Aircraft MGs
Vintage Saturday: Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines
Parabellum 1914 MG in gunnery school, Belgium, 1918 (photo from Drake Goodman)
Aircraft MGs
Accessories
Browning 1919 Experimental Belt Box
About a year ago, I wrote a post about some Browning 1919 feeding devices that were patented but never went into production. Well, reader Alex found photos of one of them in the Springfield Armory […]
Aircraft MGs
German Machine Gun Nomenclature
One would think that Germany, of all places, would have a logical and consistent system for identifying service machine guns. Any yet we see things like the WWI MG08/15 and the WWII MG15. What gives? […]
Aircraft MGs
MG17 Belt Feed Mechanism
The MG17 is one of the lesser-known German machine guns used in WWII, used for aircraft armament. Mechanically, the MG17 is basically the same as the MG15 ground gun, but with some aircraft-specific features like […]
Aircraft MGs
Turkish Manual for the Colt MG40
I recently found this in a private library, and I believe it’s the first Turkish-language manual I’ve come across. It’s dated 1936, and although the cover illustration shows a 1917 type water cooled gun, the […]
Aircraft MGs
Richard Wray Machine Gun Auction Followup
So, the auction of the late Richard Wray’s machine gun collection (see previous post) was yesterday, with the non-NFA guns being auctioned today. The final prices are interesting to look at, with some wallet-wrenchingly high […]
Accessories
Hythe Gun Camera
Training aircraft gunners has always been a task requiring some creativity, as it requires a lot more than just a paper target for an infantryman to blast away at. In the very early years of […]
Aircraft MGs
Russian ShKAS Aerial Gun
The Russian ShKAS (Shpitalny-Komaritsky Aircraft High-Speed Machine Gun) is a machine gun design form the 1930s that doesn’t receive nearly enough attention. It was the result of a need by the Soviet air force for […]
Aircraft MGs
Vintage Saturday: Wingshooting
The guns are aircraft Degtyarevs (DA-2), and appear to not have the drums mounted when the photo was taken. Note the vane-type front sight, and the distinctive muzzle brakes.
Aircraft MGs
Hotchkiss Aerial Gun
We came across an interesting manual (in English, as a bonus!) for a variety of Hotchkiss machine gun which we have very little information on. It’s an aircraft gun, intended for use by the observer […]