I embedded this question in the discussion of the events of this mornings airliner crash in Rockaway Beach New York- Could a person with an AK-47, or some similarly styled gun, while shooting at the wings and engines of the plane, take it down?
There were a couple of responses to that question saying essentially that it’d take a stinger missile or something similar down those lines to take the planes out. But I’m more curious about the ‘over the counter’ types of arms that while not perfectly legal, are still easier to come by than a stinger missile, i.e., a machine gun or large caliber rifle.
Isn’t it possible? My friends say no, but what do they know? Besides, isn’t ‘small arms fire’ a real threat to military aircraft in hostile territory? Couldn’t that threat be extended to civilian aircraft?
yes, but you have to put a lot of lead in the sky to get odds of hitting somethign critical. Breaking engine parts is the best bet. Break up some fan or compressor blades and a jet engine will quickly self destruct. The cases are designed to hold all the bits inside but hot compressor blades punching through structural members or fuel tanks will quickly take a plane down. Shooting at the wings or fuselage is more likely to miss critical items than hit one.
maybe; it would be a very slim chance though. if it were flying low, there’s a small chance you could get a bullet or two in the turbine. that wouldn’t be a good thing.
or, possibly, you might put enough holes in the wing fuel tanks to start it draining out. i don’t know what, if anything, would happen in that case.
(IANAExpert in any field whatsoever, in fact most of my information is probably faulty, dear god, put me down, put me down now for the good of humanity.)
Yes small arms fire is a risk to aircraft, but not a very great one.
Most modern combat fighter-style aircraft either fly too fast or too high to be hit with small arms fire. The A-10 is one exception but that mean bastard has enough armor on it to stop most small arms fire.
Transport aircraft, which includes military and civilian and people and cargo, are the most vulnerable to taking damage from small arms fire. They are heavy, slow, and fly lower on approach and take-off because of thier size.
Still, hitting even a small, slow puddle jumper with small arms (.45 cal, 7.62mm, 9mm handgun or machine gun) isn’t likely to bring it down. You could reasonably expect to hole the cabin, but that won’t matter at the low altitudes from which you could hit the plane. Modern aircraft have sealed fuel tanks that have more material around them than other parts of the plane. Essentially, you’d do minor damage and scare the bejesus out of the occupants.
I’d be a bit more worried about a larger weapon such as a Browning .50-cal, but I have little knowledge of those so I’ll leave it to someone else.
I think with some incidiary ammunition a gunman could start a fuel fire which MIGHT blow it up or eventually bring it down. But maybe wind or extinguisher would put the fire out. The shooter would have to be almost underneath it during takeoff or landing.
I don’t think he could throw out enough lead to do it any other way.
There is only one way you could bring down a commercial airliner by shooting at it with an AK-47: by killing and/or disabling both the Pilot and 1st Officer. And it would have to be flying extremely low. And even then it would be one in a million.
Why all these 1 in a million quotes from? , I keep hearing this on multiple boards . The A-10 built for CAS has a bullet proof front and lower cockpit section but the rear glass is vunerable to small arms fire.
Shooting out the pilot was done quite alot in Vietnam , many many aircraft were lost to small arms and these are fighers designed to take a few hits.
Also a Sniper in the USMC called Hathcock used a 50 cal machine gun (single shots) to shoot a kid on a bike @ 1000 yards+.
+airliners move in a predictable path unlike CAS aircraft which can move around quite well = easy lead solution
And finally , since airline cockpits are being armoured and enclosed to all outsiders , shoot out the pilots and you have a dead aircraft since you can’t do an airport xx and get an airsteward/ess to go into the cockpit and reprogram the autopilot.
No. Maybe, if the plane was on the ground, a saboteur could walk right up to the fuel tank and put four or five full magazines directly into that, and then small arms fire could stop a plane. As has been previously suggested, you might also be able to pick off the pilot, but you’d have to shoot the co-pilot, too. Perhaps if you had a battalion of marksmen with extra-high capacity magazines, you could get a great enough volume of fire to stop a plane. Because of speed, though, you have a very small window in which to put up a very great volume of fire. Normally, this sort of job is left to heavy weapons with greater rates of fire, longer ranges, and significantly larger bullets.
geepee, I think you are making a critical mistake distinguishing between small-arms fire and small-caliber bullets. Your ‘many many aircraft lost to small arms’ were likely small helicopters that came under fire from large crowds of determined men with machine guns as well as AK-47s. Hathcock’s achievement, though interesting, is probably not repeatable on a regular basis by mere human marksmen. Airliners also raise their nose very quickly, putting a barrier between any would-be sniper and his target.
Offensive, military aircraft fly low all the time and are therefore much easier targets. Civilian airliners never do except during takeoff & landing.
In terms of your average Islamic zealot sitting in a duck boat in Jamaica Bay with his trusty Kalishnikov, and peppering every ‘infidel iron bird’ he sees in hopes of making it to paradise, I think its one in a million.
But if you positioned yourself at a strategic point where you had a good line-of-sight view of the cockpit during the brief takeoff or landing period and had a powerful, quality high-power rifle, and were an exceptional shot, I’d say your odds might be, 1 in 1000.
Sure it can. You just have to be inside the jet when its at a high altitude.
Ground based small weapons fire is highly unlikely to do enough damage to bring down a jet of any kind as has been stated before. Most of your anti-aircraft weapons systems that use machine guns (like the vulcan) work by literally filling the air with lead. They also use considerably larger and more powerful rounds than can be used in a shoulder fired weapon.
