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The Vickers F.B.5 (Fighting Biplane 5) (known as the "Gunbus") was a British two-seat pusher military biplane of the First World War.Armed with a single .303 in (7.7 mm) Lewis gun operated by the observer in the front of the nacelle, it was the first aircraft purpose-built for air-to-air combat to see service, making it the world's first operational fighter aircraft.
Lewis Milestone: German infantry on the Western Front D N 1930 US A Man from Wyoming: Rowland V. Lee: D, R N 1930 US Inside the Lines: Roy Pomeroy: During WW1, the paths of an officer in the English secret service and a German spy converge in Gibraltar. D P 1930 US Anybody's War: Lloyd Corrigan: Two blackfaced men and their dog get talked into ...
Lewis joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in early 1939 as a pilot officer and served in the Mediterranean and Middle East theatre of World War II, rising to the rank of squadron leader. [18] [19] Bernard Shaw wrote of Lewis: "This prince of pilots has had a charmed life in every sense of the word. He is a thinker, a master of words ...
Geoffrey Crisp is a fictional character that is an amalgam of Vickers's test pilots, Jeffrey Quill (also an RAF veteran) and "Mutt" Summers. Having one character personify the test pilots is a liberty that gives the story narrative coherence, as well as a narrator and occasional comic relief. [ 9 ]
Lewis guns were used extensively on British and French aircraft during the First World War, as either an observer's or gunner's weapon or an additional weapon to the more common Vickers. The Lewis's popularity as an aircraft machine gun was partly due to its low weight, the fact that it was air-cooled and that it used self-contained 97-round ...
The design was a development of the earlier Vickers F.B.12 prototypes; [2] and was a two-bay biplane with a high-mounted nacelle for the pilot and an initial armament of two .303 in (7.7 mm) Lewis Guns. Behind this was a water-cooled 200 hp (150 kW) Hispano-Suiza engine driving the propeller.
The Vickers response, the F.B.11, designed by R. L. Howard-Flanders, was a large, single-bay, biplane of tractor layout. The pilot and one gunner sat in separate but closely spaced cockpits under the trailing edge of the upper wing, while a second gunner sat in a nacelle, or "fighting top", attached to, and extending forward of the upper wing.