The story of the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough, forerunner of the World’s premier aeronautical research establishment wherein were designed a diversity of aircraft including many of those that equipped the RFC, RNAS and RAF during the First World War. Originally established to build observation balloons for the Victorian British Army, the Factory later expanded to employ over 3500 people by mid-1916, at which time it became the subject of a political controversy that ended in a judicial enquiry. In 1918 its title was changed to the Royal Aircraft Establishment, not only to avoid a clash of initials with the newly formed Royal Air Force but to better define its changing role. Each of the many designs for airships and aeroplanes that were produced by the Factory between 1908 and 1918 is described in detail, illustrated by photographs, and with three-view drawings provided for the more prominent designs.

Those with any interest in the First World War will have have heard of the planes most associated with that conflict - the legendary Sopwith Camel and Royal Aircraft Factory's S.E.5a, which are often called the "Spitfire" and "Hurricane" of the Great War. Aviation enthusiasts might even know of the Camel's predecessors, the Sopwith Pup or the Triplane. But what of the many other planes that saw active service in the war? This is the story of those armed aeroplanes whose names few people can recall, the 'Forgotten Fighters' of the First World War, including the pusher 'gunbuses' of the early war years, the strange 'pulpit' design of the B.E.9, the desperate conversions of reconnaissance machines that were never intended to be armed, and those which were thought too tricky for the average pilot to handle. It is also the story of the brave men who flew these machines, fighting, and too often dying, for a cause they believed in. Some of these aeroplanes only served in small numbers and others in areas away from the main battle on the Western Front, but all made a vital contribution to the winning of the war. And these lost but iconic fighter aircraft, and the brave young men who flew them, deserve to be remembered just as much as the more famous aces in their legendary machines. This is their story.

Designed as the benchmark against which competitors in the 1912 Military Aeroplane Competition were judged, the B.E.2 outperformed them all and was put into production becoming the most numerous single type in Royal Flying Corps service. The B.E.2c, a later variant, was designed to be inherently stable and was nicknamed the 'Quirk' by its pilots. Intended mainly for reconnaissance, it was hopelessly outclassed by the Fokker Eindecker fighter and its defenceless crews quickly became known as 'Fokker Fodder'. The Eindecker, piloted by top scoring German aces such as Max Immelmann and Oswald Boelcke, made short work of the B.E.2c in the aerial bloodbath coined as the 'Fokker scourge'. Its vulnerability to fighter attack became plain back home and to the enemy who nicknamed the B.E.2c as kaltes fleisch or cold meat. British ace Albert Ball said that it was a 'bloody terrible aeroplane'. B.E.2c crews were butchered in increasing numbers. The B.E.2c slogged on throughout the war, and its poor performance against German fighters, and the failure to improve or replace it, caused great controversy in Britain. One MP attacked the B.E.2c and the Royal Aircraft Factory in the House of Commons stating that RFC pilots were being 'murdered than killed. ' This resulted in a judicial enquiry that cleared the factory and partly instrumental in bringing about the creation of the Royal Air Force.

Soon after entering the war in April 1917 American propaganda promised that she would `Darken the skies over Europe' by sending over `the Greatest Aerial Armada ever seen'. Encouraged by the French Government America promised to build no less than 22,000 aeroplanes within a year and to field, and to maintain, a force of 4,000 machines, all of the latest type, over the Western Front during 1918, not only to provide adequate air support for her own troops, but because she saw this as a way to use her industrial strength to bypass the squalor of the war in the trenches, and so bring an end to the stalemate of attrition into which the war had descended. However, by the time of the Armistice more than 18 months later just a few hundred American built aeroplanes had reached the war fronts and several investigations into the causes of the failure of the project were already in progress.