Aces List

Wouldn't it be nice if The Aerodrome also provided one list of all the aces and/or 1 for each alliance, so people can put things in perspective or would this give a distorted view, because every nation had its own procedure to determine the amount of kills each pilot had?

Interesting idea, but the biggest problem would center on the often heard complaint that the British system was too liberal in comparison to the other nations. Having said that, RFC/RNAS pilots obviously destroyed alot of German ac.

Just noticed the seven-in-one-day accomplishment performed by J.L. Trollope on 3/24/17. Probably read about this before, but it never stuck in my mind. What a feat!

[Barrett]

A hot-button issue fershure! Veteran Forumites recall a couple of go-rounds on this subject, prompting me to compute the RFC/RAF equivalents of air-air scores on the German basis (destroyed only) for comparison. (See the Aces section) Even then, of course, there will be problems owing to confirmation procedures, but the OOC/DD/FTL and shared credits do give a false impression in gross numbers.
By and large, the scores of top French aces are nearly 1-1 as the biggies seldom had shares. Below the top 5 or so, shares do tend to inflate the "decimal" total.
It's been suggested that rather than comparing scores of allies v. Germans it's more valid to compare within each air arm, and there's much to commend that perspective. Plain fact is, the German claims are MUCH more accurate than the Brits or US but that's to be expected when the Germans could count wrecks on the ground.
However: perhaps the ultimate statement on victory claims came from no less an authority than Sir Hugh Dowding, CinC RAF Fighter Command in 1940. He said that the relative "scores" of each side were irrelevant: what mattered was, who had air superiority? In both world wars, the Germans were closer to the truth in their victory claims but the allies won.