Military Aviation: Key Innovations

While the Wrights may not have invented flight -- other powered aircraft had taken short hops before the Kitty Hawk flight of 1903 -- they certainly invented flying. Their master accomplishment was to develop the techniques for controlling an airplane: using a primitive wind tunnel of their own design, they calculated the forces that their Wright Flyer would have to overcome in order to stay airborne, and the means (a properly pitched propeller and wings that could be twisted to steer the plane) to do it.

Like the inventors of other groundbreaking military technologies, the Wrights were naively convinced that their invention would make war obsolete. Given the fact that airplanes could prevent surprise attacks, they believed no sane government would be willing to send its troops into battle.



The Rotary Engine

One of the biggest problems that early airplane designers had to overcome was the sheer weight of the available engines; heavy steel radiators and the water within severely hampered performance. In 1908, French engineers hit upon a solution: the rotary engine, which used spinning cylinders that were cooled by the passing air and didn't require liquid coolant. The first rotary airplane engine produced a then quite respectable 50 horsepower and was so comparatively small and light that it was named the Gnome.

Airborne Cameras

Once the German and Allied armies settled into great lines of trenches, and cavalry became useless in World War I, the airplane began to prove itself as an essential source of reconnaissance. At Neuve Chapelle in March 1915, the British based their battle plan on aerial surveillance and photographs. Early cameras were heavy and unwieldy; they took their images on glass plates, which were brought back to a mobile lab and developed. Taking airborne photos was one of the most dangerous jobs of the war; the airplane had to fly straight and level, presenting an easy target for ground fire.

Synchronized Machine Guns

As airplanes became armies' "eyes in the sky," the obvious question arose: How to blind the enemy? Early combat pilots tried shotguns, bombs, and fixed machine guns with little success. The easiest way to aim at another target was to point the entire airplane at it -- but how do you fire a machine gun from the front without shooting off your own propeller? The answer: synchronize the firing of the gun to the movement of the blades. In Anthony Fokker's original design, a series of pistons prevented the machine gun from firing when the blades were in front of it. When the system was mounted on the Fokker Eindecker, it was transformed into the first true fighter plane.
The Bomber

Although the idea of dropping bombs from above had existed for as long as military aircraft, the vision was thwarted by reality: bombs were heavy, and early aircraft were severely limited in the weight they could carry. But in 1914, Igor Sikorsky, a 20-year-old Russian designer, drew up plans for the first heavy bomber, with four engines and a 10-man crew. In 1917 the Germans followed suit with the Gotha, a massive plane inspired in part by Sikorsky's design. Gotha raids killed hundreds of Londoners, inflicted significant economic damage, and were an ominous harbinger of things to come.

The "Thick Wing" and the Monoplane

Ironically, the nation that lost the Great War pioneered the future of aviation even as they were being defeated. At the University of Gottingen, scientist Ludwig Prandl's and his team developed the science of aerodynamics and created the "thick wing," which gave planes the ability to climb at much steeper angles without losing lift and stalling. The thick wing also eliminated the need for a biplane, because it allowed engineers to mount the plane's structural reinforcements inside it. At the Schneider Trophy races of the 1920s and 1930s, the world's top designers unveiled monoplanes that were increasingly faster, more powerful, and more streamlined -- among them the precursor of the legendary Supermarine Spitfire.

Radar

At the beginning of World War II, after Germany had conquered France, the only thing standing between Hitler and complete domination of Western Europe was Britain's Royal Air Force. But the RAF had an invaluable tool: a new technology called radar, which used radio waves to detect the position of incoming aircraft. Atmospheric scientist Robert Watson Watt developed the British system, and although seven other countries developed radar simultaneously during the 1930s, the British had the most urgent need for it and were the first to put it to use in an early warning network called Chain Home. The network gave the British priceless advance warning of German air raids, and allowed them to concentrate their outnumbered fighters at critical locations. On December 7, 1941, an American radar station detected the Japanese planes approaching Pearl Harbor, but the U.S. military had little faith in the system and mistakenly assumed the signal came from a formation of American B-17s.