1. Also known as flaming death traps….made of highly flammable wood and canvas….and with the gliding capacity of a medium sized stone….and slow….with no bullet- proofing….and no parachutes……yeah…sounds like fun…

2. Aviation was fairly new and there was a lot of experimentation with new designs as the war went on…there were some design “dead-ends” and each side in the war periodically gained advantages and then subsequently lost them as their opponents caught up and then surpassed them…. Sopwith Camel: very quick and agile but difficult to fly (British) SE 5a: Billy Bishop’s main plane….very stable and sturdy plane…(British)

3. Early planes were not very fast, so they had difficulty generating “lift”….a single wing had to be quite long and deep to provide lift, but often this meant they were not very agile…aircraft designers soon learned that you could generate more lift and maneuverability with more wings… Albatross monoplane (German) Fokker Dr 1 triplane (German) Niueport Biplane (French)

4. As the war continued, more and more planes were developed… Albatross Biplane (German) Sopwith Triplane (British)…Both sides came to realize that three wings maximized the amount of “lift” to give a greater rate of “climb”, and increased the agility of the plane……

5. Early in the war, planes were used to drop bombs on industrial targets like factories. Smaller fighter planes could not carry very big bombs or very many bombs, so it was not too long before both sides started to develop large purpose-built bombers designed to deliver large payloads to their targets. These planes could carry large loads but they were quite slow and were easy targets for fighter planes… Large British twin engined bomber (notice the gunner’s cockpit at the front?) German Gotha bomber…(this plane’s engines are “pushers” with the propellers at the back of the engines…)

6. At the beginning of the war a German count named Von Zeppelin invented the airship or dirigible …a huge flying ship that could deliver massive bomb loads to foreign targets. Dirigibles could carry far more bombs than any plane and had a tremendous range, but they were filled with highly flammable gas and had little defense against fighter planes armed with “incendiary” bullets…

7. During the war, several young pilots developed the tactics for the new method of aerial warfare. The Germans Max Immelman and Oswald Boelke were the innovators of many methods of “hunting” opposition planes. They developed the “Flying Circus” – a group of planes flying together and trained in group tactics. Both men were superb pilots but neither survived more than a few years…. Immelman with his plane…. Oswald Boelke…one of the great innovators.

8. Like so many others, Immelman’s talent and luck could only protect him for so long…almost nobody could survive a World War One plane crash…

9. The greatest Ace of the war was the German aristocrat Baron Manfred Von Richtoffen, better known as the “Red Baron” because he flew a bight red Fokker triplane – he wanted his enemies to know who he was… He shot down 80 planes before his luck ran out – shot through the lungs by an Australian machine-gunner while chasing the Canadian pilot Wop May. For years it was thought that Canadian Roy Brown had shot him down, but recent evidence makes this very unlikely…

10. Canadian Billy Bishop ended the war with 72 kills – the third highest number of planes shot down –but Bishop managed to survive the war unscathed….Unlike many other aces, Bishop often preferred to hunt alone. Although he wasn’t a great pilot, he was an unbelievable shot and had nerves of steel…The Germans called him “Hell’s Handmaiden”….Canadians played a dominant role in Britain’s Royal Flying Corps…by the end of the war over a third of all British pilots were actually Canadians… Bishop’s SE 5a of the Royal Flying Corps’ Squadron 60