The Wings of Warfare

How Technological Leaps, Bold Innovators Have Helped Shape Modern Aerial Combat

With wings and balance as fragile as a fledgling's, early airplanes inspired amazement, disbelief and a new strategy for war.

"Warplane," a four-part documentary, traces aviation's role in combat, from the first flimsy wooden planes through today's use of unmanned drones.

"The Wrights invented the plane in 1903, but only 11 years after Kitty Hawk, in the first months of World War I, airplanes not only shaped the war but triggered a series of cascading events," said senior Pentagon adviser and former Air Force historian Richard Hallion, who is interviewed in the program. "There was a profound military effect. With air reconnaissance, commanders realized very quickly they had to deny the skies to the enemy. You had the advent of the bomber, and later, air transport. War had become three-dimensional."

Jared Lipworth, the documentary's executive producer, said he's enthralled by how much aviation has grown and changed in just 100 years.

"It began as an age of personal invention," Lipworth said. "It was always some guy who said, 'I've got a good idea; let's try it.' Now it's thousands of people's big dreams and computer modeling -- and approval for anything takes a committee, but it is still about the small changes."

Lipworth cited a favorite "small change" in combat aviation: Aviators "went from shooting each other with shotguns as they went by, to using mounted machine guns that were synchronized by propeller. That was all [conceived] by some guy who did it in his workshop."

The broadcast chronicles the plane's role in combat, the invention of the jet engine and the development of computer-age avionics. Aviation's influence on other inventions, including radar, also is featured. "In between the war years, you had eight different countries developing radar at the same time, unknown to each other," Lipworth said. "The British had the biggest need for it and started using it right away. It took a while for America to adopt it."

The documentary also outlines the Wright brothers' early disappointment when the U.S. government had no interest in their invention.

Orville and Wilbur Wright "always believed their plane would be valuable to the military," said John Morrow, an aviation historian at the University of Georgia, who appears on the program. "They ended up dismantling it and putting it away until they had made enough contacts to go to Europe and fly."

Morrow said the shift to aerial warfare is about more than the relationship between the military establishment and the aviation industry. "There is this notion of the knights of the air, this culture of aviation that seizes people," he said. "It's been romanticized, how these young men, not yet out of their teens, flew these planes that are fragile and flimsy, topping speeds of 110 miles per hour."

Morrow's segments were shot at the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome, an Upstate New York museum that houses original and re-created antique aircraft.

"After they interviewed me, I went out and became part of the ground crew getting the planes ready for the flying sequences," Morrow said. "They thought I was some stuffy professor and they couldn't believe I wanted to get my hands dirty, pushing the planes out for takeoff."