Kind: captions
Language: en
Let me tell you a hairraising tale about
the early days of aviation in World War
I. When the First World War broke out in
1914, the first airplanes to enter
combat, were fragile, underpowered
machines, they had open cockpits, pilots
carried no parachutes, and the planes
were unarmed. So, in the first few
months of the war, pilots would take up
their revolvers or hunting rifles and
take pot shots at one another, but
usually they would miss. The obvious
solution was a more lethal weapon like
the machine gun. But that came with a
problem. How do you avoid shooting off
your own propeller?
[Music]
The hero of our story is a 24year-old
British pilot aptly named Lewis Strange
who arrived in France in the early
months of the war determined to have a
go at the Germans and he got around the
machine gun problem with an interesting
solution. He took the machine gun and
mounted it on the top wing of the
biplane, firing completely over the path
of the propeller. So with his forward
firing machine gun, Strange was armed
and ready to take on the Germans. One
day in May 1915, he spotted a German
observation plane. He does a long diving
attack on the German plane, firing off
an entire drum of ammunition. but he's
too far away. He's missed. Frustrated,
he reaches up to take off the old drum
of ammunition, but he finds that it's
jammed on top of the machine gun. He
struggles with it. Still can't loosen
it. So, there's only one thing to do. He
unfassens, puts the joystick between his
knees, stands up in the cockpit, and and
gets out of the shot, and stand up in
the cockpit to get a better grip. So, as
he's tugging to and fro, suddenly the
control stick slips out from between his
knees. The unstable machine flips right
over and strange dangling from the empty
ammunition drum with 6,000 ft between
him and Mother Earth far below. Well, we
don't know exactly how he did it, but
over the next two minutes, he clambered
and kicked and thrashed his way back
into the cockpit, kicked the control
stick, the plane rided itself, and he
tumbles back into the cockpit with a
sigh of relief.
Despite all the problems Strange had
encountered, his solution of mounting a
machine gun on the top wing of his
biplane was one that would see wider use
as aerial combat turned from a
gentleman's sport into a deadly game.
For the full story of World War I's
aerial arms race, see Nova's upcoming
show, First Air
War. So Karen was like this. Strange was
wrestling with that empty ammunition
drum. Next thing you know, the plane
flips over. He finds himself dangling
there. Just sit down.