I see pictures and hear stories of aircraft struggling back to base with hundreds of bullet holes or missing engines/parts of wings or shrapnel inside the wings. How did they stay in the air after all that anti air fire and why are modern aircraft weaker than them (Iran shot down one easily)?
In: Engineering
Most aircraft are semi-monocoque, there’s still a truss or frame structure beneath the skin, so an aircraft missing skin panels is not airworthy, but it still has enough integrity to get back to base if flown carefully, a lot of these aircraft didn’t have a pressurized cabin as the crew wore oxygen masks, this meant that a damaged panel didn’t cause an explosive decompression that can collapse floors and cause worse structural damage as the air escaping is akin to a massive compressive force.
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