Talk:List of World War I Entente aircraft

National origin column

Is there any reason for this column, since the article is divided into sub-lists by national origin? there are only two instances where there's anything useful there, both US license builds of UK designs.TheLongTone (talk) 11:41, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

I am planning on merging all the seperate tables into one, hence this field. I wanted to add a bunch more entries first which is easier to do when they are still split up. Was looking for references tho.NiD.29 (talk) 23:17, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

OK. In which case at least one of the Russian machines is a copy of an English design.TheLongTone (talk) 23:25, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

...It's going to be avery long list if all experimental types are included. I'm interested in the very first entry btw, having recently made a WP article on Vedrines. And on that subject, I'm pretty sure that La Vache is simply the name Vedrines gave to aircraft flown by him: I think the type is a Bleriot armoured monoplane.TheLongTone (talk) 23:32, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

I was going by the Davilla book, which I think lists them separately. I figured Bleriot La Vache would be a more likely name for the page than the actual numerical designation. Feel free to change it though. Many experimentals are already included except for the British and Italian ones (though there are more, I tried to keep to the more important ones for now - but not enough to be a problem size-wise). I am not sure the Tabloid copy was made from an actual had a Tabloid or just photos - it wasn't the only one as there was a German copy as well, and if we exclude anything that was a copy, we lose many of the Russian types, many of which were evolved from various German two seaters.NiD.29 (talk) 00:45, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

My main area of interest is pre (Great} war aircraft, and finding anything reliable on anything French is a nightmare, so I'll leave well alone. I shudder to think what finding out about Russian stuff... there isn't even a Wiki article on Lebed. Here

is a photo of La Vache, btw.TheLongTone (talk) 09:37, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Flying machines press has some good books covering French, Russian and IIRC Austro-Hungarian WW1 aircraft, but very little is known about production numbers though. Italian aircraft have probably got the worst coverage and a lot of the prototypes are unknown outside of Italy. Do you have Opdyke's 'French Aeroplanes Before the Great War'?NiD.29 (talk) 13:56, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

I do. In my opinion it is not a very useful work, although it does have a lot of fabulous photos. He really doesn't make any attempt to create any kind of sense out of the data, and there are some very baffling errors and omissions. Imo if I can spot the mistakes (I may know a lot about the subject but I would not call myself an expert by any means) the works is not up to scratch. He seems to have compiled the book without any reference to Flight, and seemingly without a close reading of L'Aerofile either.TheLongTone (talk) 14:19, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Probably wasn't able to find any sense to it - I can understand skipping Flight (its coverage would be limited to the more famous or successful types) but French magazines are a treasure trove, as are several German magazines including Zeitschrift fur flugtecknik und motorluftshiffahrt. Hard to find complete sets though.NiD.29 (talk) 05:40, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

I don't think there was much sense to it. Early manufactures were too busy making aircraft to worry about type numbers and the things were also often not mass produced items, and its often a mistake to try and so categorise machines. The waters are considerably muddied by post-hoc classifications by different historians. I disagree about Flight. There really should be an article on the subject, but it would be virtually impossible to write without becoming OR. Re Flight, given such a dearth of information, any source is useful. Flight is hardly an obscure publication, and for the first couple of years there was so little significant activity in the UK that a great deal of its content is about French aviation. l'Aerophile , from what I've seen of it ( which is a downloadable pdf of 1910 issues) is also a curious source: I suspect that their coverage is limited to a certain 'in-crowd', because some people, for example Voisin, seem to be hardly mentioned. (from what I know of Gabriel this is more than understandable)TheLongTone (talk) 10:22, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Flight suffers from a love-hate relationship with the French that alternates between trumpeting the need for action (to catch up to the French) and in distorting facts and figures to minimize how far behind the British aviation industry actually was, with some nationalism thrown in for good measure.

Different designers may or may not show up because some were more secretive than others, ranging from the absolutely paranoid to trying every angle for publicity - successful types rarely get as much coverage in the press as the unsuccessful ones (with exceptions). The folks actually selling successful airplanes weren't expending much effort on press releases and advertising. Air race reporting is a better gauge of their relative importance and coverage of experimental types is hit or miss. Keep in mind too that a lot of French aviation work was done at only a few airfields and so anyone not at those locations is also going to be under-reported.

What is needed is for French historians to complete a technical overview of the various aircraft. The Docavia series is great, but the coverage has a lot of holes and has a way to go, while several French aero magazines (Icare and Fana are better sources than their English equivalents, but they still haven't created a good overview, preferring this small detail here and there, with emphasis on individual military units or individuals, or on the organizations rather than on the aircraft themselves.NiD.29 (talk) 21:46, 27 October 2013 (UTC)