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
WWII bombers making it back to base after massive damage are like the epitome of survivorship bias
You hear about the epic tales of the planes that took significant damage but got lucky with it missing the critical systems. What you don’t hear about are the ones that took a lucky single hit and went down. There’s a lot of redundancy in a plane, particularly a large one, and losing 40% of the wing area to 20mm AP rounds is bad but not plummet from the sky bad, but a single machine gun hit to the tail control linkage can be plummet from the sky bad because you can no longer control the plane despite the small hole in it.
Modern planes can still take pretty significant damage and make it back to base. There’s a case of an Israeli F15 that landed with a single wing after a training accident. But bear in mind that the weapons modern planes go up against are far superior to WWII AA Guns and AA Artillery and are often high speed missiles or radar targeted high velocity gun batteries. Late war Anti-Aircraft weaponry was absolutely devastating in the Pacific Theater with radar guided 5″ guns able to pick off planes from quite a distance away.
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