The Sopwith was the choice plane for sheer dogfighting. It was dangerous in that it could kill a lesser pilot. Odd things like the engine throttle was either completely on or off. Hence that iconic start-stop noise of the era.
The Triplane was nimble as all getup, but kinda slow. The Red Baron only used it for the later quarter of his kills.
For fans of the Camel check this out:
My God, that’s even better than sex!!! 
Why would they? I don’t remember the Red Baron ever being ridiculed in the strip. Having a long dead member of their family occasionally mentioned in a syndicated comic strip was the least of the indignities suffered by a family of East Prussian aristocrats in the 20th Century.
OMG, I had that game as a kid. I haven’t thought about it in 40 years or so. I wouldn’t say it was my favorite game, probably Skittle Bowl or Bask-it. Burt, yeah, played it a lot.
I also remember as a kid visiting the Rhinebeck Aerodrome someone mentioned and they let me sit in the cockpit, or whatever it was,of some old plane 1908 Bleriot??? probably because I was the only one close to the original pilot’s weight/size (5’ 100 lbs).
The iron cross used on WWI German aircraft also had a resurgence in the Sixties. They were all the rage in the Boys Club craft shop where we cut them out of sheets of psychedelic colored resin. Put them on a string and you looked like a Banana Splits version of Roy Orbison.
I saw TMMiTFM with my dad and my brother in what must have been November 1965. My favorite airplane in that movie was the one the horny Frenchman flew:
I would love to have a full-scale replica of this craft at some point in what’s left of my life, along with a youthful Sarah Miles lookalike to tend to my every, every need.
Another view:
Sopwith produced a triplane as well, but its performance wasn’t as good as the Camel and its derivatives:
That’s why I thought the Sopwith Pup, with the same abilities as the Camel, but less of the accidental-spiral-dive-of-death bug, was preferred as soon as it was available.
Even if Schulz didn’t originally intend for the WW1 aviator gag to go on for so long, the fact remains that, while Schulz was a kid, there was still a certain glamor to the World War 1 flyboys.
Indeed, they were about the ONLY glamorous thing about World War 1. For the typical soldier, The Great War meant years of cowering in trenches. But “flying aces” didn’t see that aspect of war. They were cool, glamorous, latter day knights engaged in one on one combat.
Flight itelf was fairly new when the GReat War started (airplanes themselves were barely a decade old when the Wright brothers made their first flight at Kitty Hawk), and dogfighting was BRAND new. Of course it captured people’s imaginations.
The very first movie to win an Oscar was Wings, all about WW1 aviators. That’s the kind of movie kids Charles Chulz’s age grew up watching.
Your question being …??? 
It turns out the Pup came first, in 1916. It had good performance characteristics, but was still outclassed by its German contemporaries. Compared to the Camel, it was underpowered and underarmed.
It was replaced with the Camel by the end of 1917.
It’s not about Clancy and a Fokker Trimotor. It’s about Clancy, a Fokker Trimotor, and the Red Baron. The last two things don’t belong together and the first one belongs in a remedial History class.
Am I the only one reading this who’s totally lost here??? 
A Fokker Trimotor is a real thing (a 1920s commercial airliner). But not what Clancy was thinking of when he wrote about the Red Baron flying around in a red one.
Huh. How did I have that backward?
Interesting.
Yes, I know about the Fokker Trimotor. There was also a Ford Trimotor, a Junkers trimotor (the Ju-52), and probably others that are more obscure.
A trimotor is not the same thing as a triplane:
http://www.ohtm.org/images/collect/air/FOKKER1.jpg
This is why Clancy made an egregious error in The Bear and the Dragon when he mentioned “the Red Baron in his Fokker Trimotor” in talking about aerial combat.
Von Richtofen flew a Fokker Triplane (the Dr-I), not a Fokker Trimotor. I fail to see how anyone could confuse the two.
I earlier thought the Pup was a derivative of the Camel too, but it turns out it was the other way around.