The Airplane - Jay Spenser [29]
Among the war’s most rugged airplanes was the SPAD fighter series, created by France’s Louis Béchereau, a graduate of the École d’Arts et Métiers d’Angers. The best of this famous lineage was the SPAD XIII, which appeared in 1917. Many of the war’s most famous aviators flew this type. Top French ace René Fonck gained most of his seventy-five victories in SPADs, as did Italy’s leading ace, Count Francesco Baracca (thirty-four victories) and U.S. “ace of aces” Eddie Rickenbacker (twenty-six victories).
The United States did not enter World War I until 1917, so Rickenbacker and his fellow pilots were late arrivals. Because of the backward state of the U.S. aviation industry, they had to rely on French equipment. These Americans initially flew the Nieuport 28, a structurally questionable machine with a fatal tendency to shed its upper-wing fabric in dives. Despite these shortcomings, the Americans did well with the Nieuport.
U.S. ace of aces Eddie Rickenbacker poses with his SPAD XIII, the most successful French fighter plane of World War I.
Museum of Flight, Seattle
But then they got their hands on the SPAD and never looked back. The SPAD XIII was very fast but tricky to fly and less maneuverable than the Nieuport. Still, these failings paled compared to the benefits, particularly its robust construction. If any airplane would bring you home safely, this one would.
More than just rugged, the SPAD XIII embodied remarkably advanced ideas on design safety. For example, Louis Béchereau located the main fuel tank low on the fuselage between the bottom wings. This placed it beneath the pilot’s feet, more or less at the plane’s center of gravity. However, Béchereau also specified leather straps to hold it in place. In the event of a fire, these straps burned through and the flaming tank fell harmlessly away, allowing the pilot—his airplane still in balance—to make a safe dead-stick landing.
Despite this Gallic cleverness, the honor of fielding the war’s most technologically influential airplane goes hands down to the Central Powers. This breakthrough German machine was the Fokker D.VII, an advanced fighter design by the Dutchman Anthony Fokker that reached the front in the spring of 1918.
The Fokker D.VII looked much like any other World War I fighter, but beneath its colorful fabric lay a skeleton of welded steel tubing, not wood. A single turnbuckle-tensioned wire looped through lugs at this fuselage’s welded junctures created a braced box-girder structure for added rigidity. Atop these metal bones and beneath the fabric was curved plywood decking that rounded out the plane’s lines aft of the cockpit. Significantly, the D.VII also had thicker, stronger wings, which was another German innovation. Together these structural advantages allowed D.VIIs to dispense with nearly all the bracing wires required by other World War I airplanes.
In technological terms, the D.VII looked ahead to what aviation would be between the world wars. It’s no coincidence that it was the only airplane specifically mentioned in the Treaty of Versailles, the peace agreement that formally ended the war six months after hostilities ceased.2
Feared by Allied pilots, the Fokker D.VII was technologically the most influential airplane to emerge from World War I.
Museum of Flight, Seattle
Once techniques were devised for building fuselage skeletons out of steel, aviation quickly went this route. Steel offered greater strength than wood. It was also more uniform and thus predictable, whereas stocks of high-quality wood were sometimes hard to come by.
As airplane design progressed from art to science, this last fact became metal’s greatest benefit. Unless stress loads and paths can be calculated accurately and with confidence, airframes cannot