How Did You Actually Shoot Down Another's Plane?

Still beavering away on my Vernon & Irene Castle biography, and am following up on some info so kindly dug up by Frank Olynyk earlier this year.

Vernon shot down two planes: on Nov. 27, 1916, he was flying a Nieuport 20, with an observer, and shot down a "large 2-seater biplane" over Vlamertinghe. On March 11, 1917, he was flying a Nieuport 17 (alone) and shot down an Albatros (presumably the plane, not the bird) over Poezelhoek.

Now I—as you know too well—am not an expert on warfare and its machinery. Show biz is my beat. And my audience will not be military experts, either (at least, not most of them). So I want to be able to explain in layman's terms what Vernon actually did: were these Nieuport 20s and 17s large, small, comfy, easy or hard to maneuver? How did one actually do the aiming and shooting? What else did the pilot have to concentrate on while doing so? The "human angle," you know, I want to put the reader in the plane with Vernon.

And thanks again for all your help!

[Lufbery]

Hi Eve,

Generally speaking, it was both easy and difficult to shoot down a plane in WWI. Easy in that the pilot, engine, and fuel tank had no armor (in the vast majority of planes) -- a single bullet could bring down a plane. The difficulty, then, was getting that bullet to those targets. Bullets that hit the plane, but not the pilot or some vital machinery simply passed through the fabric without causing any trouble.

I've occasionally come across stories told by pilots of bullets causing dangerous damage to the actual air frame, severing control cables, and causing structural weakness. However, most planes shot down seemed to suffer from dead pilots, leaking fuel, leaking oil, and/or damaged engines. Leaking fuel could also lead to fires -- a very bad thing in planes that were coated with an inflamable waterproofing coating often referred to as dope.

Shooting down a plane was no easy task. Hitting a moving target from a moving target, and having to hit not just the plane, but its vital spots, was tough. The best fighter pilots got in pretty close, often closer than 100 yards.

You can find more information on Nieuports here: http://mars.ark.com/~mdf/

Click on "The Nieuport Pages" in the left hand menu. Generally, though, the Nieuport single seaters were well-thought of by their pilots. The 17 in particular has been noted as being very nimble. I've not read much about the Nieuport two-seaters, but they have more of a reputation as being tricky to fly. They were probably pretty maneuverable, however.

Regards,

Thanks, that makes sense—Vernon wrote to Irene several times about being shot up while on photographic missions and having little trouble landing (once a bullet stopped short in his muffler, about a centimeter from his neck!).

What were the Nieuports like to fly? What did you have to hold onto to fly and steer it, and how did you manage to do that while aiming and shooting? And what were the gun mechanisms like?

(These questions must seem pretty basic to you guys . . . but these "basics" are hard to find in books, which assume you know a lot more than you do!)

[Lufbery]

Hi Eve,

The basics are where we all started at one time or another.

For starters, check out Mark Miller's renderings of a Nieuport with it's skin removed:

http://www.theaerodrome.com/photopos...ry.php?cat=506

The Nieuport 17 was a lot like other planes of this era in that it was controlled with a control stick and rudder bar. The stick, when pushed forward or pulled back, controlled the elevators -- the horizontal part of the tail. This pointed the nose up and down (this is called pitch). When the stick was moved to the left and right, the nose stays put (sort of), but the wings move up and down around the axis of the fuselage (this is roll). The rudder bar moves the rudder -- the vertical part of the tail. This moved the plane's nose left and right (this is yaw).

To fire the gun, (or guns, some N17s had two) the pilot pushed a button on the control stick. The guns were syncrhonized to fire through the arc of the propeller. An interrupter gear stoped the guns from firing when the propeller blades were in front of the guns.

