Allied pilots were not given parachutes because their commanders feared that it would cause them to abandon a perfectly good machine. This stupid move cost the lives of many good pilots, and made a lot of airmen panic. The German pilots, in the late war, were supplied with them. However, they were basically just thrown into the cockpit, and if you had to bail, you jumped out and threw the silk into the air, hoping it would deploy. Sometimes it did... sometimes it didn't...
That's also a very good point about the kills made. Most of the time, the bullets hit the pilot or hit the fuel tank. You either got a dead pilot or a burning/exploding plane. The thing many people seem to forget is that these planes were just wood and canvas. Bullets basically just passed through until they hit something important.
One of the favorite tactics used by the Germans to attack the Allied pilots was to head out of the sun at their opponents. This made them difficult to spot, and gave them the element of surprise (not to mention and advantage in altitude and thus, as the Dicta Boelcke states, an advantage in speed). Run-n-Gun. However, the Allies began issuing pilots smoked pieces of glass so they could hold them up to the sun to spot the Germans. Primitive, but effective.
Standardized training for these pilots was mediocre by today's standards. The problem most pilots had was not in experience, but in just holding their damn airplane together! These planes were very flimsy and were notorious for having weaknesses. For instance, the Nieuport 17 had wing failure problems for the lower wing whilst going in a steep dive. The Albatros D.V and D.Va aircraft also suffered these same problems. They were basically kites (and that's a literal meaning). They were nothing more than wood and canvas with wires hooking them together with engines and machine guns attached; that's the plain truth (no pun intended).
If your plane caught fire, you had a few choices. You could either stay with it and scream as you roasted alive, you could shoot yourself with a pistol that was a requirement for all aviators to have, or you could jump from several thousand or hundred feet and smash into the ground.
Not like the fancy stuff you see today. These planes were living, breathing things. Their pilots were a part of them. It's not like today where you move a joystick a fourth of an inch and you get a huge turn. Much, much different. I've thought about buying a World War I replica plane, but I lack a pilot's license and I wouldn't know where to begin with the aircraft (I know how to fly it, but finding them is the problem; most you have to build yourself!).
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