Fokker Scourge

The Fokker Scourge (Fokker Scare) occurred during the First World War from July 1915 to early 1916. Imperial German Flying Corps (Die Fliegertruppen) units, equipped with Fokker Eindecker (Fokker monoplane) fighters, gained an advantage over the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and the French Aéronautique Militaire.

The Fokker was the first service aircraft to be fitted with a machine gun synchronised to fire through the arc of the propeller without striking the blades. The tactical advantage of aiming the gun by aiming the aircraft and the surprise of its introduction were factors in its success.

This period of German air superiority ended with the arrival in numbers of the French Nieuport 11 and British Airco DH.2 fighters, which were capable of challenging the Fokkers, although the last Fokkers were not finally replaced until August–September 1916.

The term "Fokker Scourge" was coined by the British press in mid-1916, after the Eindeckers had been outclassed by the new Allied types. Use of the term coincided with a political campaign to end a perceived dominance of the Royal Aircraft Factory in the supply of aircraft to the Royal Flying Corps, a campaign that was begun by the pioneering aviation journalist C. G. Grey and Noel Pemberton Billing M.P., founder of Pemberton-Billing Ltd (Supermarine from 1916) and a great enthusiast for aerial warfare.

As aerial warfare developed, the Allies gained a lead over the Germans by introducing machine-gun armed types such as the Vickers F.B.5 Gunbus fighter and the Morane-Saulnier L. By early 1915, the German Oberste Heeresleitung (OHL, Supreme Army Command) had ordered the development of machine-gun-armed aircraft to counter those of the Allies. The new "C" class, armed two-seaters and twin-engined "K" (later "G") class aircraft such as the AEG G.I were attached in ones and twos to Feldflieger Abteilungen (FFA) artillery-observation and reconnaissance detachments for "fighter" sorties, mostly the escort of unarmed aircraft.

On 18 April 1915, the Morane-Saulnier L of Roland Garros was captured, after he was forced to land behind the German lines. From 1 April, Garros had destroyed three German aircraft in the Morane, which carried a machine-gun firing through the propeller arc. Saulnier had failed to develop a synchroniser and with Garros, as an interim solution, fitted metal wedges to the propeller; bullets that hit the blades were deflected by them. Garros burned his aircraft but this failed to conceal the nature of the device and the significance of the deflector blades. The German authorities requested several aircraft manufacturers, including that of Anthony Fokker, to produce a copy.

The Fokker company produced the Stangensteuerung (push rod controller), a genuine synchronisation gear. Impulses from a cam driven by the engine controlled the timing of the machine-gun for its fire to be limited to the intervals between the propeller blades' travel past the barrel. Unlike earlier proposed gears, the Stangensteuerung was fitted to an aircraft and proved effective. In a postwar biography, Fokker claimed that he produced the gear in 48 hours but it was probably designed by Heinrich Lübbe, a Fokker Flugzeugbau engineer. Among several pre-war patents for similar devices was that of Franz Schneider, a Swiss engineer who had worked for Nieuport and the German LVG company.

The device was fitted to the most suitable Fokker type, the Fokker M.5K (military type name "Fokker A.III"), of which A.16/15, assigned to Otto Parschau, became the prototype of the Fokker Eindecker series of fighter designs.* Fokker demonstrated A.16/15 in May and June 1915 to German fighter pilots, including Kurt Wintgens, Oswald Boelcke and Max Immelmann. The Fokker, with its typical Morane controls, an over-sensitive balanced elevator and dubious lateral control, was difficult to fly; Parschau, who was experienced on Fokker A types, converted pilots to the new fighter. The early Eindeckers were attached to FFAs, in ones and twos, to protect reconnaissance machines from Allied machine-gun-armed aircraft.