Hardly independant of other services.

RAF on the other hand on the 1st April 1918 subject to CHIEF OF THE AIR STAFF and AIR MINISTRY, not Chief of the General Staff and War Office.

Well, the Army and the (lake) Navy were also subjected to the Chief of General Staff who in turn was subjected to Mannerheim. I’m pretty sure the Army was an independent branch.

We need detail in our researches, but not the arcane, and useless, details being offered on this thread.

Tell me what more evidents do you need on the Finnish Air Force and I will se what I can found from the Finnish archives. This is a discussion forum after all.

And were these planes armed or merely pilot trainers ? There is no ´Force´ without guns,and without operational capability you have only a name not an air force!

The planes were armed with small aerial bombs and some with photographic devices but not with machine guns since the enemy (Reds) had only few planes too.
1914-1922 War Victims in Finland lists people who had died in a bombing.

Put it another way…
…it was beaten to it by twenty-five days by the Finnish Air Force with one borrowed aeroplane! :diablo:

Fine…..if it makes you happy. 🙂

That’s like saying Antonio Meucci didn’t invented the telephone first independently but naturally Alexander Graham Bell did since he had more wealth!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_crumenam

Didn’t the Finnish Air Force have a majority of Swedish pilots during the Civil War, and weren’t they also being led by a Swede and then a German?

Majority were Swedes, Danish or Russians but there were few Finnish pilots at the end of the Civil War. German Captain Carl Seber took the command from Hygerth on 28th April 1918.

You’d probably find that they also based a lot of their airforce activities on the methods employed, tried and changed, of the very RFC and subsequent RAF that has already been mentioned.

The Finnish Air Force did not consult the RAF directly until in 1920s. Methods and tactics were learned from the Russians or the Germans. There are four distinct periods at the history of FiaF in 1918-1945: 1918 the Swedish & German, 1919 the French, 1920s-1930s the British and 1941-1944 the German one.

If the criteria is an effective military force as opposed to an organization…shouldn’t we ask who first used aviation in a military context?

My question was who first detached aeroplanes from the ground army to an independent air force and thus enabled them to develope to their modern shape.

Are the Finns keeping it now (i hope so) or is this a lend arrangement?

http://www.airforcemuseum.fi/brewster_arrived_finland4

“BW-372 was recieved from the NMNA as a request of the Commander of Finnish Air Force, to solemnize the Air Force 90th anniversary. A notable group of Finns and Americans has taken part in negotiations for the loan of this a/c.”

Thanks for the pages! The without torpedo test was flown with a plane almost weighting the same as the Finnish floatplane but was over 20 mph slower. A different engine perhaps?