Louis Strange was born in Dorset, England in 1891. In 1912 he had his first eye contact with aviation and decided to become a pilot. He received his pilot's license in 1913 from a private school and in October of that year joined the Royal Flying Corps (RFC), the forerunner of the RAF, with the rank of second lieutenant.
In 1914 he was one of the few pilots in the world to successfully loop. With the outbreak of World War I, he moved to France. There, attached to the 5th Squadron, he flew a Henry Farman aircraft. In fact, he pioneered by installing a machine gun on his aircraft. On August 22, 1914, he fought his first aerial battle against six German ones, but to no avail.
On August 28, he bombarded a German phalanx with improvised bombs. He later devised various mechanisms for mounting and firing a machine gun on the Avro 504 aircraft he flew, allowing the observer to fire with ease. On 22 November he and Lieutenant Small as observer forced a German aircraft to land. It was the first "takedown".
On February 16, 1915, now a captain and head of the 6th Squadron, he bombed the Koutre railway station with great success during the British attack on Neuve Chapelle from a height of less than 50 m despite German fire, killing at least 75 opponents and causing the station to be shut down for three critical days.
However, the event that made him famous was not that. Strange always continued to experiment and had fitted a Lewis machine gun to the upper wing of a Martinsyde S1 aircraft. On 15 May 1915 he took off on a patrol in this aircraft with a view to testing it in combat.
Strange spotted a German two-seater Aviatik and immediately attacked. However, he failed to bring it down with the first attack although he emptied an entire magazine. Now he had to install a new magazine. But this was not so simple as he had to stand up in the cockpit.
The damage was soon done. The aircraft flipped upside down out of control with Strange gripping the machine gun tightly in his hands! The aircraft began to fall towards the ground. Strange, holding the magazine of the machine gun with his hands, tried to touch the rudder of the aircraft with his feet.
He finally made it. The aircraft came back and he jumped into the cockpit taking control just a few meters above the ground! “I kept moving the legs until one got hooked on the cockpit. Somehow I regained control of the rudder... I don't know what exactly happened but the trick worked , the aircraft lifted off again," he said.
Strange survived and continued his action during both World War I and World War II. He died peacefully at home in 1966.