Airplanes

Airplanes were the cutting edge technology of the time. After all, even in the early 1910s, it was a sensation if aviators held a show in the city park. People flocked to the performances. Admittedly, it took courage to defy death for someone, especially a layman, to get into a machine of that time. Seen through today’s eyes, this “high-end technology” looked extremely rudimentary, suspiciously unreliable. Of course, today’s cutting-edge technology, let’s say, if we stay in the sky, space vehicles do not seem safe at all either. Even today, it takes a lot of courage to undertake space travel. Did the astronauts stranded on the International Space Station not think what would happen if they couldn’t get them down from there? Because the spaceship launched for them simply broke down. A pilot might have felt something similar when, say, the propeller of his plane stopped at 500 meters altitude.

It is interesting that the depictions of aircraft on the cap badges were mostly stylized, and often depicted vehicles seen at shows before the Great War. A photo showed that small airplane badges were also popular among soldiers. We can only guess why the models used in combat were not depicted. Maybe the badge makers didn’t have access to photos of “modern” machines (maybe they were trying to hide information about military machines?). This is how the photographs taken at the shows before the events of the Great War remained for use. These served as a model for making the Kappenabzeichen. We can see three such badges in the post.