Slow-Mo 4K Camera Shows How WWI Fighter Pilots Didn’t Blow Their Propellers Off Every Time They Fired Their Guns

As a child, while watching movies like Indiana Jones that featured WWI fighter pilots shooting their guns it never occurred to me how those guns had the potential to blow the plan’s propellers off at any time. On these early WWI prop planes, the gun was situated directly behind the prop, and would fire through the plane’s propellers while the props were in motion.

The Fokker synchronization gear was developed to ensure a fighter pilot never blew himself out of the sky by taking out his own prop, and the dudes over at Gizmodo have made a GIF from the latest Slow Mo Bros video showing us all how the synchronization gear works in action:

Essentially, what the Fokker Synchronization Gear does is only allows the machine gun to fire at instances when it’s safe to. So there’s a fail-safe in place to stop the fun at firing during times when the bullets will smash right through the plane’s prop, which is extremely easy to do without the Synchronization Gear in place as we saw in the video above.

[h/t Gizmodo via Slow Mo Guys]