Young Indiana Jones takes to the skies in the new French air force, and parachutes into Germany to convince Anthony Fokker to defect. He starts as an aerial photography analyst, gets posted to the Lafayette Escadrille, discovers that he has to fly and take his own pics., gets shot down, meets von Richtofen, escapes, yadda-yadda. But, on the whole not bad. And the planes are great. Albatroses are real Albatroses, Dr.1's, One and a Half Strutters, Nieuports...the planes are great. However, the German super plane he's suppossed to find is a huge, goofy 10-engined triplane affair. I saw this on Hulu.
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I remember watching this back in the 1990s as part of the Young Indiana Jones series. Not exactly what you can call a historically accurate representation of the Great War in the air, but it's definitely entertaining! Those were the days when Red Baron 1 was the king of WW1 flight sims.

The problem with these pseudo-historical shows and movies is that people who don't know history learn wrong and often completely fictional things from them. I imagine many a historical myth has its roots in a fictional TV show or movie that people thought was the real thing.

Somehow, I missed that entire series. Maybe I'll youtube "Attack of the Hawkmen".

I think it is available on Netflix.

Beard

Commercial break time on youtube....i like it...thanks for mentioning this Hauksbee

Amen to that, Hasse.

I should add, there's no Hawkmen in it. Don't know why that made it into the title. Maybe just a period reference to Flash Gordon. At least they cast someone in their early twenties as Anthony Fokker.

Nice going, Mudwasp

Just finished watching it. Some good dog fights in there, vehicle chases, and explosions too!

At the end there is a historical disclaimer of sorts.

First I've heard of that giant triplane bomber/transport that never was built.

http://flyingmachines.ru/Site2/Crafts/Craft31368.htm

I missed the disclaimer too, but...kudos to the Lucas Team for the historical research. Too bad they felt they had to 'tart up' the wings. The bomber was bizarre enough in its original form. Maybe that was the allusion to 'Hawkmen". Perhaps it was just as well that the plane was never finished. It had the look of something that probably didn't want to fly...and certainly not to New York.

The Austrian engineers of Lloyd laugh at the feeble attempts of their German colleagues to design bizarre aircraft:



Behold! The Lloyd 40.08 Luftkreuzer (Sky Cruiser), a triplane bomber with three engines.

It was a failure.

Those Austrians know humor when they see it.

I remember watching is series back in the 90's. Man, I was disappointed that it was only a short TV series. I was hoping it lead to something bigger.

It was a nice tie-in to some American history as well. Sad they don't push more stuff like this on TV, instead of the crap we're stuck with.

Well, it's cheaper to make all those reality shows.

They were some sweet maneuvers from that Nieuport in the dogfight!