KiwiBiggles
Senior Airman
Given the frequently remarked-upon fragility of the Spitfire, presumably this was a single hit from a rifle-calibre round?
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Given the frequently remarked-upon fragility of the Spitfire, presumably this was a single hit from a rifle-calibre round?
This is what happens when you get caught by a N1K-J's 4 20mm cannons.
View attachment 506287 This US Navy F-4U pilot saw a Miracle this day.....
No, that's a Spitfire that was hit with a cannon shell while parked on an airfield. It certainly never flew home in that condition!Given the frequently remarked-upon fragility of the Spitfire, presumably this was a single hit from a rifle-calibre round?
Ok I cannot figure out which aircraft that is. My first thought was a Kyushu Q1W but it's not that and I am assuming it's a single engine.
Me too. Even if it was possible to fly it that way...basically no elevators or stabilizers, no vertical stabilizer or rudder at all, in a plane notoriously hard to fly. Making a deck landing in that condition, without any sign of a deployed arresting hook? I really doubt it. It'd be a miracle. I think another plane ran into it with prop spinning. Could be battle damage sustained on deck, but I think that's less likely.I have to be honest but that looks more like a deck accident to me.
Hmm. You'd think that a shell the size of an 88mm would have created a lot more fragmentation than that, even if the blast wasn't powerful enough to literally rip the plane into pieces (it ought to be). Ignoring the massive blast and saying that it diffused out the side of the aircraft, without doing any obvious damage to the radios or other adjacent equipment, how do you explain the almost complete lack of fragmentation damage? Fragmentation may not be perfectly universal, but it's going to scatter in almost every direction. We're talking a LOT of small pieces of "shrapnel" and/or several larger pieces easily large enough to tear completely through an aircraft. Where did it all go? I see barely over a dozen small fragment holes, while these shells are designed to detonate in the air and send sufficient fragmentation out in all directions to damage or destroy aircraft 100 yards away. Yet a shell detonating inside the plane does only that damage? I'm not a ballistics engineer, but it looks to me more like a large (medium) caliber mine-shell. Maybe a 30mm, or a 57mm (don't recall if 37mm were used in A2A roles). A largish shell like a 57mm would explain the blast damage (yet would explain why it's relatively mild for an 88mm), and the thin-walled shell case could explain the lack of serious fragmentation damage. A rocket could do it also, but that's less likely.Miss Irish of the 350th Bomb Squadron after returning from a mission over Germany, 19 March 1944. An 88mm shell directly hit the radio room and exploded, killing the radio operator and wounding most of the remaining crew; the pilot managed to keep the aircraft together and returned to land in England. The aircraft was later salvaged for spare partsView attachment 506204 View attachment 506205 View attachment 506206
No-one with any brains suggests that the .303 is incapable of shooting down an aircraft. Any plane that ever flew could be shot down with a .303/.30/7.62mm gun, provided you brought enough ammo (or were a very good shot who knew just where to aim). The problem lays with putting enough rounds on target to hit something vital. To riddle a plane like that, the attacking fighter had to get behind it, take very good, steady aim, and get a full second's burst into the target (assuming we're talking about a British 8-gun fighter). That can only be done when the target is defenseless, basically. Aerial gunnery is difficult, and bursts disperse rapidly. You can loose a 320-round burst (8 guns x 40 rpg) at a barely maneuvering target and find you didn't hit him at all. A lot harder in real life than in games. Which is not to say that the RAF didn't manage to shoot down a lot of German planes with their RCMGs, but it was more difficult than it needed to be, and pilot armor and protected fuel tanks, etc, just made the job even more difficult to do.Here's the result of hits from the much maligned .303 machine guns of either a Spitfire or Hurricane on this unfortunate Luftwaffe bomber.
View attachment 379318
Cheers
Steve
I'd like to go through here and make a statistical analysis about the number of each aircraft type represented here. It seems so far I've seen an amazingly high percentage of B-17s, Wellingtons and P-47s, with a few other types scattered about. I wonder what that says about the aircraft involved...that those three types were likely to make it home when others would end up crashed?Resurrecting this thread to share this incredible pic of a Wellington of 300 Sqn that suffered flak damage from a raid against Bremen in Sep 42:
View attachment 465114
"C-35s"? I assume you mean "C-53s"? The XC-32 was an experimental twin based on the Lockheed Electra, used for experiments with cabin pressurization.During the night of July 11, 1943 (Husky II) 144 C-47s and C-35s took off from airfields in Tunisia. The planes flew to southern Sicily, passing Malta. Then they approached the invasion fleet lying offshore. During the day the fleet was under constant attack by the German Luftwaffe (Airforce), the ships were bombed and strafed. Ships were hit and sunk, German planes were shot down. Just some 20 minutes after the last German plane had cleared the sky (others state that the Luftwaffe was still around) the first C-47s came over. The first planes passed unharmed, but then someone opened up, more and more anti-aircraft gunners both on land and on the ships opened up, it became a tragedy. Many young Americans were killed by American gunfire.View attachment 359668 View attachment 359669
Do you know that for a fact, or are you just following the myth?No, that's a Spitfire that was hit with a cannon shell while parked on an airfield. It certainly never flew home in that condition!
I disagree. In a number of areas the metal is pealed up indicating that the shells hit from below which obviously couldn't happen if it had been on the ground.No, that's a Spitfire that was hit with a cannon shell while parked on an airfield. It certainly never flew home in that condition!
B-25 which landed without its tail View attachment 524225
That is what the site said?
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some...f-battle-damage-and-yet-were-still-functional