Inventions of the Great War

by A. Russell Bond

AIR SCOUTS AND THEIR DANGERS

The scouting-airplane usually carried two men, one to drive the machine and the other to make observations. The observer had to carry a camera, to take photographs of what lay below, and he was usually equipped with a wireless outfit, with which he could send important information back to his own base. The camera was sometimes fitted with a stock like that of a gun, so that it could be aimed from the shoulder. Some small cameras were shaped so that they could be held in the hand like a pistol and aimed over the side of the fuselage, or body, of the airplane; but the best work was done with large cameras fitted with telescopic lenses, or "telephoto" lenses, as they are called. Some of these were built into the airplane, with the lens opening down through the bottom of the fuselage.

(C) Underwood & Underwood

A Handley-Page Bombing Plane with One of its Wings Folded Back

The scouting-airplane carried a machine-gun, not for attack, but for defense. It had to be a quick climber and a good dodger, so that it could escape from an attacking plane. Usually it did not have to go very far into the enemy country, and it was provided with a large wing-spread, so that if anything happened to the engine, it could volplane, or glide back, to its own lines. As the scouting-planes were large, they offered a big target to anti-aircraft guns, and so the work of the air scout was to swoop down upon the enemy, when, of course, the machine would be traveling at high velocity, because it would have all the speed of falling added to that which its own propeller gave it.

How an object dropped from the Woolworth Building would increase its speed in falling

It was really a very difficult matter to hit a rapidly moving airplane; and even if it were hit, there were few spots in which it could be mortally wounded. Hundreds of shots could go through the wings of an airplane without impairing its flying in the least. The engine, too, could be pretty well peppered with ordinary bullets without being disabled. As for the men in the machine, they furnished small targets, and even they could be hit in many places without being put entirely out of business. And so the dangers of air scouting were not so great as might at first be supposed.

One of the most vulnerable spots in the airplane was the gasolene-tank. If that were punctured so that the fuel would run out, the airplane would have to come to the ground. Worse still, the gasolene might take fire and there was nothing the aviator dreaded more than fire. There were occasions in which he had to choose between leaping to earth and burning to death, and the former was usually preferred as a quicker and less painful death. In some of the later machines the gasolene-tank could be pitched overboard if it took fire, by the throwing of a lever, and then the aviator could glide to earth in safety.