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
Well, Iran shot down a plane with a surface to air missile. Which is 1000s of times more powerful than bullets and flak. (and im probably still off by a few orders of magnitude)
Bullet, unless they hit something super important just punch holes in stuff.
A missile explodes and destroys the craft.
Fun fact, there’s a lot of survivorship bias here. *A lot* of bombers *did* get shot down, and the ones that survived were the ones where important parts didn’t get hit. You really never saw a craft that hit the cockpit (which kills the pilot) or hit the engines return.
[Here is a great video about that by Eddie Woo.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9WFpVsRtQg)
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