1914
On October 5, 1914, French pilot Louis Quenault opened machine-gun fire on a German aircraft, the first known such use in war. The treaties and declarations known as the Hague Convention of 1899 and its modest extension in 1907 which were signed by 25 major European countries and the USA, included a declaration prohibiting firing in this way as well as dropping explosives - providing that, for a period of five years, in any war between signatory powers, no projectiles or explosives would be launched from balloons, "or by other new methods of a similar nature." However, this agreement was broken in the Italo-Turkish war in 1911 when Italian monoplanes bombed a Turkish camp, and, with the successful use of machine-guns in planes in 1914, the Conventions seem at least in this respect to have been ignored.
