No reason to suppose any other force was any different. Every RAF pilots account I have read has said that pilots were accustomed to losing friends and fellow students long before they ever saw combat.Oh man.
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No reason to suppose any other force was any different. Every RAF pilots account I have read has said that pilots were accustomed to losing friends and fellow students long before they ever saw combat.Oh man.
8000 killed in training in UK and since they weren't actually trained pilots until a proper training system was introduced the figures are even worse than they seem. The Royal Flying Corps in WW1 – dangers and accidents | Writing Family HistoryDoes anyone have access to the WW1 statistics ?
I know they'd be even worse. But I wonder how much ?
Does anyone have access to the WW1 statistics ?
I know they'd be even worse. But I wonder how much ?
We lost more planes to accident than we did to the enemy in WWII.No reason to suppose any other force was any different. Every RAF pilots account I have read has said that pilots were accustomed to losing friends and fellow students long before they ever saw combat.
By saying "A-36", I'm assuming you mean the P-36, and it was a very responsive, pilot friendly aircraft.
The pilots who flew the P-36 had nothing but high praise for it's performance and agility.
Several WWII aircraft that were unforgiving to novice pilots that come to mind, were the He162, F4U, Me163, B-26, Bf109, P-39, Me210 and LaGG-3.Conversely, I would imagine that the aircraft with reputations for difficult handling or landing would generate higher accident rates.
SB2C and Seafire come to mind
All primary flight instructing is risky, to a degree, but fling wing training in a production environment has got to be 10x more so than rigid wing.That one instructor, like all our instructors, a veteran of a Vietnam tour. Probably over 2500 hours. Ironic that he could safely get back from a combat tour and die instructing a student in t
Unfortunately that 20,000 number sounds believable. From the pilot quotes I've read on individual outfits 10% seemed to be about the going rate of training fatalities for USAAF types. I've only read 3 quotes from pilots concerning this but all 3 recalled about a 10% fatality rate. Even if it were half that it's a truly hair raising statistic.I saw a figure that is probably in error, that 20,000 were killed in stateside aviation training accidents. Of course a lot of bombers ran into mountains, go lost and whatnot, so crew included. My dad said that about 5% got killed in Navy training.
20,000 is probably way high, that would be 5% of total US war dead!
I've run across a few things lately that made me wonder about this. The first was that the 56th fighter group apparently lost about 10% of their pilots when training in there new p47s stateside( and as far as I know the Thunderbolt had fairly docile handling characteristics compaired to other ww2 fighters). Also I read an interview with a p40 pilot that said the same thing, about a 10% fatality rate durring training.
Lastly, today I ran across a website that listed all the p51 accidents since 1947 and it seems an average of about 1 fatality a year can be atributed to P51 crashes. Cosidering there's only(I think) about 200 p51s in existence that's quite an achievement so to speak.
It looks to me like training and flying a fighter in ww2 was plenty risky even if you never saw combat.
Would love to hear everyones comments on this.
In the 1980s, the commuter airline I was flying for was hiring 23 year old pilots with an aeronautical science degree, 900-1000 hours, and 100 hours multi. I had one from Embry Riddle Arizona in my right seat, who after I read him the JFK ATIS calling for turbulence, windshear, icing, an ILS to minimums, and poor braking action, said "What a way to get my first ACTUAL IFR experience! I've never been inside a cloud before. But I love a challenge!" Turns out he had 600 hours of flight instructing experience under his belt, 150 of it instrument training in the blue Arizona skies, and all of that "hood time". Needless to say, he became PNF and I flew the approach and landing. He got to dispose of the barf bags afterwards.These kids in Russia were flying commercial airliners in their early twenties. I thought to myself, no, no, no!
200 hours is what army pilots had upon graduation. I guess they were ready to go.
They were dangerous times, without many flying aids that pilots have today and without cities lit up at night for example. There was an increase in accidental losses in the RAF during the BoB put down to start of night flying but mainly to cockpit routine. Running out of fuel or crashing into hills due to navigation errors was quite common here in North England as were crashes due to icing on the wings. Collisions were also more frequent than I first thought.