this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2025
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They had pistols though. The first aerial combat engagements were fought with pistols.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/first-aerial-combat-victory-180952933/
They would also carry a little basket of hand grenades sometimes, and toss them out of the airplane to fall on any troops they saw down below.
It was a fucking wild time lol. No radios, open cockpit, no artificial horizon. If you flew into a cloud you just lost your orientation and fell out of the sky and died. They just went up there.
Didn't you need like a fraction of training to become a pilot? Also imagine running into birds or bad weather, rain would probably feel like a soft top car at best
It also was the era where the pilots of some types of combat aircraft suffered more losses in training accidents than in actual combat. While they were fighting a world war.
Crazy Icarians, biting their thumb at the gods
I also like the bonkers phase between the "just take a gun with you" era and the synchronizing gears. Seems to have boiled down to three or four ideas:
We also had:
5. Stick it on top of the wing, firing roughly forwards and hope for the best (Nieuport Scouts)
6. Mount it on the side of the cockpit at a jaunty angle, shooting outwards diagonally away from the propellor, and attack the enemy diagonally, like you're a pawn on a chess board (Bristol Scout)