Laser pointers are a known risk for pilots and there have been arrests.
I haven’t heard of any incidents of gunfire against private or commercial planes. Are they very vulnerable to a random shot from a hunting rifle, shotgun or pistol?
Discounting a one in a billion lucky shot is this something that concerns pilots?
I do recall a cartoon of a quail hunter with a dazed expression on his face. His dog and a few dead birds on the ground near him. Theres a burning airliner in the background falling from the sky. It was amusing, but I realized that a shotgun with bird shot would never reach that high.
I ask because I’m actually surprised laser pointers hit the cockpit at the perfect angle to partially blind a pilot. Seems improbable but I see news reports of these incidents pretty often.
The biggest difference between a laser pointer and a rifle (a shotgun is hopeless because of very limited range) is that the laser can be turned on and aimed for many seconds if not longer. It won’t hurt the plane but someone can get lucky and sweep the windshield.
I suppose someone could try to shoot an airliner with a larger rifle like a 30.06 on takeoff or final approach but it is an incredibly difficult shot because of the speed it is moving and it probably wouldn’t do terminal damage even if they managed to hit it. Aircraft windshields are similar to bullet-proof glass and bullet-holes don’t just make airliners explode or fall out of the sky as plenty of war pilots can attest to.
In the best case, you would be looking at hitting something moving at well over 100 mph at 300 yards and probably a whole lot more. There are airports in the world where it is possible likePrincess Juilanna airport in St. Maarten but you would be caught instantly and it still wouldn’t cause terminal damage even if someone managed to hit it.
That said, people shoot at small planes all the time (usually with shotguns) because they are flying over their property. That is a serious crime but they almost always miss. In the cases where they have scored a hit, it very rare for it to cause anything but damage to the outer fuselage.
It happenned that a 727 was hit while taxiing at Atlanta in 1998.
They may have purposely targetted passenger window , using a rifle.
Note that the glass pane that was hit wrecked… But there were two more inside to safeguard the passenger. You’d have to hit the same window three times at the same location to get a window to cause a loss of air pressure ( and the risk someone gets sucked out the hole. )
It takes 3 seconds for sniper bullets to travel 2.5km to reach record distances…the chance of being able to hit the same window on a plane that is already flying… Just won’t happen.
A single engine failure will be expensive but it won’t generally take a plane down either especially if it is on final approach. Birds are a lot better terrorists at that type of thing than people with hunting rifles.
Aircraft get shot at from time to time. And hit. Light planes, biz jets, and airliners. Various civilian malcontents angry about aircraft noise is the usual scenario.
In USAF we figured that small arms fire (.50 cal & below) was a threat within 5000’ of the ground. Above that it didn’t have enough oomph to do much even if by some miracle it connected. Conversely, the lower you were the greater the risk. Both likelihood of taking a hit and severity of the consequences.
Flying over massed infantry at a couple hundred feet even at 500 knots was considered pretty dangerous. The countertactic to low flying jets, as practiced by US Army, was simple. Everybody drop, lay on your back, and fire a burst straight up. Don’t aim at the aircraft; let him fly into your curtain of fire.
An individual civilian with an individual semi-auto rifle is generally going to have a hard time hitting a flying aircraft from the side. A hard core sniper with all the ballistic tables, laser rangefinders, & training, sure. David Deerhunter or Mikey Macho Post-apocalyptic Wannabe, not so much. OTOH, if Dave or Mikey sets up directly under a takeoff or landing corridor within a couple miles of an airport he’s got a pretty easy shot. And it’s not hard to find airports where those areas would afford good concealment and decent privacy.
From the pilot POV I’d not be much concerned about any single shot doing material harm to an airliner. Sure, they could get lucky and drill a pilot straight from asshole to ballcap. They could also win the Powerball the same day. Besides, we carry a spare pilot for a reason.
Most likely if they hit anything it’d be wing or tail, making a tear in the skin and perhaps a small hole in a fuel tank. We might notice the fuel loss or might not if it’s small enough.
They might hit an engine and hurt it or, less likely, make it fail completely. Which is a failure we’re designed to deal with. IOW, a big increment in flight risk from the normal near zero risk, but still not ending up with a very high absolute flight risk. As rare as engine failures are, only a tiny fraction of a percent of single engine jetliner situations end badly in the modern era.
Any other system we have is redundant enough we can deal with any single and many dual failures.
A shot into the belly of the fuselage will probably get stopped in the baggage compartment before it gets into the passenger cabin. There’s no armor there, but there are an awful lot of dissimilar layers of stuff to plough through.
