Fighter Planes: From Wood and Cloth to Planes With No Pilot

Key takeaways

• Every plane fights four forces: weight, lift, thrust and drag. A wing makes lift by turning the air downward and by having lower pressure on top than below, but only if it moves through the air fast enough. Early engines were weak, so WWI planes used two wings of wood and fabric.
• In 1915 Fokker's team timed the machine gun to fire only between the propeller blades, and the sky became a battlefield. The Red Baron was credited with 80 victories, the most of the war; in 'Bloody April' 1917 historians estimate a new British pilot survived only about two to three weeks.
• In the Battle of Britain (1940), radar, which works like an echo, let Britain see German formations more than 100 km away, so its fighters could wait on the ground. The jet engine works in four steps (suck, squeeze, burn, blow); the first jet flew on 27 August 1939, five days before WWII began.
• Near the speed of sound the air can't get out of the way and piles up into shock waves; on 14 October 1947 Chuck Yeager flew faster than sound in the Bell X-1. Swept wings delay the shock waves, and in Korea the MiG-15 and F-86 Sabre fought the first large jet-versus-jet battles. US kill claims of about 10 to 1 are judged far too high by historians today.
• Vietnam showed missiles alone were not enough (often cited: only 1 or 2 hits in 10), and training mattered: TOPGUN opened on 3 March 1969. The US bombed Cambodia from March 1969 to 15 August 1973 (at least 500,000 tons per US records). Since then stealth, fly-by-wire computers, sensor fusion, drones and AI pilots (5–0 in a 2020 simulator) are changing who sits in the cockpit.