THE FIRST FIGHTER

The Vickers F.B.5 has the distinction of being the first airplane designed from the outset as a fighter, built in quantity and deployed in a fighter squadron equipped with a single aircraft type. But its appearance was not much like what we would think of today as a fighter. To understand why the F.B.5 looked the way it did, it’s useful to examine both how it came to be developed and even the very definition of “fighter.”

During World War I, Britain applied the term specifically to and ). Subsequently the U.S. Army, whose members were Francophiles, literally translated the French term into “pursuit plane.”