Airco would design and produce numerous aircraft during the wartime years. Its DH.2, a pusher configuration fighter introduced during 1916, contributed to ending the "Fokker scourge" of 1915. While early air combat over the Western Front had indicated the need for a single-seat fighter with forward-firing armament, there was no dominant approach to applying armaments to fighters at the time. As no means of firing forward through the propeller of a tractor aeroplane was available to the British, Geoffrey de Havilland designed the DH.2 as a smaller, single-seat development of the earlier two-seat DH.1 pusher design. A total of 453 DH.2s were produced by Airco.