The Fokker Scourge (Fokker Scare) occurred during the First World War from July 1915 to early 1916. Imperial German Flying Corps (Die Fliegertruppen) units, equipped with Fokker Eindecker (Fokker monoplane) fighters, gained an advantage over the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and the French Aéronautique Militaire.
The Fokker was the first service aircraft to be fitted with a machine gun synchronised to fire through the arc of the propeller without striking the blades. The tactical advantage of aiming the gun by aiming the aircraft and the surprise of its introduction were factors in its success.
This period of German air superiority ended with the arrival in numbers of the French Nieuport 11 and British Airco DH.2 fighters, which were capable of challenging the Fokkers, although the last Fokkers were not finally replaced until August–September 1916.
The term "Fokker Scourge" was coined by the British press in mid-1916, after the Eindeckers had been outclassed by the new Allied types. Use of the term coincided with a political campaign to end a perceived dominance of the Royal Aircraft Factory in the supply of aircraft to the Royal Flying Corps, a campaign that was begun by the pioneering aviation journalist C. G. Grey and Noel Pemberton Billing M.P., founder of Pemberton-Billing Ltd (Supermarine from 1916) and a great enthusiast for aerial warfare.
As aerial warfare developed, the Allies gained a lead over the Germans by introducing machine-gun armed types such as the Vickers F.B.5 Gunbus fighter and the Morane-Saulnier L. By early 1915, the German Oberste Heeresleitung (OHL, Supreme Army Command) had ordered the development of machine-gun-armed aircraft to counter those of the Allies. The new "C" class, armed two-seaters and twin-engined "K" (later "G") class aircraft such as the AEG G.I were attached in ones and twos to Feldflieger Abteilungen (FFA) artillery-observation and reconnaissance detachments for "fighter" sorties, mostly the escort of unarmed aircraft.
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A synchronization gear (also known as a gun synchronizer or interrupter gear) was a device enabling a single-engine tractor configuration aircraft to fire its forward-firing armament through the arc of its spinning propeller without bullets striking the blades. This allowed the aircraft, rather than the gun, to be aimed at the target. There were many practical problems, mostly arising from the inherently imprecise nature of an automatic gun's firing, the great (and varying) velocity of the blades of a spinning propeller, and the very high speed at which any gear synchronizing the two had to operate.
La Luftstreitkräfte allemande, connue sous le nom de Die Fliegertruppen des deutschen Kaiserreiches (Service aérien de l'armée impériale allemande) ou simplement Die Fliegertruppen avant octobre 1916 était la force aérienne de l'empire allemand durant la Première Guerre mondiale (1914-1918). Bien que son nom soit très proche de « Armée de l'air allemande », la Luftstreitkräfte demeura un élément de l'Armée de terre impériale pendant toute la durée de la guerre contrairement à la Royal Air Force qui fut un nouveau service indépendant formé à partir du Royal Flying Corps et du Royal Naval Air Service.
vignette|Albatros D.V de la Jasta 12 alignés sur l'aérodrome de Roucourt, Une ( au pluriel, et en version abrégée) est l'unité de base de l'aviation de chasse allemande au cours de la seconde moitié de la Première Guerre mondiale. Les sont déployées à partir d'août 1916, pour contrer la supériorité aérienne gagnées par les pilotes de l'Entente au cours de la bataille de la Somme. Ces unités composées d'une quinzaine de pilotes et d'appareil remplacèrent alors toute une variété d'unités d'aviation allemande qui accomplissaient aussi bien des missions de chasse que de reconnaissance depuis le début de la guerre.