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| - Military aviation appeared in World War I where aircraft were initially used to spot enemy troop concentrations, field gun positions and movements. Early aerial combat consisted of aviators shooting at one another with hand held weapons. The first aircraft to be shot down by another aircraft, which occurred on October 5, 1914, was a German Aviatik. The pilot, Feldwebel Wilhelm Schlichting, was shot with a hand gun wielded by observer Louis Quenault, riding in a Voisin Type 3 piloted by French Sergeant Joseph Frantz. The need to stop reconnaissance by enemy aircraft rapidly led to the development of fighter planes, a class of aircraft designed specifically to destroy enemy aircraft.
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| abstract
| - Military aviation appeared in World War I where aircraft were initially used to spot enemy troop concentrations, field gun positions and movements. Early aerial combat consisted of aviators shooting at one another with hand held weapons. The first aircraft to be shot down by another aircraft, which occurred on October 5, 1914, was a German Aviatik. The pilot, Feldwebel Wilhelm Schlichting, was shot with a hand gun wielded by observer Louis Quenault, riding in a Voisin Type 3 piloted by French Sergeant Joseph Frantz. The need to stop reconnaissance by enemy aircraft rapidly led to the development of fighter planes, a class of aircraft designed specifically to destroy enemy aircraft. Fixed, forward-firing guns were found to be the most effective armament for most World War I era fighters, but were nearly impossible to fire through the spinning propeller without destroying it. Roland Garros, working with Morane Saulnier Aéroplanes, was the first to solve this problem by attaching steel deflector wedges to the propeller. He achieved three kills, but was shot down by ground fire, landing behind German lines. Anthony Fokker inspected the wreckage and improved the design by connecting the firing mechanism of the gun to the timing of the engine, to allow the gun to fire through the propeller without hitting it. As technology rapidly advanced, new young aviators began to define the realm of air-to-air combat, such as Max Immelmann, Oswald Boelcke, and Lanoe Hawker. One of the greatest "aces" of World War I, Manfred von Richthofen (the Red Baron), wrote in his book The Red Fighter Pilot, "The great thing in air fighting is that the decisive factor does not lie in trick flying but solely in the personal ability and energy of the aviator. A flying man may be able to loop and do all the stunts imaginable and yet he may not succeed in shooting down a single enemy." Pilots achieved firing position while avoiding the threat of enemy guns by manoeuvring behind the enemy aircraft. This is known as getting on an aircraft's six o'clock or tail, plus a wide variety of other terms, usually coined by air crews. This type of combat became known as dogfighting. Oswald Boelcke, a German fighter ace during World War I, was the first to publish the basic rules for aerial combat manoeuvring in 1916, known as the Dicta Boelcke. He advised pilots to attack from the direction of the sun (toward which the defending pilot could not see), or to fly at a higher altitude than the opponent. Most of these rules are still as valuable nowadays as they were a century ago. Today's air combat is much more complicated than that of older times, as air-to-air missiles, radar, and automatic cannons capable of high rates of fire are used on virtually all modern fighter aircraft. New manoeuvres have emerged, intending to break radar lock by minimizing the Doppler signature of one's own aircraft ("keeping the enemy at 3 or 9 o'clock"), or to exhaust the kinetic energy of an incoming missile (by changing the aircraft's course from side to side, the missile, not flying directly at target but trying to forestall it, will make sharper turns and eventually have to fly a longer path). However, close range fighting with infrared guided missiles and aircraft cannons still obey the same general rules laid down in the skies over Europe in the early 20th century. The master rule is still the same: do not let your opponent get on your six o'clock, while attempting to get on his. Close-range combat tactics vary considerably according to the type of aircraft being used and the number of aircraft involved.
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