On August 28, Brocard shot down an enemy plane north of Senlis. His escadrille was fully reequipped with Nieuports on September 20 and officially redesignated N.3. On December 5, Sergeant Guynemer, flying a single-seat Nieuport 10, shot down an Aviatik over Bois de Carré. He downed an LVG five days later, and on the 14th he teamed with a two-seater Nieuport 10, crewed by Adjutant André Bucquet and Lieutenant Louis Pandevant, to bring down a Fokker monoplane over Hervilly.

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Early in 1916, Guynemer received Nieuport 11 N836. On its fuselage he applied the legend Le Vieux Charles, a reference to Sergeant Charles Bonnard, a well-liked member of old MS.3 who had transferred to the Macedonian front. Guynemer was flying that Bébé on February 3, 1916, when he encountered an LVG near Roye. “I did not open fire until I was at 20 meters,” he later wrote. “Almost at once my adversary tumbled into a tailspin. I dived after him, continuing to fire my weapon. I plainly saw him fall in his own lines. That was all right. No doubt about him. I had my fifth. I was really in luck, for less than ten minutes later another plane, sharing the same lot, spun downward with the same grace, taking fire as it fell through the clouds.”

Guynemer drove down an LVG at Herbecourt on February 5, and one more on March 12. While engaging another LVG the next day, however, he was hit twice in the arm and wounded in the face and scalp by fragments from his windscreen. While recovering he received a permanent commission as sub-lieutenant on April 12.

By the time Guynemer rejoined N.3 in mid-1916, the escadrille was mainly equipped with the Nieuport 17, a somewhat enlarged version of the Bébé with a 110-hp Le Rhône engine and a synchronized .30-caliber Vickers machine gun firing through the propeller. On June 22, he teamed with Sergeant André Chainat to destroy an LVG for his 10th victory. On July 16, he took on three LVGs and seven Roland and Halberstadt fighters, surviving 86 hits on his Nieuport to emerge with credit for one of the two-seaters. He downed another LVG on the 28th, helped Lieutenant Alfred Heurteaux to down an enemy plane on August 4, added an Aviatik to his tally on August 17 and a Rumpler the next day.

On September 2, Guynemer received another new fighter, one in which he would become personally involved in more ways than one. In 1915 Swiss designer Marc Birkigt had designed a remarkably lightweight, water-cooled eight-cylinder engine, the 150-hp Hispano-Suiza 8A. One of the first airplane builders to take an interest in the new power plant was the Societé Anonyme Pour l’Aviation et ses Dérivés, or Spad. Early in the war, Spad’s chief designer, Louis Béchereau, had tried to solve the problem of firing a machine gun past the propeller arc by placing a gunner in a pulpit held by means of struts in front of the propeller and its 80-hp Le Rhône rotary engine. The Spad A2 proved to be a failure, but its basic airframe was sound. Its single-bay wing cellule, which featured intermediate struts to which the bracing wires were attached at midpoint, added strength and, by reducing vibration in the wires, reduced drag as well. Adapting that arrangement to the Hispano-Suiza 8A engine and a synchronized Vickers machine gun, Béchereau created the Spad 7.C1, or VII, which was ordered into production on May 10, 1916.

Among the earliest units to receive the new fighter was, of course, N.3, in late August 1916. Just two days after being assigned Spad VII S115, Guynemer used it to destroy an Aviatik C.II over Hyencourt. In five minutes on September 23, Guynemer downed two Fokkers, plus a third that went unconfirmed, but as he returned over the lines his plane was struck by a 75mm shell fired by nervous French anti-aircraft gunners. With the water reservoir shattered and fabric torn away from his left upper wing, Guynemer spun down. But he managed to regain control just in time to pull up and crash-land in a shell hole, emerging with a cut knee and a slight concussion. “Only the fuselage was left, but it was intact,” he wrote his father afterward. “The Spad is solid, with another machine I would now be thinner than this piece of paper.” Sold on the new fighter, he was back in action in Spad VII S132 two days later.

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