Although Kiffin did not yet know it, he was destined to become a fighter pilot. Military aviation came of age during World War 1. There were no fighters at the beginning of the war, and the concept of a fighter airplane was just starting to evolve when Kiffin began his flight training. When the war begin, airplanes were unarmed observation machines like this Maurice Farman 7 “Longhorn.” They were sometimes called “flying bird cages” because of a joke that before a flight someone would release a bird inside the plane, and if the bird got out one of the bracing wires was missing. They were unarmed in part because few people saw the need to arm airplanes, and because the weight of a machine gun and ammunition seriously degraded the performance of these early, underpowered aircraft. They look comical by today’s standards, but it’s important to remember that they represented the cutting edge of technology at the time. (Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Biplane_Maurice_Farman_7_Longhorn_Preveza_1912.jpg)