The Pilot Factor

[stona]

RAF gunnery was poor and it was a complaint of Dowding and later Leigh - Mallory. Little had changed in the eighteen months between the two complaints. Most RAF fighter pilots, most fighter pilots, couldn't hit the metaphorical cow's arse with a banjo. This is actually not at all surprising given the very difficult calculations, actually estimations or best guesses, that were required for good deflection shooting. Many, though by no means all, of the top scorers in the first half of the war simply negated the need for this by engaging from close to a six o'clock position with no or very slight angle off.

As alluded to in the document posted by Edgar later gun sights, particularly the very late war gyro sights, took a lot of the guess work (for want of a better phrase) out of the equation by compensating for the angle off and rate of turn of the attacking aircraft in the gun sight. Subsequently the accuracy of air to air gunnery improved dramatically.

The limiting range of many air to air weapons had nothing to do with the performance of the weapon and its projectiles and everything to do with the sighting system. The late war gyro gun sights were far removed from the early 'ring and bead' sights.

Cheers

Steve

 

[bobbysocks]

the gyro site also trained pilots ( some of them ) to some degree. i have read acouple accounts where the gunsite bulb burned out and the pilot didnt have time to change it before getting into a fight. by their words they aimed using a best guess remembering how the site set up the solution from previous battles and scored hits.

 

[pbehn]

When the aircraft and targets were standing still, the pilots didn't miss the butts, either.

Except for the speeds involved, of course.

I cannot fathom what your point is at all. When aircraft and targets are standing still is a complete nonsense, aircraft apart from helicopters cannot "stand still". The speeds involved between football and combat aircraft are relative, speed and perception of speed is relative. To illustrate this travel down a motorway at 100mph when everyone else is doing 100 mph in effect you are all parked, if someone travels the wrong way at 100 mph then you have a difference of 200mph and it is scary and dangerous. More likely everyone is doing 70-80 mph and suddenly something drops off a truck or an animal runs across, suddenly you go from zero differential to your true speed.

The speeds involved in combat versus football are higher but so are the distances, the time of flight of a football in whatever sport is greater in most cases than an ACs bullets as is the relative movement. One aircraft travelling at mach 2 being followed directly behind by another aircraft at mach 2 has no speed relative to its pursuer, only to the ground. Watch any combat gun cam your only perception of speed comes from your own knowledge and outside markers like the ground or clouds.

 

[Garyt]

I met Saburo Sakai at a Doug Champlin get-togeter in the early 1980's. He said he was flying a Zero and the Hellcats were following procedure to the letter.

Must have been quite an experience!

I read something about him flying a KI-84 later in the war and he loved it as a combat airplane.

Maybe I mixed these two instances together in my mind

 

[stona]

One aircraft travelling at mach 2 being followed directly behind by another aircraft at mach 2 has no speed relative to its pursuer, only to the ground. Watch any combat gun cam your only perception of speed comes from your own knowledge and outside markers like the ground or clouds.

If you imagine shooting at the car in front of you in the same lane on a motorway, both travelling at a similar speed (though you might be closing) that is a zero deflection shot. It is the easiest shot to make assuming you can manoeuvre yourself into a position to make it. The only calculation/estimation required of the attacker is the range. Many WW2 era pilots couldn't do this either.

For a deflection shot, that is typically when both aircraft are turning and moving relative to one another the crucial estimation is the 'angle off' of the target from the attacker. Few pilots got this right. Analysis of RAF gun camera footage in (IIRC) 1942 showed that the average pilot underestimated angle off by at least 50% and therefore had NO CHANCE of hitting such a target.
In your driving analogy it would be like trying to hit another car crossing a motorway bridge at ninety miles an hour!

The later gyro gun sights effectively did the sums for the pilot and input this into the sight. I explained it in another thread somewhere, essentially gyroscopes measured the rate of turn and tilted a mirror, moving the sighting graticule to give the correct deflection. With these sights, assuming a few criteria like the wingspan of the target/range had been correctly entered, simply placing the target in the 'cross hairs' would ensure hits.
In this way the 'pilot factor' at least in aiming was removed from the equation. Of course the aircraft still had to be flown into a position from which a firing solution could be established.

