Often in Hollywood you will see aerial or space dogfights in which a pilot will line up on a target’s 6 o’clock, destroy the target, and then fly straight through the cloud of smoke and fire and carry on. Is this realistic?? Aren’t there massive chunks of metal in this cloud waiting to chew up the insides of the attacker’s engines? Does this happen IRL?
In: 10
IRL There’s a lot of the room in the sky to just not fly through the fireball.
Most of the time the plane doesn’t instantly explode, you just shoot something important, like the pilot, engine, or control linkages.
Even if it does go up in a fireball, all the heavy bits keep moving in the direction they’re already moving.
If you’re on the tail of an enemy aircraft shooting guns at it, they’re going to be turning to avoid you, not just moving in a straight line, so all you’d have to do is stop leading the target. You’ll also be farther away if you’re shooting missiles at it.
In real life, most dog fights haven’t happened in fifty years or more, however typically I imagine a pilot would avoid that because debris can destroy an engine.
Absolutely not.
A jet engine gets easily totaled by sucking a metal debris. Let alone flying into metal debris at Mach1. It would mean doubling the speed of impact between the debris and the engine blades.
Also, movies do compress distances a lot to create pathos. If you shoot a plane with your gun, you are still far enough you need a hard maneuvering to catch the exploded aircraft. You need to fly one or more minutes and pull a lot of G forces to manage to pass through the falling debris.
If you hit the plane with a missile, you are way too far to even try. If you hit the plane with a modern long range missile, you don’t even see the plane or the explosion.
In movies you see people shooting at eachother in the same frame. IRL footage you see only one guy/vehicle on one side shooting at the horizon. That’s how real distances are.
In reality dogfights don’t really happen anymore and if they do, it’s at greater ranges than they show in movies so you would have room to avoid debris. But if you were to fly through the explosion then yes, the debris would damage the plane and all the gases and gunk would probably flame out the engine.
There is *so much room* in the air. If you were that close to a plane that exploded because you shot it up, you’d most likely be inventing new kinds of swearword as you frantically took evasive action. That is *ramming close*.
Also, explosions don’t exactly stop. The debris still has a ton of forward momentum. If you’re turning at all – which you 100% are if debris is in front of you and close enough to see – it is very unlikely you’ll hit it.
Space is like that but all the distances are a hundred times bigger. Relative speeds might not be huge, but there’s nothing to hide behind and you’d be fighting at distances where you couldn’t even see your opponent without your computers. See the excellent *The Expanse* TV show for a reasonably good depiction.
Just recently there was an incident where a Chinese military plane dumped chaff in front of an American one that potentially could have damaged the engines.
[https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/14/chinese-jet-us-military-interaction-00045832](https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/14/chinese-jet-us-military-interaction-00045832)
Even thick smoke can starve an engine, and anything bigger than a fleck of paint can chew up the fanblades. However in the air, at normal speeds and guns interception distances, I couldn’t tell you if it was realistic that a target’s debris would have any chance of occupying the same space as the pursuer.
In media, aircraft have to be close enough that they can fit in the same camera shot, or at least enter it a few seconds after each other so the audience can see their positioning play out in the dogfight.
It happened with V1 flying bombs aimed at London in WW2, but they had a ton of explosives on board and the debris or fire could damage the attacking aircraft.
Can it fly through debris? Sure can. But it’s likely the last flight before weeks in maintenance to repair the dmg on the turbine fins.
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