How machine guns on World War I biplanes never hit the.
News Portsmouth sailors who dodged death on HMS Glasgow relive their escape SHIPMATES who dodged death when a 1,000lb bomb slammed into their vessel '“ but failed to blow up '“ have celebrated.

Synchronization gear was invented in 1913, allowing pilots to shoot through the arc of a spinning propeller without their bullets striking the blades. The Slow Mo Guys slow down the effect and catch the mechanism in action.

There are endless documentaries that explain the clever technology that allowed World War I fighter planes to fire their machine guns through their propellers without hitting the blades. But The.

The War in the Air - Fighters: Deflector and Interrupter, The Birth of the Fighter Roland Garros, the French pre-war aviator, had come to the conclusion that a fixed, forward firing machine gun was the right answer to the problem of using machine guns from within aircraft (see Fighter Aircraft - Early Days).

The problem back then: How do you let pilots shoot machine guns straight ahead without hitting the propeller blades right in front of them? Dutchman Anthony Fokker, an aviation guru, eventually came up with a solution for the Germans: Connect the gun to the propeller via an interrupter gear so that gunfire is halted whenever the blade is directly in front of the gun’s muzzle.

World war 1 guns The Machine Gun in 1914. Machine guns inflicted appalling casualties on both war fronts in World War One. Men who went over-the-top in trenches stood little chance when the enemy opened up with their machine guns. German artillery, wearing gas masks, with a quick-firing anti-aircraft gun used mainly against low-flying. Rifles First used in the American Civil War, machine guns.

Kenton Tucker has shot machine guns most of his life. He owns several, including, he says, Errol Flynn's machine gun. Tucker, a tidy, middle-aged man with a red mustache, is.