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
I would say that the AA fire is depicted fairly accurate. Flying above AA fire wasn’t possible for heavy AA guns as they could reach 30,000 ft altitude relatively easy though with a roughly 30 second delay/flight time of the shells. As it wasn’t really possible to get accurate hits at that altitude AA batteries would mostly just saturate the air space ahead of the bomber formations with well timed explosive shells that would go off all around the planes as you see it in those shows. Even though direct hits were relatively unlikely the shrapnel could still damage planes and wound/kill flight personnel, and a direct hit would most likely end in the plane going down. On a bombing run anywhere between 10-20% of planes would be shot down during the mission by AA fire and interceptor aircraft, and probably a similar percentage would be able to fly home with some damage. [This 1943 instructional video explains it quite well.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8zPNMqVi2E)
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