So while its possible that some loon with a .50 caliber sniper rifle could bring down a jet liner (assuming he could get a shot at the pilot), its highly unlikely that he’d be able to do it and survive (of course, lunatics tend not to be concerned about such things). It’d be easier to shoot the tires out of the thing when its on the runway and about to take off.
I actually heard the late GYSGT Carlos Hathcock speak at a dinner. I’ve never heard that he “shot a kid on a bike,” but he did have 93 confirmed kills and “many probables.”
One of his most famous was a 2500 yard confirmed kill with a .50 caliber Browning rifle, the longest sniper kill ever documented.
Another was a Vietnamese General from 700 yards. It took him four days to get into position to make the kill.
A third was the decimation of an entire company of NVA regulars over the course of 5 days. He and another Marine sniper pinned down the company in a valley and took them out one after the other.
I don’t know why all of these people are saying ‘no’. Commercial jets are not hardened and have very thin skins. The engines are quite vulnerable.
You’d certainly have to get lucky, because the hydraulics and electrics are redundant and spread out geographically around the airplane. But if you hit an engine blade, or critical parts of a control surface, you could bring it down.
I’m imagining someone hiding out on the approach or takeoff path when the aircraft is low and slow and at full power, opening up with a .50 caliber machine gun. Not a pretty thought.
My thoughts exactly Sam. I don’t often have preconceived ideas on things I don’t know anything about (Yeah, yeah… I don’t often, I said), but this one I was sure about.
A guy standing at the end of a runway with an AK-47 shooting at the wings and at the engines seems to me to be a no-brainer -it’s going to do some serious damage and might possibly shoot the plane down.
I honestly don’t see how it wouldn’t. Commercial aircraft aren’t designed to take fire, so I doubt they design the system with that in mind. Besides, I thought what brought down the Concorde was a piece of metal on the runway that when struck by its wheels on takeoff, punctured the fuel tank on the wing. Result- blown up plane a few hundred yards from the runway.
Again, aiming at the wings and engines, a pretty serious weapon pumping some serious lead at a plane relatively close to the ground seems like an easy way to bring it down.
But, obviously, this doesn’t seem to be happening. And, obviously, I can’t be the first person who has thought of such a thing.
I guess I’m just missing it… I’m missing why it wouldn’t affect the engines and the fuel in the wings.
Chris, the scenerio you describe is one most likely to cause the plane to abort the take off. A commerical airliner isn’t designed to take weapons fire, but it is designed to handle bird strikes. So while El Whacko’s machine gun fire might cause the engines to shred themselves, that’s not necessarily going to mean the end of the jet. Birds do occasionally get sucked into engines and this doesn’t cause the plane to explode or fall from the sky. The engine shreds itself and the housing around the engine protects the plane from the most serious damage. Jet fuel, OTOH, isn’t the highly explosive stuff everyone thinks it is. Its little more than kerosene, and is thus not likely to go up as readily as some other fuels might be.
The piece of metal that doomed the Concorde was a long piece of metal, not simply a wrench or some other small object left lying around on the runway. Also, there’d been some complaints made about the Concorde and its vulnerablity to just such an accident before it ever happened, IIRC. In any case, they’ve modified the Concordes so that if a hunk of metal does get sucked into the engines again, it won’t cause the whole thing to explode.
During the bombing of Hanoi toward the end of the Vietnam war, the Vietamese would stand out and shoot their guns into the sky. There were a few planes that were brought down by this method. The pilots when captured would be brought into the Hanoi Hilton and be amazed at how he was brought down.
Remember though, that it does not matter if you shoot the plane directly or if the plane flies into the bullet, the outcome is the same.
Note: The above is from a talk given by Vietnam veteran who was in the Hanoi Hilton. I heard him speak when I was in the military.
SInce we’re all using second-hand sources to justify our pre-conceived notions on this, I guess I’ll jump in with my own. My wife’s father is a consulting engineer with GE, the makers of the CF6 turbofan that powers the A300 and many other commercial aircraft. He helped design the blade retention components (what keeps the blade attached to the shaft) on that engine, and also worked on the blade containment (what keeps loose blades inside the nacelle) of other GE engines. He and I have talked about catastrophic engine failure on several occasions.
I’ll summarize his point of view: In order for a catastrophic engine failure to start throwing turbine blades outside the nacelle, there has to be a breakage of several parts of the system, most likely from an internal cause. E.g., if the blade has too much mechanical damage and metal fatigue, a blade may fail, causing failure of nearby blades. But even then, the rest of the fan will likely remain stable. There was an engine that lost about five blades about four years ago, and killed a mother and daughter seated in the rows directly parallel to that part of the engine. The rest of the engine remained intact.
External impacts are very, very, extremely unlikely to kill an engine. Bird impacts are not uncommon, but it is very uncommon for one to cause engine failure. I doubt that even a large amount of small-arms fire would cause engine failure. The damage could get exciting, but taking it down is unlikely.
Oh, and Tuckerfan is right, the piece of metal that took down Concorde was 17" piece of strapping from another plane. Also, the Concorde’s engines were turbojets, not turbofans.
A shotgun shooting slugs would probably do it. My cousin has one and the 12mm slugs to go with it. Easier to get than an AK-47, more difficult than an average gun tho. Keeping in mind what everyone else has said bout the fuel not so explosive and the difficulty of getting that perfect shot. Still i’ve seen what they do when they hit. Insane destruction.
Sorry, but a shotgun slug would be even less effective. Shotguns, even loaded with slugs, are much, much less powerfull than high powered rifles and are essentially useless at anything other than very close range.
paperbackwriter explained things very well. Add to that the idea that the same containment shielding used to keep broken turbofan blades from coming out would be effective at keeping bullets from coming in.
