How the world's earliest air battles were fought

On December 17, 1903, the world's first aircraft powered by an internal combustion engine, developed by Americans Wilbur Wright and Orville Wright, made a successful test flight. The flight lasted only 59 seconds and covered a distance of 852 feet, but it marked a glorious page in the history of world aviation.

Shortly afterward, flying was introduced to Europe and became popular on the continent of Song. But flying was seen as a fashionable sport, or even a game, and no one associated it with war. Eight years later, on April 13, 1912, two years before the First World War, the Royal Flying Corps was founded. Yet militarists did not realize the enormous role this new creation could play in the future of warfare.

In the early days of the First World War, the Germans used airplanes as observation posts and resided in an insignificant position in the communications corps. Repeated requests by aviation officers to support ground troops were repeatedly denied on the grounds that the aircraft's engines spooked the cavalry's horses.

Because of the rivalries and struggles between the belligerents, both sides gradually used airplanes for air combat. At the beginning of the Great War, none of the countries' airplanes were designed for military use, and as a result, there was no weaponry on the planes, only the weapons that the pilots carried with them. When the planes of the two warring sides met in the air, the pilots at best waved their fists in a sign of hostility.

The Russian pilot, Nesterov, had the ingenious idea of installing a sharp knife in the rear of his plane, and on August 5, 1914, when he fought with a German zeppelin, he succeeded in cutting the skin of the zeppelin with the knife. Later, he fitted a steel cable with a weighted hammer to the tail of his airplane, ready to entangle the propeller of an enemy plane as it flew by in front of it.

Another Russian pilot, Kazakov, used a special device, the "grappling hook," which was a wire rope fitted to the lower part of the plane, with a movable "grappling hook" at the top of the rope. "A wire rope was attached to the lower part of the airplane, and a movable "grappling hook" was attached to the top of the rope, to which a detonator was attached. When flying from the top of the enemy aircraft, use the grappling hook to hook the enemy aircraft, in the moment of hooking, lead to dry the detonator on the grappling hook, to destroy the enemy aircraft. Later he succeeded in destroying a German airplane. Since there was no weaponry on board, pilots fought in the air mostly through bravery, resourcefulness and tenacity. in September 1914, a pilot drew his pistol and shot at a passing enemy plane instead of swinging his fists, and this became the first aerial combat of the Great War. Later, observers of French single-seat airplanes began to carry rifles, but the fierce winds and violent vibrations of the engines greatly affected the accuracy of the shots. Some observers also carried bricks to smash the propellers of enemy planes and even to smash each other's pilots.

With the increasing use of rifles and pistols to shoot at each other, some pilots mounted machine guns on their planes. But the mounted machine guns were useless because the 600-round-per-minute machine guns couldn't get past the two-bladed propellers, which rotated at 1,200 revolutions per minute. Later, France developed a new type of weapon, and in February 1915, four German two-seat planes met a French single-seat plane. Since there was no observer on board the French plane and no weapons could be seen, the Germans did not take it seriously. Suddenly, however, yellow flames erupted from the propellers, and before the Germans could figure out what was going on, two of the German planes were hit and exploded. The two survivors fled back to base.

From then on, the thrilling modernization of the air war really began.