All in all I’d be more worried about us taking a drone in the windshield, killing one pilot and leaving the other struggling to fly in a hurricane. Or the damnable super lasers they sell as man-toys nowadays. Two dazzled pilots is a recipe for an out of control rollover and a rapid descent into the ground.
You are correct except about the part of “getting sucked out of the hole”. That is an urban legend that has been repeated in many movies and TV shows and movies but it simply isn’t true. An explosive decompression at altitude certainly isn’t a good thing but it also doesn’t “suck” everything out of the cabin at all especially once the pressure is equalized. The real problem is surviving the lack of oxygen at cruising altitudes and that is what the drop-down masks are for.
Compare that to small holes in the worst case of the scenario we are talking about here and you can understand the magnitude of the differences between something like that and one or a few rifle bullets.
Your own link says that, according one mechanical engineer and one flight investigator, the flight attendant who died in the Aloha Airlines disaster may indeed have been sucked into the (initially small) hole that formed in the aircraft. Her body blocked the vent for some time before the pressure finally tore the remaining part of the fuselage off, taking her with it.
I don’t think that the “getting sucked out of the hole” is an urban legend. It’s a theory that has been advanced by apparently reliable experts, and seems to have been borne out in the British Airways Flight 5390 case.
I think the point is that the hole has to be* big enough for you to fit* in order to be blown out. You don’t do a Goldfinger through an intact window frame just because the glass pane has a bullet hole.
In any case, yeah, what they said, single small-arms shots are an extremely inefficient way of trying to bring down an airliner.
This is not your question but this is a misconception. The laser is not so precisely aimed at the perfect angle such that it goes right into the pilot’s eyes. They just have to hit the cockpit window. If the light enters the cockpit it reflects around the surfaces of the cockpit, creating flashes that are incredibly bright in contrast to the instruments at night. The bright light can make the pilot temporarily “blinded” the same way that an oncoming driver with his bright lights on can make you unable to see anything but the lights. There are also many cases of actual vision damage if the light does reflect directly into a pilot’s eyes.
What happens when the bullets come back down after being fired “straight up”?
How effective can that tactic possibly be? It sounds like something that was designed for WWI or WWII where you had division strength infantry formations and relatively low-flying prop aircraft. Modern aircraft fly too high and too fast and infantry units are too small and spread out to create an effective “screen”. I would imagine that any unit large enough for that to work probably already has designated anti-aircraft weapons like Stinger missiles or whatever.
This. Your can’t get sucked like a milkshake through a bullet hole like the creepy alien in Aliens Resurrection. The pressure differential in an aircraft is like 16 psi IIRC. Try and shove someone through a 1" square hole with 16 pounds of force.
Now the glass might not be designed to have a rapidly moving airstream passing through a hole that was never supposed to be there in the first place. So if the glass shatters, now you have a 1 foot square hole. That’s now over 2300 pounds of force. More than enough to blow poor Auric out of a hole he might not precisely fit through.
Bullets fired literally straight up tend to come down tumbling at a fairly low terminal velocity, still potentially dangerous but not likely to be lethal (you can see Myth Busters on that one ). More realistically a bullet fired at some pretty high angle will retain its spin, slow down less and can be lethal far away compared to the weapon’s effective range in aimed fire. In general this is an issue for antiaircraft fire with small arms and machine guns, solid rounds from small AA automatic cannon, or HE rounds if they lack self destruct fuses, or not enough time passes for the fuse to go off at a safe altitude.
However massed non-aimed barrage fire by infantry against a/c has been a standard tactic for a long time. It was standard doctrine by US opponents in Korea and Vietnam.
But it’s true the a/c have to be flying fairly low to be shot down by small arms/machine guns. Speed OTOH isn’t an absolute defense. Vietnam era jets weren’t particularly slower than now’s (faster in certain comparisons), and still suffered a noticeable % of their losses to small arms and machine gun fire*. In the wars of the 1990’s onward such losses have become rare because attacking a/c typically fly higher, not because they’re faster. Guided munitions and sensor/data linking type stuff has made it more practical to achieve results outside the envelopes of small arms and mg’s, man portable SAM’s too to some degree. And those wars have typically been characterized by a non-existent or quickly suppressed heavy SAM and opposing fighter threat that attacking a/c might seek to avoid with low altitude tactics.
*question speaks of small arms: the cause of a/c losses in Korea/Vietnam from small arms per se v light machine guns or heavy machine guns was obviously difficult to exactly determine, but losses in the general category were not rare for jets on ground attack missions in either war, though less likely than for prop a/c.
