The film was a James Cagney flick,Captains of the Clouds. And the age was 28.
In real life, it was not just age, but the fact that there was a near limitless supply of volunteers for fighters and they could be picky and younger men would have a longer shelf life.
In addition to Ak84’s reference, I suggest Dive Bomber (1941) starring Errol Flynn and Fred MacMurray as a navy doctor and pilot trying to solve the pilot-blackout problem (now known as G-LOC, I guess).
Wow. Sorry for the delay.
Let me move that over for you.
The drive brakes were hydraulically actuated, not the basic flight controls (rudder, elevators, ailerons). Hydraulically boosted flight controls were unusual on WWII a/c. Even the B-29, a then large a/c with lots of complicated then state-of-the-art systems had manually powered flight controls. Late models of the P-38 had hydraulically boosted ailerons because roll rate was important for fighters and a weakness of previous models of the ac/, but an innovation at the time.
For an accuracy comparison, high-level bombers at Midway attacked a number of Japanese ships, but scored no hits (and in most cases were far off target). On the upside, they were at too great an altitude to be attacked by Japanese fighters.
The American dive-bombers did a lot better.
True and also of almost all other countries’ attempts at medium altitude bombing (with unguided bombs) against moving ships (the Japanese Naval Air Force was a partial exception to that). Besides accuracy in terms of a static aim point, the bombs took too long to get there, and even if aimed accurately at the correctly predicted position of the ships on their course when the bombs were released, the ships could maneuver out from under the bombs by the time they hit the water.
Very low level horizontal bombing, called ‘skip bombing’ in the USAAF but several other air arms had similar tactics, could be very effective v ships .However, it exposed the attacking a/c more to ships’ AA. The USAAF method of countering that was a strong strafing armament in the a/c, and/or support by separate strafing a/c (as for example RAAF Beaufighters in the Battle of Bismarck Sea) to tamp down ships’ AA first.
Against stationary targets, the advantage of dive bombers in accuracy could sometimes be offset by their greater vulnerability to light AA, as compared to medium altitude level bombers. The French AF used A-24’s (the USAAF version of SBD) in the 1944-45 European campaign. Could be effective, but suffered heavily to German Army light AA. Level bombing B-26’s or even high speed ‘glide bombing’ fighter bombers were less accurate, but less vulnerable. Depended in part on the value of the target. A big warship in a key battle like Midway, it was make or break, sink at all costs. Attacking an army in the field it was more harassment, you had to come back every day, and losses to AA could pile up for dive bombers. Also dive bombers were typically more vulnerable to enemy fighters certainly compared to fighter bombers, if there were any enemy fighters around.
I just assumed the thread was moving so fast you couldn’t get a bearing on it. :d
This thread sent me down a rabbit hole that led to this fascinating document about the development of the SBD-1 Dauntless. Apparently, it’s predecessor (the BT-1) had satisfactory diving performance, but poor handling at low speeds, which was just a bit of a problem for a carrier-based aircraft.
The series of tests on the XBT-2 aircraft were largely focused on changing the control surfaces to improve low-speed handling and stall characteristics. With each change, dive tests were also done to make sure the high speed and pull out characteristics were still acceptable. To answer the OP’s question, there’s a reference to the amount of stick force necessary to pull out of a dive:
A single 40-pound pull should be easily within the abilities of any pilot with a minimal amount of physical training. For comparison, the stick-pull forces listed for level flight handling of the XBT-2 is typically under 12 pounds.
The Admiralty moved its entire warship design operation from London to Bath, but German intelligence thought that just a few high ranking staff officers had decamped there and were staying in hotels. Thus Bath was officially “a lesser town without specific aiming points”. To maintain that fiction, Bath was deliberately undefended, having neither a balloon barrage nor anti-aircraft guns.
In April 1942, Bath itself was the target, in a reprisal for the RAF bombing of Lübeck. During two nights and the following morning at the end of April, many hundreds of high explosive bombs and countless incendiary devices were dropped. The official figures show that around 900 buildings were completely destroyed and around 12,500 buildings were damaged during these raids. Over 400 people were killed, many of them women and children.
Not so much. Many WWII aces were over 25. ‘Pappy’ Boyington was in his 30’s when he flew with the ‘Black Sheep’ squadron. Stanford Tuck was 29 when the war ended. Johnnie Johnson was 30. David McCampbell, the Navy’s top scoring ace in WWII, was 35 when the war ended. Some of those pilots went on to fly in Korea as well.
From what I have read, one of the key requirements for fighter pilots in WWII was great vision. Chuck Yeager reportedly had 20/10 vision, and still had 20/15 vision in his 70’s. Pappy Boyington was most often the man who spotted enemy fighters first.
Next in imortance was situational awareness and tactics. Those all improve with age.
