Aeroplanes in World War One were not equipped with brakes. One literally dropped a machine down onto a big enough field and allowed the rickety piece of canvas and wood to roll naturally to a stop. There was another problem with such machines. They were without any form of internal starters for their engines. It took at least two men to get a machine’s engine running. One man had to sit in the cockpit and control it once it was started while the other stood in front of the wooden prop and used plain, old-fashioned muscle power to spin the prop around fast enough to ignite the gas in the engine’s cylinders. Of course engines in World War One were notoriously unreliable. In 1914 they were worse than notoriously unreliable.
Whipping the plane around and lining it up toward a clump of trees s
