Amount of time an aeroplane could stay in the air during the last stages of WW1

Upvote:0

All depends on the aircraft, development went very quickly during WW1. In the early days it was indeed a very precarious business, aircraft were very new and nobody really knew what they were doing.
As a result new designs were pushed into service that were indeed unstable, very unreliable, and put in the hands of people who had little or no training or experience. Accident rates were high, accounting for far more losses than did enemy action.
But over the years things improved massively until at the end of the war we could see aircraft as reliable and stable as those of WW2, long range bombers that could reach Germany from the UK with a reasonable weapons load, patrol aircraft to scour the north sea for German U-boats, and shortly after WW1 ended there were the first scheduled air mail deliveries between Europe and the USA using converted bombers (with extra fuel tanks and reduced weight from removing weapons).
Aircraft like the HP V/1500 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handley_Page_V/1500 with 17 hour endurance, not at all comfortable to spend that long on the hard wood and leather seats in an open c**kpit, wind howling and engines screaming all around you...
And that was probably the real limit of what could be achieved, human endurance, until the advent of enclosed cabins made possible by increased engine power per kilo of mass during the 1930s.
p.s. The Vickers Vimy was used to set world records crossing the Atlantic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickers_Vimy

Upvote:20

Here are some rough specs for common planes (as I said in the comment, the endurance depends on various factors).

Sopwith Camel (BR)

  • combat endurance (at 1000 m) - 2:30 (hr.:min.)

  • cruise endurance (...) - 5:00

SPAD S.XIII (FR)

  • combat endurance (...) - 1:30-2:00

  • cruise endurance (...) - 3:00

Albatross D.III (GER)

  • combat endurance (...) - 1:30-2:00

  • cruise endurance (...) - 3:10

Fokker Dr.I (GER)

  • combat endurance (...) - 1:30-1:40

  • cruise endurance (...) - 2:30

Siemens-Shuckert D.III (GER)

  • endurance (...) - 2:00

Bristol F2.B (BR)

  • endurance (...) - 3:00

Short Answer

So we see that our average endurance for a combat mission was 1:30-2:00. Cruise times ranged between 3 and 5 hours on average.

Mid-air engine failures were around 5-10% per plane (not per flight). I've calculated this from two numbers: number of aircraft built and non-combat related deaths. For example, 5734 Sopwith Camels were built during WWI and 385 Sopwith Camel pilots died from non-combat related causes while flying. This is about 7%. Most other aircraft had the same ratio. Although these deaths are not necessarily from engine failures, that was a leading cause.

Sources-

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