Cheers

Steve

 

[pbehn]

I said
One aircraft travelling at mach 2 being followed directly behind by another aircraft at mach 2 has no speed relative to its pursuer, only to the ground. Watch any combat gun cam your only perception of speed comes from your own knowledge and outside markers like the ground or clouds.

you said
If you imagine shooting at the car in front of you in the same lane on a motorway, both travelling at a similar speed (though you might be closing) that is a zero deflection shot.



Essentially the same statement, once again a series of contradictions entering a circular spiral. This all started with me not accepting "verbatim" that to be an ace you had to shoot a bloody grouse in the pre war years. I know about Gyro gun sights, thanks, they helped most pilots to do what some could always do.

Speed is a linear quantity, the discussion would run better by using velocity which is a vector quantity, relative vectors can be resolved to make sense of the situation.

 

[GregP]

Mr. Sakai was there for a meeting of the American Fighter Aces Association, and was a guest as well as a guest speaker. He gave a nice talk and was delighted to be able to sit in some the aircraft he has formerly fought, and loved the ride with Bill Hane in his P-51 Ho-Hun. He didn't say anything that surprised me except that most of the Japanese pilots didn't "hate" the Americans, it was a war and they had to fight. They were proud to fight for the Emperor, but that didn't make war any better a proposition. All it really meant was the same as it did for us ... hardship and sacrifice. Like he said, war wasn't either declared or halted by people in his position ... he was just along for the ride and did his duty. He was glad when it was over, but was rather sad to have to stop flying as he rather enjoyed it.

 

[BiffF15]

Maybe I mixed these two instances together in my mind

That seems to be an affliction shared by some in the news reporting business these days!

 

[tyrodtom]

Must have been quite an experience!

I read something about him flying a KI-84 later in the war and he loved it as a combat airplane.

Maybe I mixed these two instances together in my mind

The KI-84 was a JAAF aircraft, Sakai was Navy. He might have flew it at some point, but almost certainly never in combat.

 

[stona]

I said
One aircraft travelling at mach 2 being followed directly behind by another aircraft at mach 2 has no speed relative to its pursuer, only to the ground. Watch any combat gun cam your only perception of speed comes from your own knowledge and outside markers like the ground or clouds.

you said
If you imagine shooting at the car in front of you in the same lane on a motorway, both travelling at a similar speed (though you might be closing) that is a zero deflection shot.



Essentially the same statement, once again a series of contradictions entering a circular spiral. This all started with me not accepting "verbatim" that to be an ace you had to shoot a bloody grouse in the pre war years. I know about Gyro gun sights, thanks, they helped most pilots to do what some could always do.

Speed is a linear quantity, the discussion would run better by using velocity which is a vector quantity, relative vectors can be resolved to make sense of the situation.

Show me a gun camera footage, even of a zero deflection shot, when their is no speed difference between the two aircraft. The attacker is usually closing on the target. This causes errors even when the angle off/deflection do not have to be estimated. The closing speed means that an attacking pilot knows he will have only limited time to make the shot which adds stress to an already stressful situation. All the Air Ministry's calculations, those resulting in the eight gun fighter, were based on a maximum firing time of two seconds. This causes the error in estimating range. Many RAF pilots in the earliest gun camera footage recorded by the service were opening fire at 1500 yards or more with .303 machine guns, which is just one way of wasting ammunition.

I'm sure many of us can sit down and work out arithmetically the solution for the deflection needed to resolve a particular firing situation. I could do the same to enable me to catch a thrown ball or throw a ball of paper into a waste bin. Both are impossible to do in the time available and the human brain uses different methods to resolve the problem. We can train ourselves to do these things better and this is the crucial point. A cricketer catches a ball on the boundary not by doing the immensely complicated arithmetic in his head but by practice. Good deflection shooters did the same. Unfortunately most WW2 pilots did not get sufficient training or practice and were therefore not very good at it. Humans are not all the same (thank God) and some may have had a natural aptitude for this sort of shooting, or grasped the principles quicker.

