[Chock]

Most SE5as that had the Aldis sight removed, had the back up iron ring and bead site relocated to a central location on the cowling, which could of course be done with the Aldis sight out of the way. The Aldis sight was a good piece of equipment, as evidenced by the fact that a few Germans placed recovered ones on their aircraft. You could of course have both too.

But the Aldis was better suited to the lone hunters than the dogfighters, so if you were more like McCudden and inclined to go after two seaters alone, sneaking up on them and firing a good sustained burst from underneath their tails, then the Aldis, if properly harmonised, would have been a real advantage, especially since it had a slight magnification factor. And on something relatively stable like the SE5a, which was pretty able to be trimmed to fly hands off, you'd be in with a good chance of nailing the rear gunner through the floor at a fairly safe range. To then take the thing out at a big advantage in maneuverability. Such an approach also probably being psychologically damaging the enemy pilot in the ensuing fight, from the undoubtedly traumatic situation of having a dead or dying comrade sat just behind him, possibly someone who is his best friend. McCudden did this sort of thing fairly regularly, and in fact he actually ended up with an enemy's blood all over the front of his SE5a when doing that once. That sort of stalking approach on a lone aircraft is however, not really the way the tactical flight leaders like Mannock and mix it up dogfighting types like Voss did things.

Mannock's strength was as a flight leader and tactician against multiple targets, so he was a strong advocate of getting in a good tactical position, often using the sun and unusual cardinal points, then having his flight make a diving pass on the enemy formation, to hopefully take something out quick, followed by coming up using the speed off the initial dive for a chandelle to turn back toward the enemy, thus having more energy than the enemy flight for the ensuing dogfight, which would also hopefully be against reduced numbers from the initial firing pass. Which if not having destroyed an enemy, would certainly put the wind up them. These days that does not seem that innovative, and a rather obvious thing to do, but of course someone had to think of it first, and at the time it was just as creative and pioneering as Boelcke's vanguard approach to combat, or Richthofen's calculating methodology of hovering on the periphery of a melee, awaiting a suitable advantageous chance.

Thus Mannock would want a good initial shot, but after that, he regarded the Aldis, which required you to put your eye up close to it, much like using a telescope, as too time consuming to use in a swirling dogfight, and also likely to make life riskier, since you had to narrow your field of view and fly steadily, to make use of it. If you've ever waved a telescope or telephoto camera lens about whilst looking through it, you will well appreciate how it would be hard to shoot a moving target through such a device. So the lack of an Aldis was a trade off between slightly less accuracy for the initial shot on the first firing pass, but much more practical combat utility from an open iron sight when in a turning fight, where often a quick deflection snapshot would be all you could expect to get, and the risk of collision was high, so keeping a good watch was fairly crucial too. An Aldis sight is not conducive to that.

Of course that favoured the people who were decent deflection shooters, which is where you need good spatial 3D perception to judge things, but Mannock was apparently an unbelievably good shot, so it is understandable that he would be an advocate of such practice. Nevertheless, he was also noted for mentoring new guys, and he would doubtless have preferred them to be looking about in a dogfight, rather than have an eye clamped to an Aldis sight, flying straight and level whilst there were canny German dogfighters all over the sky. So you can see that he had more than one reason to advocate such a preference, and it was not entirely selfish in its motivation.

Mannock is unusual in that he often preferred going for a head on diving firing pass on enemy craft at the merge, and often took aircraft out with just one pass, which is indicative of what a good deflection shooter he was. The target with such an approach, is dropping away below the nose, requiring fairly high speed to negate that effect as much as possible, a steep diving angle helps, occasionally also requiring a negative G pitch down to keep the target in sight, not to mention leading a target at a closure rate of probably well over 200 mph. But for pilots who could manage that, it does make sense, since after the initial pass, it puts you on the enemy's tail, usually with more energy for the turn after the merge. Useful too, is the fact that firing at the front of fighters and two seaters gives you a chance to hit the engine, the radiator, the propeller, the guns, the sight, the pilot, the wing rigging and the windscreen, any one of which could be a killer hit. So a slightly less accurate grouping from ring sight can 'spread the hate' over a large selection of crucial parts.

Al