Military Aircraft in World War I

Abstract

World War I broke out exactly 100 years ago. In commemoration of the event an overview is given below on how some of the most important military aircraft used in the course of the event were created; an account is also given on the aircraft’s structural design and performance characteristics.The majority of the related presentation is done by using web-links, so online internet connection is required when reading the article. Ten and a half years after the first flight carried out by the Wright brothers on 14 December 1903, at the beginning of World War I great powers participating in the war had had several hundreds of different types of aircraft with different missions, whose number increased to thousand pieces during the war. In those years the performance of those aerial vehicles saw a dramatic surge. Privately funded efforts of fanatic aviators were replaced by the development and manufacturing of the military industry.