The Most Significant Air Power Advances
since the Beginning of Powered Flight
The use of the third dimension – aviation in all its guises – has itself been the key factor in enabling air
power. While it started with balloons, kites and gliders, the new era of powered flight that began on 17
December 1903 was also the dawn of the era of air power; warfare would never be the same again.
The following is inevitably a partial and subjective list. The advance of air power has mirrored and built on
the advance of aviation (and space) itself – and many of the great steps forward have had application across
the whole spectrum of civil and military aerospace. In addition, as in all engineering science, many
inventions build on incremental improvements over years or are the putting together of existing inventions
in new ways. It can be hard to know exactly who to credit or when precisely the change started.
In putting together this list, the Air Power Group has prioritised advances that are an obvious step change.
In addition, perhaps a little arbitrarily but with no intention to minimise their importance, we have excluded
such things as the jet engine and computers/data links. And the helicopter, although it has enabled so
many battlefield and maritime changes in tactical lift and attack – and fundamentally changed search and
rescue, is not solely an air power invention. Likewise, inventions such as the use of oxygen, the g-suit and
the Martin Baker ejection seat are about aviation medicine and safety, rather than air power per se.
Deflection Gear/Interrupter gear
Roland Garros realised that a fixed, forward-firing machine gun would greatly improve air-to-air combat
capability. With engineering from Raymond Saulnier attaching steel deflector plates to the propeller, this
was first achieved in April 1915. Shortly afterward Garros and his aircraft were captured and in July 1915
Anton Fokker, who had already been working on the same problem, improved on the invention with an
interrupter gear on the E1 Eindecker. Air-to-air combat was revolutionised.
Automatic Bombsights
Although WW1 aircraft had fixed ‘iron’ sights, it was not until the 1930s and 1940s that mechanical
computers were invented that ‘solved’ the equations of motion in tachometric bombsights, the best-known
and most numerous of which were the various marks of the Norden bombsight that, linked to the aircraft
autopilot, achieved unprecedented accuracy – in 1940 a CEP of 400ft from 15 000ft, although in combat in
1943 the average CEP was 1200ft. Genuine precision bombing would have to wait for a generation, but this
was the start of accuracy and discrimination in aerial bombardment.
Radar
WW2 saw the birth of both ground-to-air radar and air-to-air radar, evolving from numerous related
discoveries and inventions in Germany, the USA and the UK. Radar completely changed the nature of air
warfare, which had hitherto relied on the ‘Mk1 eyeball’. Ground control and beyond visual range detection
and engagement of targets all became possible. It is hard to imagine what aerial warfare would be without
it.
Aircraft carrier: Angled flight Deck; Steam catapult/arrestor wires; Ski Jump
Jet aircraft, with their higher speeds for both take-off and landing led to a fundamental change in carrier
aviation in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The steam catapult could rapidly accelerate heavy aircraft and
arrestor cables could bring them to a halt. And the angled flight deck allowed ‘bolters’ to go around safely –
and permitted concurrent take off and recovery operations. Separately, the limited excess power of STOVL
aircraft, and therefore carrying capacity, was enormously boosted by the invention of the ski jump ramp.
Thus the era of maritime air power began and was enabled to be so effective that world-wide military effect
can now be delivered without fixed base support.
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Missiles
The following three entries illustrate the pre-eminent position that missiles, in all their guises, hold in
modern warfare.
1. V1/Cruise Missiles
Although the idea predates WW1, and some development was done during that war and in the 1920s,
cruise missile designs derive from the WW2 German V1. Advances in computer technology have enabled
missiles to be guided in flight, as opposed to only at launch. These advances developed into the modern
cruise missile, initially, from the late 1940s and 1950s, for nuclear delivery and then for conventional
warhead delivery, with the Soviet Union in particular producing a range of anti-ship missiles to counter
American carrier supremacy.
2. V2 Ballistic Missiles
The V2 was the world’s first long-range ballistic missile. The four key new technologies were large liquidfuel rocket engines, supersonic aerodynamics, gyroscopic guidance and rudders in jet control. The German
team under Wernher von Braun, assisted pre-WW2 by the work of Richard Goddard in the USA, solved all
the considerable problems and the first successful test flight was on 3 October 1942, reaching an altitude of
84.5 kilometres. After Hitler's 29 August 1944 declaration to begin V-2 attacks as soon as possible, the V2
offensive began on 8 September 1944 with a single launch at Paris, which caused modest damage near
Porte d’Italie. Although over 5000 of V2s were produced, the V-2 had no effect on the outcome of the war.
