A closer look at those bullet defector plates from the Epic of Flight...
In 1915 from an airfield near Dunkirk, French Lieutenant Roland Garros
took off armed with defector plates that for a time would make his
Morane Saulnier the most feared weapon in the air. Before the War
Garros had won acclaim at international air meets, had set an altitude
record of more than 18,000 feet and-in 1913- had become the first man
to fly across the Mediterranean. But his first efforts as a combat
pilot had netted him nothing. "I was able to outmaneuver my
adversary," Garros wrote, "but my observer never succeeded in shooting
him down with the light rifle, carbine or shotgun that constituted our
armament."
On a visit to Paris, Garros expressed his frustration to Raymond
Saulnier, the plane builder. In April of 1914 Saulnier had applied for
a patent on a cam-operated mechanism that, in theory at least, would
enable a machine gun to fire cleanly between the blades of a revolving
propeller. The design was sound enough. Unfortunately, the available
Hotchkiss machine gun tended to fire at an uneven rate and the
ammunition it used produced a high proportion of delayed " hang-fire"
rounds. No device could keep it from mistiming and shooting up the
wooden propeller. But Saulnier also showed Garros something else he
had designed: a steel deflector that, when fastened to the propeller,
would protect it from damage by the small percentage of bullets that
might actually hit it. Intrigued, Garros and another friend, master
mechanic Jules Hue, set to work to test the deflector idea. They
bolted a gun and engine onto an obsolete plane. I started the
engine, wrote Hue. "Garros fired and everything collapsed. The
engine fell to the ground, one blade of the airscrew having flown off,
and the fuselage broke behind the cockpit. What had happened? One of
the braces holding the deflectors had broken.
Hue thereupon fashioned better braces and produced a more streamlined
set of deflectors: wedge shaped, with gutter-like channels for the
bullets. In March Garros reappeared at St. Pol airdrome near Dunkirk
with a Hotchkiss gun on a fixed mount behind the shielded propeller of
a Morane-Saulnier monoplane, and on April 1 he took off alone toward
the German lines.
Officially, his mission was to bomb the railroad station at nearby
Ostend. But along came a German Albatros, seeking a look at the Allied
trenches after a week of bad weather. Garros, climbing, bore in on the
German plane. Then, from just behind his propeller came the orange
winking, the thin smoke trail, the noisy rattle of a machine gun. The
surprised Germans fired back with a carbine, but it was no contest.
Garros furiously slammed fresh ammunition into the gun until, on the
third clip, "an immense flame burst out of the German motor and
spread instantly." The Albatros went into a wide spiral and crashed. "I
gazed below me for a long time," Garros wrote later, "to convince
myself that it was not a nightmare.
Never before had a man aimed his entire plane as though it were the
weapon, and shot through the propeller to bring down an enemy. The
deflectors might be jury-rigged and imperfect, but they had worked,
and the prophecy for the future was incalculable. On April 15 Garros,
again firing through the shielded propeller, shot down a second German
plane. Early in the morning of April 18 he got his third, making him
second only to Pegoud, with five.
But later that very day Garros trumped himself. In the afternoon he
again took off from Dunkirk, swooped too low behind the enemy lines
and had his gas line cut by a single bullet fired from the ground.
After gliding to earth, he tried to set fire to his plane to protect
the secret of its armament. But he was too slow. German troops
captured the plane, and Garros, intact.
The Germans were jubilant over the opportunity to unravel the mystery
of the French plane that had destroyed three of theirs in less than
three weeks. Ironically, the technology needed to develop an even more
sophisticated method of shooting through the propeller was already
available to them. Franz Schneider, a Swiss engineer working in
Berlin, had applied for a patent on a synchronizing device even before
Saulnier had; unlike the French, the Germans had an air-cooled
Parabellum machine gun that was reliable enough to be adapted to the
timing mechanism. But Schneider had been given no machine guns to work
with. Instead, once Garros and his plane were in their hands, German
authorities assigned another engineer to develop an imitation of the
captured French device. Meanwhile, Allied airmen continued to dominate
the sky.
Enter Fokker and his team and they built a cam-operated push-rod
control mechanism connecting it to the oil-pump drive of an Oberursel
engine and the trigger of a Parabellum machine gun. They then attached
a plywood disc to the Oberursel's propeller and kept test-firing until
they got an even pattern of bullet holes between the blades. Finally
they mounted the whole works on the Fokker M.SK and reported to
Doberitz air base with the world's first reliable single-seated
fighter plane. The operation had taken, not 48 hours, but several days
of around-the-clock work.
From defecting bullets to synchronized forward firing to a mono plane
sporting enclosed aerodynamic cowl and bullet spinner, all the
beginnings of a modern fighter...
Roland Garros...
Reply With Quote