Wouldn't a ww1 plane's gun hit the propellers when firing?

Answer 1

Well, they did shoot off their propellors on the first experiments. The first French aircraft designer to try this simply installed a deflector plate on the propellor blade. The logic was that if the blade and the plate was angled enough, the bullet would hit the plate and glance off. This worked----most of the time.

The Germans inspected a downed French plane and decided to solve the problem. They designed what is called an interrupter gear. This was a gear that was driven off of the aircraft engine. It was rigged so that it would prevent the gun from firing (or interrupt the firing sequence) when a propellor blade was in front of the gun. This would not allow the gun to fire when a propellor blade was in its line of fire.

This interrupter gear was a shaft that was geared off the engine and used a bell crank to convert the input to the machine gun(s) mounted on top of the engine cowl.

Answer

Before the French tried deflector plates, aeroplanes had forward firing machine guns mounted on the top wing of biplanes- these fired over the top of the propellor arc. However, they were difficult to aim and even more difficult to work on if they jammed (the pilot had to essentially stand up to get close enough) which was a frequent occurrence. A later fix was for the machine gun (or cannon) to be mounted in the "V" of liquid cooled engines, or for the crankshaft to be hollow, allowing the projectiles to exit through the propellor boss.

Answer 2

Aerial combat was in its infancy at the start of WWI, and originally pilots brought small firearms along with them which they fired manually. Bombs were likewise little more than hand grenades which the pilot lobbed out over the side of the aircraft.

As airplane vs airplane combat became more common, it was necessary to mount purpose-specific firearms to the aircraft. Firing through or around the propeller was achieved in many different ways.

The British experimented with push-propeller designs so that the guns could fire forward, as well as turret-mounted machine guns which fired in various directions, but not forward. Some aircraft mounted the machine gun on top of the upper wing, so that gunfire passed above the propeller arc. Others even used small steel armor plates on the propeller blades to deflect any bullets which struck the prop.

All of these solutions had their problems, and it wasnt until later in the war that the Germans developed a system to synchronize the gun with propeller movements in order to be able to fire through the spinning prop without damaging it. The Allies quickly discovered this technology in aircraft wreckage and replicated it for their own aircraft.

Answer 3

no.

Yes. The early attempts did hit the propeller. A French inventory attached a metal plate to the propeller so any bullet that hit it would bounce off. This worked but it could be a potential problem to any friendly airplane flying next to it.

The Germans developed a gear mechanism that worked off a cam attached to the propeller shaft. The gear would prevent the gun from firing when a propeller blade was in front of the gun. This was called an Interrupter Gear. Later the British inspected a crashed German fighter and stole their design. After that, all airplanes could fire through the prop without hitting it. IT worked 100% of the time.

Answer 4

You'd think so - but the engineers were pretty smart - they figured out a way to fire the gun only when the propeller blades were NOT in front of the barrel. Using a series of gears and cams, the front-facing guns of most WW1 fighter planes were engineered to NOT shoot the propellor blades off. I say 'most', because there was this one pilot, "Doubting Tom" Curtis, who took off to fight the Hun before the Engineers fixed his plane. He's buried in France, near where his plane crashed.