Garros' Innovation
During the month before the outbreak of the war, Raymond Saulnier had been working on an interupter gear that would allow a machine gun to be fired through the propeller arc. He had grown impatient with hang-fire failures so he attached steel deflection plates on the propeller where the bullets passed through the arc. The military lost interest in his idea once the war started and made Saulnier return the machine gun he had borrowed.
After a few months into the war, all the pilots were unanimous in their desire for fixed machine guns facing forward that they could shoot in the direction they were flying.
Roland Garros
Date of Birth: October 6, 1888
Place of Birth: Saint-Denis, Réunion
Date Of Death: October 5, 1918
Lieutenant Roland Garros, a famous stunt pilot, came to Saulnier and had steel deflector plates attached to his propeller blades and a fixed machine gun mounted in front of the cockpit. The interrupter gear was not installed, Garros relied on the steel plates to ward off the bullets that hit the airscrew.
At the end of March Garros took to the air, and in just over 14 days he had shot down five German planes. On April 19, he was brought down by enemy ground fire while strafing an infantry unit near Coutrai. His attempts to set fire to his plane to prevent it from falling into enemy were unsuccessful and his modified airscrew was quickly turned over to Anthony Fokker.
