Been watching Catch-22 on Hulu, and I’m seeing all kinds of AA fire going off all over the place. I know the show is based on the book and somewhat of a satire, but even in Band of Brothers, the AA seemed to have a somewhat low success rate. I know these are television/movies, but was there any accuracy to the amount of AA fire shown in the films? I’m not sure how exactly how they worked. I guess the true question is, “How did these work? Why didn’t they try to fly above it? Was flying above an option? What kind of success rate did they provide? How have they improved over the years?
In: Engineering
This might seem like a cop-out, but the best source on this is probably the [Army Air Force’s training video on the subject](https://youtu.be/PIYVwqHM488).
The short of it is that most contemporary flack was designed to detonate at a particular altitude, and gunners and pilots were in a cat-and-mouse game of maneuvering vs aiming that involved a lot of guesswork and randomness.
The actual effectiveness of flack was also questionable, with some estimates putting the rounds-per-kill at above 3,000. This was due to all of the limitations of hitting something moving a couple hundred miles per hour at thousands of feet of altitude.
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