I don't know whether having experience of game shooting helped or not. One thing is certain though, that someone who was used to shooting at targets moving relative to himself at least had an understanding of the principles involved and might well be able to apply this to an aerial situation. The application of an already understood principle to a similar situation is something the human brain is very good at.
It is often forgotten that many WW2 era pilots had never fired a gun on the ground or anywhere else before the war. Many had never even driven a car.

Cheers

Steve

 

[Edgar Brooks]

I cannot fathom what your point is at all. .

It isn't my point, it's what the authorities, 75 years ago, said, so if you have a beef, take it up with them, though a medium might be needed. If you can't see any difference between men running at a maximum of 20mph, and aircraft jinking and turning at around 300, there really is no point in me trying to explain their view (I repeat, their view, not mine.)

Essentially the same statement, once again a series of contradictions entering a circular spiral. This all started with me not accepting "verbatim" that to be an ace you had to shoot a bloody grouse in the pre war years.

Which is not what I said, and you know it (language, tut, tut.) To repeat (yet again) it was felt that, due to their time on the shooting field, the likes of Tuck and Johnson had a better grasp of the niceties of deflection shooting than ordinary pilots, who might only get a chance to fire at a towed target. Bob Doe said that his only training consisted of firing a burst into the North Sea; "Difficult to miss the North Sea," he said.

 

[GrauGeist]

Must have been quite an experience!

I read something about him flying a KI-84 later in the war and he loved it as a combat airplane.

Maybe I mixed these two instances together in my mind

I haven't seen anything about Saburo Sakai flying a KI-84, although it's possible.

Are you perhaps mixing the KI-84 with the A7M that he flew and had nothing but praise for?

 

[GregP]

One of the things Mr. Sakai DID mention in his talk was that being a pilot with only one eye would have been impossible if he had not already been an experienced combat pilot to start with. Since he was wounded and lost an eye in battle, they wanted to ground him and he asked to be allowed to go for a flight around the pattern to see if he could still fly and fight. He was allowed and he took off in a Zero, did a roll and a loop on climbout, and landed perfectly from a sideslip.

He was reassigned to flying immediately.

His emphasis was that the correct sight picture was firmly entrenched in his mind for takeoff, landing, and combat / aerobatics. Had it not been so, it would have been very hard to learn without considerable danger to both him and the plane ... and the landing strip. His only real difficulty was watching ALL of the sky with only one eye ... which is why he had a wingman. So ... his wingman watched his blind side and Mr. Sakai watched the other side and together they did well.

 

[buffnut453]

Bob Doe said that his only training consisted of firing a burst into the North Sea; "Difficult to miss the North Sea," he said.

So-called "splash firing" was a common training approach for RAF fighter squadrons even late into 1941. While it did accustom the pilot to the effects of gun firing (noise, vibration, aircraft deceleration etc), and might (if targeted on a fluorescent target marker) help with ground strafing gunnery, it did nothing to improve deflection shooting or firing during air combat manoeuvres.

 

[Bad-Karma]

If you imagine shooting at the car in front of you in the same lane on a motorway, both travelling at a similar speed (though you might be closing) that is a zero deflection shot. It is the easiest shot to make assuming you can manoeuvre yourself into a position to make it. The only calculation/estimation required of the attacker is the range. Many WW2 era pilots couldn't do this either.

For a deflection shot, that is typically when both aircraft are turning and moving relative to one another the crucial estimation is the 'angle off' of the target from the attacker. Few pilots got this right. Analysis of RAF gun camera footage in (IIRC) 1942 showed that the average pilot underestimated angle off by at least 50% and therefore had NO CHANCE of hitting such a target.
In your driving analogy it would be like trying to hit another car crossing a motorway bridge at ninety miles an hour!

