Aerial Acquiescence?I'm unsure of the make of this plane... Lloyd C.II maybe?
Assuming this 'most remarkable' photo is real and not plain propaganda, it almost seems this aviator is waiving hello rather than surrendering. Cases of mid-air capitulations were indeed documented during the Great War (including one rather rude incident that headlined here in July 2022:
https://forum.ww1aircraftmodels.com/index.php?topic=12930.msg246344#msg246344). While I'm somewhat doubtful of this doctored silhouette it does appear that the French captor truly existed. Online info on Lieutenant Rémy Grassal, an aerial observer, is somewhat sparse. Nothing else pertaining to this alleged submission is recorded - particularly not in Grassal's posthumous full-page biography published in
La Guerre aérienne illustrée during the war(see below).
(from the Fulton County News, 8 November 1915):
(image via gallica.bnf.fr)
"I stare Death in the face every day." Grassal is said to have stated. He wrote in one of his last letters, “Don’t forget that I am hand-holding a little the host of heaven".
Grassal's aforementioned bio notes that on his last day, 2 February 1916) he, "
leaves on a two-seater piloted by Sergeant Grivotté to protect reconnaissance planes. At 3,000 meters above Péronne, he encountered a Fokker. Grassal immediately engages the combat. We hear the crackling of the two machine guns. Suddenly those who, from below, follow the phases of the encounter, see the French two-seater suddenly dive as it leaves, deprived of direction, spinning, in a frightful fall... The disabled plane will crash into enemy lines. It was only two months later that we learned that Sergeant Grivotté had had a bullet pierce his head. His observer, Remy Grassal, doomed to certain death by the tragic end of his pilot, was himself hit by several bullets. He died the same day as a result of his injuries and his fall.".
There is no mention of the two-seater type Grassal fought their enemy 'Fokker' in. The Aviation Safety Network website lists a single comparable crash for this same date - a Voisin two-seater downed by the German flyer Rudolf Berthold. The Aerodrome page for Berthold notes that this was the future air ace's very first victory, which occurred over Chaulnes. Péronne and Chaulnes are less than 16 kilometers apart; however is is recorded in 'Above the Lines' that Berthold's victims this day were Corporal Arthur Jacquin and
Sous lieutenant Pierre Segaud. So Grassaal's vanquisher remains a mystery.