The salient feature of almost all Nieuport planes is that they had rotary engines. The propeller was bolted securely to the engine, and the whole engine spun with the prop. The whirling engine kept itself cooler and provided good power for its weight. The pilot controlled the engine with one or two levers on the left side of the cockpit that adjusted the amount of fuel and/or air that the engine used. There was also a "blip" switch (also often on the control stick) that cut off the engine's ignition while held down to provide a quick reduction in engine power useful during landings.

The spinning mass of the engine would pull the plane's nose down in right-hand turns and up in left-hand turns.

As I stated in my previous message, the Nieuport 17 was considered an agile and successful design. Pilots seemed to like it.

This is, of course, the barest of detail, but I hope it helps.

Regards,

Good gosh, thanks—may I quote bits of what you've said? Makes it a lot clearer to me, and I expect to my readers, too. One of my rules as a a writer is "never pretend to know more than I do."

[Lufbery]

Hi Eve,

Sure you may quote me, but follow another rule of good writing and confirm what I've written by consulting another couple of good sources.

Let's hope that a few other folks drop into this conversation too.

Regards,

[EricGoedkoop]

Originally Posted by Eve

What were the Nieuports like to fly? What did you have to hold onto to fly and steer it, and how did you manage to do that while aiming and shooting? And what were the gun mechanisms like?

To add to what Drew has said, I'd point out that in a scout like the Nieuport 17 the machine gun(s) was fixed to fire directly forward, and the only "aiming" was of the entire aeroplane. Very early on, some single-seaters like the DH-2 were equipped with a movable machine gun but it was soon discovered that flying the plane and aiming the gun at the same time was just about impossible.

The Nieuport 20 was a two-seater and probably would've been armed with a forward-firing gun for the pilot and one for the observer on a ring mounting. There weren't many of this type built. The 20 wouldn't have been as fast or maneuverable as the 17 and was certainly no dogfighter, but probably was a little more agile than a contemporary German two-seater. Your man's victory in this type could've been his shooting or his observer's.

Interestinger and interestinger . . . Stuff like this will really bring life and light to the book. Just saying that "Vernon shot down two planes while flying Nieuports" won't mean that much to a contemporary reader. But colorful scraps of information about how fast and maneuverable (or not) the planes were; the difficulty of steering, aiming and shooting (while being shot at!)--that is going to bring the book to life and we'll feel like we're right behind Vernon in the observer's seat.

What did it actually feel like to take off in one of those "busses," how cold did it get and what did you wear up there, was it scarier to be up there alone, or surrounded by friendly and unfriendly planes; were photographic missions worse, because you had to aim your camera and had no gun at your control? Just trying to get into the heads and the lives of these fellows.

[Barrett]

Eve: as Drew noted, it's always advisable to double and triple check, but in his case you needn't bother.

As for what it felt like: the following is based on 600 hrs in open cockpits.

Hotter in the summer & colder in the winter. I've never been above 5-6,000 ft in a biplane but he extremities go dead; feet feel like clumps of ice. Without a muffler over the mouth it hurts to breathe. You want to keep your head on a swivel to see what can hurt/kill you, but after a couple hours or less, you're almost lethargic. Just imagine what it was like at 15,000 in December.

Depending upon the type of machine, the burble off the top wing can ripple your flying helmet, causing an icy itch of the scalp. (In the Naval Aircraft Factory N3N-3 of 1930s vintage, the engineers shrewdly calculated the burble to run down the back of the student's neck.)

The wires in biplanes "sing" in a dive and "moan" in a stall. However, I've only flown 30s and 40s birds with streamlined flying & landing wires, which can issue a loud harmonic sound. The round wires of WW I undoubtedly sounded different.

Engine noise isn't as big a factor as the pulp writers said; you just get used to it. SILENCE is extremely loud, however!

Ooooh, thank you, that's lovely--you see, the books I'm reading (the nonfiction, I mean) give you the facts and figures and battles and shoot-downs and crashes and all that, but you never really feel like you're up there with them, which is what I want to get across to the readers!

(Now, how am I going to learn to Castle Walk and Turkey Trot . . . ?)