While the airliner pilot gawks in amazement at the aircraft hovering in front of his eyes? Until his eyes melt, at least.
I suspect the thought “evasive maneuver” wouldn’t even have time to form before he flinched the control column away from that. 10 seconds? 10 milliseconds maybe.
A post-impact ejection requires surviving the impact, which is not guaranteed. Consider this mid-air collision between a bomber and a fighter, in which the wingtip vortex of the bomber was suspected of playing a role.
You may have to hit the big plane’s tailfeathers pretty hard to disable the control surfaces. There’s a pretty good risk that the impact itself may injure the pilot of the fighter, and of course there’s a risk that the weird slipstream in the vicinity of the larger plane might cause the fighter to hit in an uncontrolled manner.
The pilot could also try nudging the wing over. Allied pilots actually used this method to bring down V-1s over the Channel.
[QUOTE=LSLGuy]
But unlike in wartime fighter-to-fighter combat, the fighters in this hijacking case will just be hanging there waiting to see the result of the first shot. If it’s a clean miss, fire another one. To be sure the supply of missiles is not infinite. But no combat loadout consists of just one for a flight of two fighters.
[/QUOTE]
Of course, any American fighter with a combat loadout will also have a working machine cannon and lining up a shot on a lumbering airliner would not be a difficult task. The M-61 will tear any aircraft apart.
We practiced intercepts and cannon shots on transports. It’s actually a bit challenging to cannonize a transport without getting killed by the parts falling off it. Just setting up behind them and blazing away would be real likely to kill you too.
Proper technique is to do a weaving maneuver where you’re firing from a distinct angle off to the side (e.g. the 4 to 5 o’clock position from the target’s POV) then pulling up and crossing over to the other side to try again if necessary. The problem is by the time you get enough angle-off, you pass from max to min range very quickly. Then you’re immediately into collision (and wake) avoidance mode. You’ve also got to do this at a slower speed than is optimal for our own maneuvering; we’re kinda wallowing instead of zooming.
The F-15 cannon was/is mounted with some up-angle compared to the aircraft centerline. The intent was to improve dogfighting by allowing you to shoot across the circle a bit. Makes strafing and killing transports much harder. That “feature” was not retained in the F-16, -18, or -35.
All in all, strafing transports and bombers can be done, and done successfully. But it’s easier and safer to back off a mile or so and hose off an AIM-7, AIM-9, or AIM-120 if you have one.
In the actual 9/11 scenario IIRC they ended up with some fighters airborne armed only with non-explosive training rounds for the cannon. Training missiles are useless; they’re a real seeker with no warhead or motor.
Training cannon rounds will still buzz-saw the crap out of whatever they hit. I wouldn’t want to use them against a fighter who can fight back and who’s hard to hit in the first place. But against a defenseless mostly non-maneuvering transport they’d get the job done even if it took 4 passes instead of 1 to get the kill.
And no, nobody would expect to ram and jump out just before impact. You’re going to ride through the collision and jump out afterwards if you’re still alive.
Not sure this would work. V-1 buzz bombs didn’t have quite as much roll inertia as a passenger jet, and they also didn’t have a pilot actively working to evade you and/or restore level flight.
Wouldn’t the fact the aircraft still had so much fuel aboard it mean a hit that caused a fire or explosion would cause the entire aircraft to explode though?
Nope. Fuel doesn’t explode. It burns. And it only burns when it gets mixed with enough air.
Here’s a wiki Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182 - Wikipedia that was a midair collision with a Cessna. The result is open fuel tanks and a massive torch trailing the aircraft. Here’s another example: Air France Flight 4590 - Wikipedia.
I’d expect a similar torch dragging off any big airplane hit with a missile. They’ll be falling rapidly and losing parts along the way.
The idea that things explode and the largest pieces are dust is Hollywood garbage.
Only if every available space on the aircraft were filled with a combustible mixture of fuel and air. But this is not the case. The tanks contain jet fuel, with a flash point of about 100F. This means that if its temperature is below 100F, it can’t produce enough vapor to form a combustible mixture.
