A violent fight between dogs.
A close fight between warring fighter planes.
Any rough-and-tumble physical battle.
To engage in a dogfight with.
To engage in a dogfight.
The aeroplanes are wonderfully fascinating. One would like to watch them all day - theirs and ours, darting about the sky amid storms of shrapnel. They spot for the big guns, you know, and each side makes frantic efforts to drive hostile craft away when they come over. The sky is pitted with the little black and white shrapnel shells when any come in range of enemy guns. The shells are coming from all directions by the thousand, ours and theirs, but I'm resting in quite a comfy little machine gun emplacement. We hope to be out of it in a few days, thank goodness. Our losses have been heavy.
Pilot from the Australian Corps, John Raws, letter to a friend (20th July 1916)
The etymology of this word originated in the 1880s meaning a "riotous brawl.” During World War I it came to be used as slang for an "aerial combat" among the air forces. Essential to aerobatic technique is the ability to fly an aircraft inverted or upside down. Frenchman Adolphe Pégoud a test pilot for aviator Louis Blériot was the first to demonstrate this ability on September 1, 1913. The war to end all wars broke out soon after the invention of the airplane. The first planes built had machine guns mounted on the wings of the plane.
Dogfights took some real maneuverings in the two-seater aircraft; the gunman in the rear would shout directions as to how he wanted to sight his line of fire to the pilot while the pilot dived and dodged the enemy aircraft. Lieutenant Norman Spratt, flying a Sopwith Tabloid is credited with the first dogfight of the war. A real feat since his aircraft was unarmed.
The British pilots were the first to come up with a system of safety straps so that the gunman could stand up; therefore increasing the range of fire to 360 º. By October 1915 all British aircraft were outfitted so. In addition to using machine guns many times grenades were dropped on aircraft below. That same year a French pilot by the name of Roland Garros mounted deflector plates to the propeller blades making it possible for the first time for a pilot to fire a machine gun since the steel wedges diverted any bullets, protecting the propellers. Later that fall a Dutchman Anthony Fokker who ran an aircraft factory developed a machine gun that could fire through the blades of a propeller and soon was putting in his interrupter gear, a synchronizing gear linked to the shaft of the trigger and propellers skipping the release of a bullet when they were lined up, manufacturing the first real fighter aircraft.
The following year Germany developed the same technology and began to shoot down large numbers of the British air force. Max Immelmann was shot down and killed in June 15th, but not before he had destroyed seventeen Allied aircraft in his Eindecker.
Oswald Boelcke another infamous German pilot claimed forty victims before he too was killed later that fall. About this time any pilot who had more than eight 'kills', became known as a Flying Ace.
During the spring of 1916 France and Britain joined the Dutch and began adding synchronized machine-guns systems to their aircraft and pilots such as René Paul Fonck and William Bishop gained notoriety as flying aces. In addition they began mounting the aircraft engines behind the pilot and placed a forward-firing Lewis machine-gun. The absence of an engine in front gave the pilot an uninterrupted view of his target.
In July with the new innovation of tracer ammunition added to the arsenal, a pilot of Royal Flying Corps could now see his line of fire and make adjustments for more accuracy. Spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ explains how the tactics of dogfighting evolved:
Organisation and tactics changed with the introduction of the synchronized machine-gun. At first flying aces adopted "lone wolf" tactics. However, by 1917 British pilots tended to seek out enemy aircraft in groups of six. The flight commander would be in front, with an aircraft on either side formin