The later gyro gun sights effectively did the sums for the pilot and input this into the sight. I explained it in another thread somewhere, essentially gyroscopes measured the rate of turn and tilted a mirror, moving the sighting graticule to give the correct deflection. With these sights, assuming a few criteria like the wingspan of the target/range had been correctly entered, simply placing the target in the 'cross hairs' would ensure hits.
In this way the 'pilot factor' at least in aiming was removed from the equation. Of course the aircraft still had to be flown into a position from which a firing solution could be established.

Cheers

Steve

Hi Steve,

Do you happen to know if the pilot inputted wing span and range on the fly or would they typically have it set for what they expected to go up against like a 109 or 190?

EDIT: nevermind I found another thread on here explaining its operation. Very interesting thank you!

 

[stona]

First the target type was entered into the system. I suppose this might have been done in advance but I think more likely once the intended target had been identified. Subsequently the pilot used a control fixed to throttle lever to match the diameter of the sighting graticule to the wingspan of the target aircraft. Since the target aircraft had previously been input and its wingspan was a known quantity, this effectively allowed the sight to calculate the range.

Gyro gun sights on Spitfires increased the percentage of aircraft destroyed significantly. A 1944 study of two squadrons using the older fixed graticule sight and the newer gyro sight showed kill percentages of 36% and 50% respectively. The gyro sight was probably even better than that, being new the squadrons fitted with it were still learning to use it.

Cheers

Steve

 

[BiffF15]

On the topic of fatigue in a fight, I think all of the reasons mentioned are contributors, but the single biggest reason has to be the fact that the pilot had to muscle these aircraft around.

You can read about the stick forces of some of these aircraft - even at lower force levels a man can only last so long.

A couple of good anecdotes here from Wing Commander Hugh Godefroy DSO, DFC and Bar, Croix de Guerre with Gold Star (Fr) -- (though he was a Pilot Officer in the first quote and Flight Lieutenant in the second).

Greyman,

It sounds like he had a serious workout! I've done surges on active duty where you fly three times and never get out of the plane or completely shut down (we would "hot pit" refuel with one engine running). These were tiresome and required us to bring lunch. I've "heard" guys would power nap while refueling and the pit boss would bang on the nose of the A/C to wake them up.

The most I've done is about 13-15 BFM (dogfights) set ups in one sortie (this involved going to the tanker at least three times). The sortie length would have been about 1.5-1.7 hours and was an extremely fatiguing. Max stick force on an Eagle is about 45 lbs, which is probably lower than what WW2 fighters had. We also had the luxury of air conditioning and pressurization, however due to the speeds the G load could be sustained much, much longer. A modern fighter at low altitude can be at corner speed (speed needed to attain max g load), at max G, and accelerate. You learn power modulation, and use AOA to control your speed. Or you push the fight into the slow speed regime (much lower G's).

Cheers,
Biff

 

[pbehn]

It isn't my point, it's what the authorities, 75 years ago, said, so if you have a beef, take it up with them, though a medium might be needed. If you can't see any difference between men running at a maximum of 20mph, and aircraft jinking and turning at around 300, there really is no point in me trying to explain their view (I repeat, their view, not mine.)

Which is not what I said, and you know it (language, tut, tut.) To repeat (yet again) it was felt that, due to their time on the shooting field, the likes of Tuck and Johnson had a better grasp of the niceties of deflection shooting than ordinary pilots, who might only get a chance to fire at a towed target. Bob Doe said that his only training consisted of firing a burst into the North Sea; "Difficult to miss the North Sea," he said.

I have no problem with what the authorities said 75 years ago. Gunnery training was poor, and deflection shooting is difficult. My only point was that the shooting of grouse improving marksmanship is revisionist. I went on an open day which included shooting both shotguns and small bore rifle. It is the easiest thing to teach picking the lead on a clay pigeon, you trace the line of flight and as you overtake it you pull the trigger. You stand still and when you pull the trigger you crate a hail of shot that at 20 yards is about 3 feet across to hit a target about 6 inches long, where is the connection to aiming guns on a plane at another plane. There were many aces who liked to shoot game and were good, there were many pilots who liked to shoot who never made a kill in a plane and a huge number of aces who I doubt know what a grouse is.

