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
Firstly many bombers didn’t survive, you hear stories about ones that did but they were often shot down. Secondly is that they were built to take a few hits, they had armour in places and robust structures designed under the knowledge they would be under fire. A modern airliner has no armour and barely enough rigidity to be safe, they are built for fuel efficiency and not much else.
Flak also isn’t that effective compared to something like a modern surface to air missile, which is what shot down the plane over Iran. Even an airliner might survive being shot at briefly by flak, but if a plane gets hit by a missile it is almost impossible for it to survive,
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