Flying the EI teaches you patience that's for sure and for me it gives you a real opportunity to fly your missions as realistically as possible. It takes an age just to climb up, doubly so if you're being buffeted by the wind as you say.

There are far fewer aircraft in the air so you need to really use your spotting skills and maybe hang around important points for a while. To see if something turns up. Then if you do spot something....what is it?....and where is it in relation to you?

As you can see from the first picture, I spotted an enemy aircraft, it was a Morane. On seeing us he turned and ran. Now I could have gone hell for leather after him, but he had height on us and we were quite close to the lines, with his nose down there's no chance I'd have caught up with him until he got to his airfield and the nearest airfield is a fair distance over the lines, putting me and my precious synchronisation system in jeopardy.

So, with a moral victory in the bag rather than a material one, in that he'd abandoned his mission, we turned and carried on our patrol.

I really like that it gives you the feeling of having to make the same decisions, Boelcke, Immelmann, Buddecke etc had to make in those very early days and how exciting it must have been to be flying these aircraft.... to us... primitive but to them cutting edge machines....and trying to come up with the first proper tactics.

"A great deal of an aeroplane could be holed without affecting its ability to fly. Wings and fuselage could be—and often were—pierced in 50 places, missing the occupants by inches (blissfully unaware of how close it had come until they returned to base). Then the sailmaker would carefully cover each hole with a square inch of Irish linen frayed at the edges and with a brushful of dope make our aircraft 'serviceable' again within an hour."