To turn the discussion in a different direction, Jackie Stewart was Britain's most successful F1 racer, he was also international class with a shotgun At the age of 13 he had won a clay pigeon shooting competition and then went on to become a prize-winning member of the Scottish shooting team, competing in the United Kingdom and abroad. He won the British, Welsh and Scottish skeet shooting championships and the "Coupe des Nations" European championship. Does that mean shooting helps you drive a car fast? I would say no. But to reach the top in these sports you need great reflexes balance awareness hand eye coordination concentration and determination to get it right.

From what I have read the biggest problem with deflection shooting is that the greater the deflection then the greater is the importance of the distance, if the range is off then the lead angle is off. Humans live on land not in the sky and are not naturally good at estimating large distances. I have read several times that pilots seeing another plane in the distance at the same height will perceive it to be lower and the further away it is the lower it seems. As stona posted on another post viewing gun cameras showed that pilots were way off, you must presume the pilot was actually aiming at the target (he knows he has a camera on the gun) from what I read it was the hopelessly inaccurate estimate of range, some were firing at 1000 yards.

 

[Greyman]

On the subject of "It's the pilot not the plane" I've got another anecdote from Mr. (then Flight Lieutenant) Hugh Godefroy.

Now, people who recall some of my posts in the past might roll their eyes at seeing this yet again - but it really is one of my all-time favourite anecdotes when it comes to discussions on

i) single anecdotes (small sample sizes) or anecdotes in general
ii) turn performance, 'manoeuvrability' in general
iii) importance of the pilot in comparing aircraft
​

---

At Duxford one day a US Army Captain arrived unexpectedly with a P-38. Like the other Air Corps pilots, he had no battle experience and asked if he could get somebody to dogfight with him in a Spitfire IXb. Flight Lieutenant Clive, implying that he was in charge, said he would be glad to cooperate. He would fly the Spitfire himself. We were all a witness to the P-38 outmanoeuvre Clive, even turning inside him. When they landed, Clive came into Dispersal sweating profusely and stated the P-38 could outmanoeuvre the IXb. The Captain asked if he could have that in writing to show his Commanding Officer.

'Certainly,' said Clive, 'I'll have it ready for you by lunchtime.'

Now, imagine if the story ended here, as it easily could have. Think of how us internet nerds would pour over this controlled, seemingly decisive 'combat'. How those that have some strange, personal investment in the performance of seventy-year old aircraft would either swoon or gnash their teeth at the outcome of this impromptu contest. It would have been 'ammunition' on forums and bulletin boards for decades.

However, it doesn't end there. Godefroy continues ...

I was convinced this was wrong, and pleaded with Campbell-Orr to let me fly against him before issuing any report. The Captain supported me in my request, and off we went. I was able to show that there was no way he could come anywhere near me in the Spitfire. To demonstrate the turning ability, I let him get on my tail. In two complete circles from this position, I was able to get in firing position behind him. The Captain was not a bit upset, he had come to learn the truth. I told him I thought a good pilot in a 109F would give him a lot of trouble.

Now here we have two mock combats with everything remaining constant except for the pilot of one of the aircraft - and we get completely opposite results.

Something to keep in mind.

 

[nuuumannn]

Now here we have two mock combats with everything remaining constant except for the pilot of one of the aircraft - and we get completely opposite results.

Yep, I was thinking the exact same thing whilst reading the first part - great anecdote indeed Greyman. That's pilot factor.

One example that springs to mind is when the RN went to war with Sea Harriers against the Argentine Mirages, before the war, few thought the Sea Harrier could do the job, but in the right hands with the right training and tactics, it could. Although the Sea Harrier was a terrific mount and ideal for what the Brits needed, I'm also certain that had the British had Mirages and the Argies had Sea Harriers, the result would have been the same.