The Missus and I are volunteers at the Military Aviation Museum in Virginia Beach. We meet a lot of really nice people and show them the very cool aircraft we get to hang around.
We were staffing the Great War Hangar (WWI was known as the Great War because you don't know you're having a first world war until the second one comes along). It was a slow day so I got out a ladder and put myself looking straight down the barrels of the twin Spandau machine guns of the Fokker Dr. I triplane.
The triplane was made famous by Manfred von Richtofen, the Red Baron, who shot down 80 allied aircraft before he was killed in April 1918. He was the leading ace of WWI, er, I mean, the Great War. While it may look like it from the front, this is not a replica of Richthofen's plane...we do have one in the collection which I posted on August 29, 2020. This one has a white rear half (you can see pictures of it in the two informational placards in front of the wing) and represents the aircraft of Leutnant August Raben.
The gray pad on the floor under the engine is to absorb oil leaks. Almost all of the Museum's aircraft are flyable, including this one. And as any pilot will tell you, the only old planes that don't leak oil are the ones that have run out of oil.
Have always loved these WWI planes and particularly the Fokker triplane. However I have always had my reservations about firing those twin machine guns through the propeller. :)
