Originally Posted by
ReducedAirFact
Hi,
This isn't aimed at you in particular; it's more of a general commentary. It's convenient to think of service dates in a binary way (start - stop). But a lot of planes had a long lead-up time with only a few in service (due to slow initial production or service trials), a "bulk of service" where they were at their highest numbers, and a long tail where again there were only a few (sometimes used on an obscure front or even as a squadron "hack" to fly around from one place to another but never for combat missions).
It's pretty easy to say it first appeared in late spring or early summer of 1915, but where do you draw the line for the stop date? The numbers started decreasing in early Spring 1916, and it fell off rapidly in 1917, but evidently there were a few still kicking around the front lines (probably as hacks) all the way through 1918. It's an arbitrary call to say when it was rare enough not to count as "in service" any longer. And for most planes our data is much less accurate than the numbers above.
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