IIRC, at 18,000 feet the pressure is 1/2 atm (half of sea level’s 14.7psi.) at 36,000 feet half that again? so 1/4 atm so say, pressurized aircraft would be about 12psi differential at airline altitude?
Actually if you read Hatcher’s Notebook he developed an easy way to locate bullets fired straight up and at least roughly measure their lethality. Julian Hatcher was part of the development of many military rifles for the US. He was also involved in many court cases as the expert witness when firearms and explosives were involved. A fascinating book to read. The Mythbusters would have saved themselves a lot a time setting up to recover a dropping bullet.
Cut to the chase: 30-06 bullets fired straight up take a minute to return, still spin stabilized. They just slide back down, base first. If turned around in the cartridge and fired base up, they return point first but are still not quite lethal. They are spinning at a quarter million rpm and retain much of it.
One of my favorite episodes he relates was whether smokeless gun powder would explode if shot while in the canister. He set up his marksman at 100 ft and started shooting at increasing sizes of powder containers.
One pound, nothing, 5 pounds, nothing. I forget at what point this changed, but they figured the weight of the powder in the larger canisters (25 lbs or whatever) compressed the gun powder enough to make it more sensitive (he shot at the lower part of this canister. The resulting detonation blew the shooter over backwards.
Dennis
Typical passenger windows might pass a child or skinny adult. With enough differential pressure pushing on them people are pretty water-balloony & flexible. Conversely pretty much any cockpit window is plenty bigger than all but the most corpulent pilot you’ve every seen.
Exactly. At the ranges we’re seeing laser hits, the beam is 50+ feet across. Yes, there’s a smaller brighter spot in the center, but even that is many feet across.
The bozo is waving this thing around the sky and it sweeps across the cockpit one or more times in the space of a few seconds. Light comes in the big windows, rattles around inside the cockpit bouncing off the interior, other windows, instruments, LCD screens, etc. It takes very little, especially of the green laser light, to trash your vision thoroughly for 30 seconds to 5 minutes. Which for an aircraft near takeoff or landing is a lot longer than it takes to lose control and return to Earth.
As others said above, they’re not as dangerous on the way back down. Especially not for guys w infantry helmets and body armor. Nor is “straight up” all that straight.
In my era we tried to fly very, very low to evade SAMs and radar guided AAA. Which also hid us from enemy surveillance radar, AWACS-equivalents, and fighter interceptors. By “very very low” I mean like below 500 feet and going the speed of heat. We’d drop down to 100 feet if the terrain was flat enough. Which was low enough that it put us well into the danger zone for small arms fire. Which we tried to avoid by not overflying identifiable troop concentrations unless we were delivering ordnance onto them. Of course us dropping ordnance on them certainly improved their motivation to shoot back. Even if all they did was chase us off, they improved their own survival. In combat, even doing something not very effective is preferable to just sitting there and taking your beating like a man.
At least in my era the Redeyes, Stingers, SA-7s and SA-14s were out there, but not in enough volume that every infantry unit could count on having effective local air defense. As well, MANPADS aren’t magic death rays. By us flashing past any grunt with a MANPAD at low altitude and high speed he probably can’t see or hear us coming, turn to face us, ID us as hostile, turn to follow us as we go by, raise his weapon and activate the seeker, get a lock, fire, and have the missile catch us before we’re gone. We flash through their engagement envelope in 10-15 seconds.
Conversely the curtain fire tactic with individual weapons leaves out all the steps except see us coming, decide we’re hostile, raise rifle to shoulder & empty a magazine well out in front of us.
In the Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars things have been different. The enemy lacked/lacks all the higher order air defenses. Mass small arms, the occasional visually aimed HMG, light autocannon, and the occasional MANPAD is all we’re up against. So tactics shifted: stay above 15,000 feet, preferably 20,000 feet at all times and attack with precision guided munitions to make up for the loss of accuracy caused by the greater standoff distance. Those tactics would be suicidal against the Russians, Chinese, Iranians, NK, or any other modern combined arms team.
Ballpark cruising pressure differential is 7.5psi on traditional aircraft and 8.5psi on 787s.
If a window came out as a neat unit and the smallish person right next to it wasn’t belted in they could well be picked up & fed through the hole about like using a tamper to feed stuff into a food processor chute. Pretty quickly (10-30 seconds max)the pressure will equalize and then there’s not much residual force working.
). More realistically a bullet fired at some pretty high angle will retain its spin, slow down less and can be lethal far away compared to the weapon’s effective range in aimed fire. In general this is an issue for antiaircraft fire with small arms and machine guns, solid rounds from small AA automatic cannon, or HE rounds if they lack self destruct fuses, or not enough time passes for the fuse to go off at a safe altitude.