It’s pretty cold at cruising altitude, like -50F. So your fuel tanks aren’t going to violently explode, even if you throw a match into them. If you finely atomize and disperse the liquid fuel and apply an ignition source, you may get a pretty good fireball, but this will happen outside the fuel tank, after you’ve ruptured it
The reported/suspected cause of the explosion on TWA flight 800 was that the fuel tank had indeed gotten pretty hot, resulting in a combustible mixture of air and fuel vapor that was ignited by a short-circuit (spark) in some wiring. This may or may not have triggered explosions in neighboring tanks, depending on whether they were also above the flash point (100F). But one tank explosion is enough to bust up the airplane into unflyable chunks. The result of this incident was a new requirement for airlines to pump inert gas into the fuel tanks, displacing the air; that way, no matter how warm the fuel got, there just wouldn’t be any air present to form a combustible mixture.
And the fuselage isn’t full of an explosive mixture, either; it’s full of passengers, air, and farts. It may break up due to an adjacent explosion, or due to aerodynamic forces once it starts tumbling at 500+ MPH, but there’s nothing that will make it vigorously explode all on its own.
Well, there’s the source of your explosion right there.
They mostly use what is called annular blast-fragmentation or a continuous-rod warhead.
Wow. I had no idea.
When did they come up with that?
IIRC the original AIM-9 Sidewinder in the early 1960s was the first continuous rod warhead. But that’s off the top of my head. The Soviets might have come up with it first.
A little more research indicates continuous rod warheads date from the early-mid 1950s on SAMs, but Sidewinder in the mid-late 1950s was the first US AAM with that sort of warhead.
The Naval Talos SAM had a continuous rod warhead by 1960.
I’ve read that those RAF pilots didn’t actually ‘tap’ the V-1’s wing. They got their wingtip close enough to one of the V-1’s wings that it spoiled the airflow over it causing it to stall and spiral in.
Airliners in distress generally break up due to aerodynamic forces. Korean 007 lost control and went into an overspeed dive and broke apart before hitting the water. Same thing happened to the Shuttle Challenger.
Also not true; Challenger broke up immediately after one of the SRBs partially separated and ruptured the main fuel tank; the breakup happened while the shuttle was still ascending at ~2000 MPH.
I think Hail Ants meant Columbia, not Challenger.
In either case, both shuttles spontaneously disassembled due to airloads once they became uncontrollable and got sideways enough to the relative wind. They only really differ in *why *they became uncontrollable and in which phase of flight.
I’ve only seen one airliner crash; the pilot apparently confused between control level functions on a DC-8 pulled the airbrakes 50 feet up, bounced off the runway, and resumed flying. They attempted a go-around (I think) although I think they left one engine on the runway. Regardless, from 10 miles away you could see this mass of flames going slowly across the sky, a piece fell off also in flames, and then the main part went down (several miles from the airport) producing a massive fire and smoke column.
Airliners are at once very resilient and very fragile. It doesn’t take much to make them stop flying, and once they start to disintegrate in flight, they can break into a lot of pieces if going fast enough. But some of the resulting pieces are very large - for example, the tailpiece from the Egyptian airliner in the Sinai was essentially the last 20% of the plane, intact. The from cockpit section of the 747 in Lockerbie hit the ground in one piece, it appears. There’s a classic film of the airliner in Hawaii landing with most of the passenger section walls and roof missing. Once pieces start hitting each other in a 500mph wind, a lot of small debris can be generated and airliner sections peel off like a banana. I assume if the wing rips off and turns flat to the flight path at 500mph, wind forces will fold and break it where the engine weight momentum is pulling on it, creating 3 or more pieces, plus ailerons, etc.
Explosives are a whole new area of discussion. Anyone who thinks it’s trivial to plant a bunch of explosives unseen in a WTC-sized building (and wait until a major fire is under way to set them off) has never really understood how explosives do what they do. Particularly, the recent previews for “London Has Fallen” appear to show London Bridge exploding into a cloud of concrete shards. Good luck doing that without a few van-loads and barge-loads of explosives, and/or the ability to drill deep into the concrete structure. Just look at the very basic damage done by bombs in Iraq or Serbia - massive ordinance basically just collapses one support and the bridge falls down, but it does not shatter to tiny pieces. Earthquakes generally do more damage to a building, because they can wreck almost every support point at once.
Could a fighter fly just forward of it, come in close, and let the own jet engine burn away the cockpit like a massive blowtorch? I mean even on the runways airliners cant be right behind each other and thats only in idle.
+1 for Hollywood script–Seriously. While Tom Cruise pumps his fiat in the air and shouts burn baby burn."