Libya: A century of study in air bombing

— -- Soaring above the Libyan desert, Italy's Lt. Giulio Gavotti turned his attention to the handful of steel shells packed inside his monoplane's cockpit.

The shells were grenades, each about the size of an orange, and filled with explosive picric acid.

Banking over the Taguira oasis on Nov. 1, 1911, miles from the trenches outside the recently-taken city of Tripoli, Gavotti steered with one hand while clasping the grenades between his knees. Some 2,000 feet high, Gavotti dropped two grenades on the oasis, and then released four more on the nearby Turkish camp of Ain Zara, a stretch of white tents parked in a sandy hollow.

Though they likely missed their mark, exploding harmlessly in the sand, the era of aerial bombing had begun, a century ago this month, in Libya. One irony of the recent overthrow and death of longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi, following NATO warplanes bombing his convoy in October, is that Libya illustrates the advances in aerial bombing technology that transformed warfare over the last century.

"Accuracy has been the great problem and great challenge in aerial bombing," says air historian Tom Crouch, a senior curator with the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. "Today the problem isn't hitting the target, but making sure it is the right target. It wasn't always that way."

Bombs, blimps and airplanes made their first wartime appearance in Lt. Gavotti's war, the Italian-Turkish conflict of 1911-12, a clash remembered almost solely by devotees of air power. "Amazingly, aircraft were used not only for reconnaissance but also for artillery spotting, transportation of supplies and personnel, and even bombing of enemy troops, supplies, and facilities — both day and night," wrote the air power historian Col. Philip Meilinger.

In 1911, the airplanes these men flew were mostly framed with wood, although some used steel tubing, covered in torn canvas and held together with steel wires. Designers had not determined whether the planes should land on wheels or skids, whether the propeller should push or pull the plane forward or determined the pilot's best location — back as far as possible from the engine and nose it turns out — to survive a crash. Recent experiments had demonstrated that long narrow wings generated more lift than short stubby ones, but an explanation for this puzzling fact awaited publication by the German aerodynamicist Ludwig Prandtl, in 1918.

The airplanes were slow. The state-of-the-art 100-horsepower rotary Gnome engine (the Wright Flyer's 1903 model only had a 16 h.p. one) could propel a Blériot "sport" monoplane to 75 mile-per-hour speeds, which made landing tricky as engines had only one speed, full-throttle, and smooth runways were a novelty. A Taube monoplane, the kind Gavotti seems to have flown, cost $6,335 with a 100 h.p. Mercedes engine.