The Cavalry Horse of the Air 



At last the secret of German 

 fighting aeroplanes is revealed 



By Carl Dienstl^ach 



BY this time every- 

 one has heard of 

 the famous Fok- 

 ker aeroplanes — the 

 fighting chariot of the 

 air in which the fa- 

 mous German avi- 

 ators Immelman and 

 Boelke performed so 

 many daring exploits! 

 Very little has been 

 published by the Ger- 

 mans about the Fok- 

 ker beyond the fact 

 that it is swift and 

 strong, and that it 

 can shoot up like a 

 balloon, plunge like a 

 stone, rise again, tum- 

 ble about, and fight 

 like a cavalry- horse, 

 all because of its ex- 

 cessive power and its 

 extreme lightness. 



Much more is now known of the Fokker. 

 Interesting as its construction is, still more 

 interesting is its single machine gun and the 

 manner in which it is fired. August Euler 

 patented the idea of aiming a gun not by 

 swinging the weapon itself, but by manipu- 

 lating the air craft on which it was mounted. 

 That was the underh'ing idea carried out in 

 the machine-gun mounting of the Fokker. 

 Euler exhibited his device in 1912 at the 

 Berlin Aeroplane Exposition. Prince Henry 

 of Prussia no sooner saw it there than he 

 ordered it to be withdrawn at once and 

 guarded as a mihtary secret. 



Military experts have always wondered 

 what is the best way of making an attack in 

 the air. Ramming is obviously impossible. 

 Bomb dropping is uncertain at high speed 

 even at close range. Euler's invention 

 solved the problem for the Germans. 

 Mount a machine gun on an aeroplane so 

 that the entire craft must be turned in 

 order to aim the gun and a kind of ramming 

 principle is at once applied without en- 

 dangering either the machine or the ram- 

 mer. The firing rariges, to be sure, are 

 short — at most a hundred yards. 



Since in racing monoplanes of the Fokker 



A cut-away drawing showing the construction of the Fokker aeroplane 

 with its macliine gun which is aimed by swinging the entire craft 



ty[)e the projieller is mounted in front, the 

 technical difficulty of firing the gun through 

 the blades of the swiftly revolving propeller 

 had to be overcome. An aeroplane motor 

 explodes thousands of charges of mixed air 

 and gas in a minute; a machine gun fires 

 about six hundred shots a minute. If it is 

 jxjssible to time thousands of motor ex- 

 plosions with mathematical nicety, surely it 

 is not an impossibility to time rapid but 

 less frequent machine gun discharges with 

 equal ease. The propeller blades intercept 

 the gun only during the one-fortieth part 

 of the time required for a complete revolu- 

 tion. The solution was simple: Let the 

 motor operate the machine gun and fire 

 it at the proper time. And so that was 

 done. 



The operation of the gun by the marks- 

 man is not in the least interfered with. The 

 pulling of the trigger indicates merely when 

 firing should begin and end. It must not 

 be forgotten that the propeller of the 

 machine is directly coupled to the motor, 

 as our illustration shows, and that it makes 

 more revolutions a minute than the most 

 rapid automatic gun wouUl make firing 

 shots in the same length of time. 



397 



