Military Aircraft

Long the "Knights of the Sky" for the respect and admiration commanded by airmen over the decades - military aircraft received their baptism of fire in World War 1, a war that saw a continuous evolution of the species into lethal fighting machines. Monoplanes soon gave way to biplanes and these were followed further by triplanes as aircraft engineers quickly adapted to the changing needs of the battlefield. These pioneering airmen - essentially airborne descendants of the mounted knight - duelled it out in the skies over Europe. Early fighter pilots were armed with nothing more than a personal sidearm or rifle of choice and could be called upon to drop hand-held munitions over enemy trenches. Gun-less reconnaissance platforms were eventually forged into machine gun-laden fighters. Multi-engine platforms now bristled with multiple defensive machine gun positions all their own as well as staggering bomb arrangements. While the machine gun when used in ground combat went on to change ground warfare, the synchronized machine gun (that is, a machine gun set to fire through a spinning propeller system) of the air changed aerial warfare to the extreme.

Far from hitting their ceiling, the aircraft continues to evolve today into ultimate fighting machine with capabilities yet unheard - quite the far cry from when the first heavier-than-air flight occurred just over a century ago. With advancements made in armed UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), one has to wonder if the age of the pilot and his respected mount are coming to a close. but then again, the advent of the missile age was once thought to be the end of close-in aerial combat - this thought of course proven wrong by the events of the Vietnam War air campaign.