At the end of the war, a race began between the United States and the USSR to retrieve as many V-2 rockets
and staff as possible. Three hundred rail-car loads of V-2s and parts were captured and shipped to the
United States and 126 of the principal designers, including Wernher von Braun, were in American hands.
The V2s real value was in its ingenuity, which set the stage for the next 50 years of ballistic military rocketry,
culminating in the ICBMs of the Cold War and in the beginnings of modern space exploration.
3. Air-to-air, surface-to-air and air-to-ground missiles
The move from projectiles to missiles was a fundamental shift in the development of the war in the air from
WW2 onwards. The complexity of all the advances involved means that a short paragraph can hardly do the
subject justice. Suffice it to say that missiles have changed everything about air warfare and spurred a
similar rapid development in counter-measures.
Reconnaissance satellites
On 16 March 1955, presciently recognising - Gary Powers was not shot down until 1960 - that even the
stratosphere would no longer guarantee invulnerability, the USAF officially ordered the development of an
advanced reconnaissance satellite to provide continuous surveillance of 'preselected areas of the earth' in
order 'to determine the status of a potential enemy’s war-making capability'. The Corona satellite
programme was operational from June 1959. Since then, military intelligence, surveillance and
reconnaissance has been radically changed.
Head-up Displays
Head-up Displays (HUDs) evolved from reflector sights and attack sights, such as used by the Buccaneer, and
in the 1960s the head-up display was expanded to include flying as well as weapon aiming symbology. The
French test pilot Gilbert Klopstein created the first modern HUD, with standard symbols, greatly increasing
pilot efficiency and reducing task saturation/overload. Now the HUD is ubiquitous, although there is
already a trend to helmet displays, to increase the field of regard.
Fly-by-wire – relaxed stability/unstable aircraft
Electronic signalling of the control surfaces of an aircraft was first tested in the 1930s in the Tupolev ANT20. But the first pure electronic fly-by wire aircraft was the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle in 1964. The
first digital fly-by-wire aircraft was a NASA experimental F-8 Crusader in 1972. It is digital fly-by-wire that
allows relaxed stability, greatly improving manoeuvrability – and allowing ‘carefree handling’, making a
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significant difference to actual and safe useable aircraft performance.
Precision Guided Munitions
The Germans developed steerable munitions in WW2, with the first use in combat in 1943, when a Fritz X
was used to attack an Italian Battleship. Research into laser guidance systems started in the USA in 1962
and the USAF developed the first laser-guided bomb, the BOLT-117, in 1968. The first use in combat was in
Vietnam on 13 May 1972 on the Thanh Hoa bridge. In the first Gulf War in 1991, they were in large-scale
use, although only approximately 10% of sorties used PGMs; by the second Gulf War in 2003 it was 90%.
Now GPS-aiming has supplemented electro-optical guidance.
Stealth
Modern stealth aircraft first became possible when Denys Overholser, a mathematician working for
Lockheed Aircraft during the 1970s, adopted a mathematical model developed by Petr Ufimtsev, a Russian
scientist, to develop a computer program called Echo 1. Echo made it possible to predict the radar
signature an aircraft made with flat panels, called facets. In 1975, engineers at Lockheed Skunk Works
found that an aircraft made with faceted surfaces could have a very low radar signature because the
surfaces would radiate almost all of the radar energy away from the receiver. The first operational stealth
aircraft, the F-117 Nighthawk, was in service with the USAF from 1981, although it was first deployed in
Operation Just Cause in Panama in 1989. It was in the first Gulf War in 1991 that it became widely known
about.
Remotely Piloted Air Systems (RPAS)
Unmanned flight’s history starts at the beginning of flight itself, but the step change in air power capability
occurred around the second Gulf War with the deployment of the GA-ASI Predator remotely piloted air
system (RPAS). Notwithstanding the popular debate over ‘drones’, RPAS are here to stay and with their
persistence and precision have made a major difference to the conduct of aerial warfare.
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