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
Just luck. Some of them had four engins and could make it home with just one engine still operational provided the electronics and hydraulics that allowed control over the engine and steering were still in tact and the structural integrity of the plane doesn’t fail.
You’re looking at things from a survivor’s bias. For every plane that returned to base all swiss-cheesed, there were plenty of planes that got swiss-cheesed and crashed.
In fact there’s an engineers’ parable from WWII about exactly this:
Mechanics were diligently upgrading the armor on parts of planes that got all shot up, and an astute engineer pointed out, “if they’re making it back to base just fine with that part all shot up, then clearly the original design is sturdy enough! If you’re going to add more armor, add it somewhere else!”
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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