The reason most WWII fighter pilots were young is because aviation was fairly young and there weren’t that many pilots around, so new recruits fresh out of school were brought in and trained. That created a huge cohort of pilots born around 1920. In the axis countries they were young for the same reason, plus the casualty rate was so high that very few survived to be older pilots. Those that did were often promoted to positions that took them out of the cockpit or putnthem in training roles.
Finally, if you were successful in the sky you often got rotated out to go home and sell war bonds like Boyington, or rotated home to train other pilots and test airplanes like Dick Bong. So pilots in action in WWII tend to skew young, but it has little to do with physical aging.
For example, consider test pilots, especially after WWII. Dangerous, high stress, physically demanding flying, yet many of those test pilots were in their 40’s and even 50’s. Scott Crossfield, one of the most famous test pilots, didn’t even solo in an airplane until he was 29, and when he was flying the X-15 he was in his mid to late 30’s.
Chuck Yeager, born in 1923, was still flying Phantom fighters in Vietnam in 1968, and was still test-flying for NASA and the USAF in the 1970’s. He broke the sound barrier again in an F-15 Eagle in 1997 at 74 years old, then did it again (with a mandated backup pilot) in 2012 at age 89. As far as I know, he still has a pilot’s license today, and he is now 95.
I thought the whole dive bomber thing was because it was impossible to time AA fuses to hit a diving target, so they were a lot likelier to hit AA positions.
Strategically, this is not very important – it’s after the bomb has been released toward its target. So tough for that pilot & his plane, but them’s the odds in war. His commander knew that there would be some percentage of losses. If they managed to hit the target before being lost, that was a success, despite the loss of a pilot & plane. (And dive bombers had lower losses than other bombers.)
Another way to consider the dive bombing problem is to think about how much effort and secrecy was invested in the Norden bombsight. This was, for its time, a highly advanced mechanical computing bombsight that was integrated with the plane flight controls and bomb release mechanisms.
Even with all that, it STILL wasn’t that accurate by today’s standards. And that’s from a large, stable heavy bomber flying more or less straight and level on the bomb run. Smaller planes pretty much needed the Force, or something like dive bombing to get close to the target.
The Norden bomb sight never came close to the accuracy that was claimed for it in operational condtions. In fact, Britain achieved similar results with its own, much simpler Mark XIV bombsight.
One of the problems was that the Norden sight could only be used from high altitude, and therefore the bombs were subject to atmospheric changes as they fell. The Norden could calculate ground speed of the aircraft, and therefore the winds aloft at altitude, but it had no way of knowing how the winds changed on the way down. Even mild wind shear would throw the bombs off target.
Also, the Norden was connected to the controls of the plane to ensure that it was tracking straight and no yaw, pitch or roll inputs were being added as it calculated the release points and dropped the bombs. This made the bombers sitting ducks, and forced them to fly a looser atrack formation so they wouldn’t fly into each other. This meant it was even more difficult to saturate a small area with bombs, which was necessary because even with the Norden the bombers had a hard time dropping their bombs within 1000’ of the target.
Unfortunately, dive bombing was not a reasonable tactic for strategic bombing. It’s great against ships and tanks and soldiers, but not so much against industrial targets. The dive bombers just couldn’t carry enough load, and their draggy designs limited their range and speed. For example, the famed Stuka only had a range of 199 miles, and a cruise speed of 198 mph - so slow that fighter escorts couldn’t fly slow enough to stay with them. So they were sitting ducks in the sky. And they could only carry one 500lb bomb, making them useless for area bombing. They were, however, great for taking out ships and tanks and such when the Germans had air superiority.
The Navy dive bombers did better, the Marines operating the same SBDs did not, as they were too inexperienced and the commander, Major Henderson decided they were too inexperienced to attempt a dive bomb attack. He lead them in a suicide mission with a glide bombing attack, the worse of both worlds as it puts them low and slow, but with decreased accuracy.
Henderson was killed (the airstrip at Guadalcanal was named in his honor) as were many more in the squadron without inflicting any damage to the Japanese carriers.
Nitpick:
During the dive isn’t the problem. It’s after the dive, when the pilot attempts to pull out of the dive, that the plane and pilot are sustaining high positive G loads; that’s when blood tends to leave the head.
Oh, I know. My point was that if they couldn’t handle getting bombs from a big, stable heavy bomber flying straight and level within 1000’ of the target using the state of the art in mechanical computers, they definitely needed something like dive bombing for smaller scale bombing missions- no bombsight on a Stuka was going to be particularly helpful considering that it was difficult for the big bombers.
At some point though, digital computers came into their own w.r.t. bombsights, and suddenly pilots had very accurate and fast bombsights that could be projected onto their heads-up displays- in various video game simulations, they’ve looked like lines or dots showing where the bomb will land, although I’m not sure how realistic that is.
But modern day planes like the F-16 are drastically more accurate than the older ones, even without guided bombs of some sort- the Israeli strike on the Osirak reactor was with unguided bombs, and HALF of the bombs hit the reactor.
A performance which would get the squadron commander sacked these days.
Thanks for correcting this.