Fighter Jet Challenges from a Different Era

Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia talks of several problems from the Second World War that I had never thought about. They do seem obvious once you hear of it…

 

With bomber planes flying at high speeds at high altitudes (to avoid being hit by anti-aircraft fire), the odds of any bomb landing where one wanted it to was remote. What was the windspeed? The speed of the aircraft? Was the plane level when you dropped the bomb or moving up/down? Or side to side? And you couldn’t even see the tiny target so far below clearly anyway.

 

Even though some devices (they were practically analog computers!) were built to try and solve this problem, they never worked out. Because in practice, the person operating it had to set the dials while under enemy fire, in a shaking plane, and sometimes with clouds hiding the target altogether.

 

This could explain why both the Allies and the Axis powers practiced indiscriminate bombing during the war. If you can’t aim precisely, you spray and pray that at least some bombs will hit the target.

 

The other problem the book describes was about the Allies getting to Japan. An ocean separated it on one side from the nearest landmass (the Americas) from which a plane could take off. No plane could fly that distance and back. But there were three volcanic islands in the Pacific from where a bomber could hope to fly to Japan and back. The Americans knew this, so too did the Japanese. And that led to some of the most vicious fighting over three islands that nobody had even heard of until then.

 

An alternative route was considered. From India, fly over the Himalayas to China. Re-fuel and fly to Japan. But this route had multiple problems. First one – crossing the outrageously tall Himalayas. The planes of those days couldn’t fly that reliably. Secondly, how to get aviation fuel to the landing site in China? After a few attempts and a high failure rate on both fronts (crossing the Himalayas; and getting fuel to China), this approach was aborted.

 

It made me realize how far war tech has come since then. Those crosshairs we have in our video games to aim and shoot? That’s a reality and used for precision bombing. The distance flights can travel has increased enormously. So too has their reliability. And all that is even without getting into missiles can get the job done faster (and one-way) than any fighter jet.

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