Quick Question

[jdajd]

I was watching A Very Long Engagement last night and they keep talking about the Albatross. The movie takes place on the Somme (1916 at least) and one of the characters says the machine gun was in the back b/c we had not started to shoot through the propeller yet. My question is when did the interuptor become the standard and was it later for the Germans?

[mahross]

The first deflectors were developed by Roland Garros, a French Pilot. After he was shot down on 18 April 1915 his aircraft was taken to Berlin for inspection and two months later a synchronized gear was introduced onto the Fokker E.I. Max Immelmann shot down his first plane witht his gear on 1 August 1915. So in answer proper interuptor gear was introduced by the Germans first and was then subsequently copied by the Allies. Such was the topsy turvy nature of the air war.

Ross

[Adrian Roberts]

jdajd

The first British aircraft to have a synchronised gear as standard was the Sopwith one-and-a-half Strutter two seater, introduced in April 1916. However, the initial Allied gears caused a very slow rate of fire compared with the Germans, and we continued to rely heavily on fighters with pusher engines [DH2, FE2b] so no need for synchronisers, or on types with overwing guns [Nieuport 11, some Bristol Scouts] for most of the rest of that year. So the script-writers were not strictly accurate, but gave the defacto situation for the bulk of the Allied air crews at that time.

To clarify, Garros' system involved plates on the propeller to deflect the bullets. This system was used on small numbers of other aircraft, especially the Morane N for the next year or so. Various German and French inventors had been working on interruptor gears even before the war. For the Fokker company to get such a device into service in two months was certainly an achievement but they were not starting from scratch - it was Garros that made officialdom take the inventors seriously.

Adrian