JANE‘S
FIGHTING AIRCRAFT
OF WORLD WARI
FOREWORD BY JOHN W.R. TAYLOR
STUDIOCONTENTS.FOREWORD
|ANE'S All the World’s Aireraft was only five
[years old when the First World War began. Tt
jad already established such a reputation for
authenticity that its Founder/Editor, Fred T.
Jane, feared that the 1914 edition might be of
assistance to Britain's enemies. It was not
practicable to serap the work already done and, in
A reasonable period of time, restart page make-up
and printing. So, when purchasers opened the
book they discovered that pages in the British
section that should have earried large illustrations
of aeroplanes and airships in service with the
Royal Flying Corp and Royal Naval Air Services
were sometimes ‘almost entirely obliterated by
rectangles of solid black ink.
In a Special Note above his Preface, Jane wrote
“On account of the general European War it has
been deevided to publish the first edition of this,
boak a month ‘earlier than was originally
anticipated. ‘This means that the Italian and
United States pages have to go to press
imperfectly brought to date. On the other hand,
though certain details which would otherwise have
appeared are necessarily lacking, the matter
collected concerning the principal belligerants is of
such a nature that immediate publication seems
desirable and to justify the unfinished state of the
British pages, from which, for obvious reasons, a
good deal has been deliberately deleted.”
‘We shall never know whether the purpose was
simply to deny the enemy information on aireraft
that some considered to be world-beaters. But
Jane could hardly have foreseen that types such as
the RFC’s B.E.2e, poorly armed and with the
emphasis on stability for reconnaissance, would be
almost cleared from the sky over the Western
Front in France when the Germans introduced
their Fokker Eindecker (monoplane), with a
forward-firing machine-gun, in the Summer of
1915,
From that time, combat aireraft developed at an
astonishing pace. By the end of the war, in 1918,
Successive generations of single-seat fighters had
progressed from having engines capable of
producing 80 hp on a good day to engines giving a
reliable 200 hp or more. Speeds. increased. in
consequence from 82 mph to nearly 150 mph. Twin
forward-firing machine-guns became the normal
armament, with up to four guns on some aircraft,
ich as the Sopwith Dolphin.
It is surprising to realise, long afterwards, that
the so-called “Fokker scourge” of 1915-16 was
accomplished in only ten months by aireraft that
weighed only 1,400 Ib fully loaded, and of which
only some 433 were built. In contrast, nearly 5,500
British Sopwith Camels were produced, and they
shot down 1,294 enemy aireraft — more than any
other Allied or enemy type — in dogfights that were
often decided by their extreme manoeuvrability.
Unlike the present day, when many types of
military aireraft remain in first-line service for 20,
30, or more years, some of the best-known types of
the 1914-18 period operated for only a year or 18
months before being replaced by something better.
As a result, they had long disappeared from
assembly factories and from the inventory of
squadron fighting in France when the late Fred
Jane's successor, C. G. Grey, compiled the 1919
edition of All the World's Aireraft that forms the
basis of this book.
‘To provide readers with a more comprehensive
record of the aircraft that fought aviation’s first
great war, the compiler of Jane’s Fighting Aircraft
of World War I has supplemented the 1919
material by extracting entries on_ significant
military aireraft from the 1914, 1916, 1917 and 1918
editions (there was none in 1915). Civilian types
have been omitted as irrelevant to this volume.
Tt has to be remembered that in wartime it is
seldom possible to describe in full detail the
structures, dimensions, weights, performance and
armament’ of contemporary aireraft built by
manufacturers on one’s own side. Even the 1919
edition of All the World's Aireraft was compiled
partly during the still-desperate closing months of
the eonfliet, with some updating after it ended. So,
the deseriptions of individual aireraft in this book
are, for the most part, based on reports and
studies of German aireraft that had been captured
(often in a damaged state) by the Allies, and vice
versa. They are of considerable historieal interest
and, although they could not include all the facts
and’ figures that became available later, they
provide some of the most detailed descriptions of
important aireraft that have ever appeared in any
reference book.
In retrospect, it can be seen that the four years
and three months of the First World” War
represented the most significant period in the
entire history of aerial warfare,