.
Reasonably protected, it's natural to conclude that balloons were highly vulnerable sitting ducks. And what with the advances of aviation and sensory technology, one might assume that balloons in wartime are charming relics from lost days of old.
With nearly one hundred years of technological evolution, the aerostat is unmanned, fiber-optic-sensor-packed and rises with the aid of now-accessible helium - but it's a tethered, inexpensive alternative for military monitoring that has shed neither the look nor the function of its predecessor. While we won't see double-winged, canvas-and-wood vehicles in touted defense contracts, some things never change.