Can dogfight pilots fly through debris?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.