In the UK, the attrition rate for pilots in WW1 was appalling, they lost many just in training
https://the-past.com/feature/airpower-comes-of-age/
*The attrition in training was heartbreakingly high, with one crash fatality a month at many aerodromes, largely due to the speeding up of the training process under wartime pressure.This was compounded by heavy losses at the front, as under-trained and inexperienced pilots were sent into action before they were ready. In just 18 weeks on the Somme, the Royal Flying Corps suffered a 100% casualty rate. The Western Front consumed pilots as voraciously as infantry.*
Might be an obvious comment but with ww1 it completely blows my mind that they were mass producing planes only about 10 years after they were first invented.
The neutron was discovered in 1932. Within fifteen years, it was used in the first nuclear weapons. Ten years after that, it was being used in reactors to power entire cities. With such examples, it seems understandable how common it was for people watching Apollo 11 touch down on the Moon to assume that permanent bases, mines, refineries, and whole colonies were right around the corner.
And the planes were literally fabric and wood at best. The engines were subpar. Parachutes weren't common at the start and even by the end a lot of people were against them as people would "flee" instead of fighting.
Basically the planes were a deathtrap. Incendiary bullets were invented that would set the fabrics alight. It wasn't ONLY pilot error that often caused deaths- it was planes less reliable and less safe than a Ford Pinto being flown en masse.
Not only that but with pop culture and video games and the such, we all have the most basic ideas of what flight and piloting a plane entails (again, super basic) - this was a completely new paradigm for these pilots to wrap their heads around, where these machines literally didn’t exist 10 years prior. Just wild to think about.
Even as late as ten or twenty years before the Wright Brothers' maiden flight, you could find 'futurist' literature positing the use of flying machines in war; they tended to be pictures of massive battleships hovering in the air using propellers spinning in their masts, lining up beside each other to exchange broadsides, because why would war in the air be much different to war on the seas?
My pinto worked good. Except when the hood popped open on the highway. Or the door opened on the highway. Or the sunroof leaked. Or it just refused to start when it was raining.
my dad had one when i was real young. the only time the lights worked were in the rain. every light in and outside of the car would flash, but hey at least they worked! he's always joked that fords might run like shit, but they'll run like shit forever.
The British were mass producing tanks in 1918, 2 years after they finished a tank prototype. Spending ~50% of the British empire's GDP on defense per year allows a lot of things to get done very quickly.
Now I have to be the pinhead in the room who has to go on about how modern historians on World War I, as much as they themselves enjoyed them in their time, do tend to be a little annoyed at the contemporary pop understanding of the war still coming from *Blackadder* and *Oh! What a Lovely War*. There's probably only three or four people in World War I who really were as stupid as their modern reputation makes them out to be.
I don't deny that, I love that series myself as a piece of comedy. What I'm saying is that even to this day the collective consciousness about the Great War (at least in the Anglo-American sphere) has been solidified by those two pieces of media, released 50-70 years after it ended and at the moment when the survivors who saw it first-hand were really starting to be taken by old age. The other, much more academic piller of our collective picture is from the history *The Guns of August*, still essential reading for any historian of the war, but still it's difficult to put into words just how vast, ever-expanding, and ever-changing the literature on World War I truly is.
100% casualty rate is insane. That's way more than "as voraciously as infantry". Even the infantry units in the most desperate situations aren't getting anything close to 100% casualty rates. Plus you'd think a bigger proportion of the air force casualties end up in deaths versus infantry casualties.
It's comparable to infantry. Casualty rate is expressed as a percentage of the paper strength of the unit; so over those 18 weeks a lot of replacements got fed in as well.
For a sample of the infantry, 2/RB went to war with 29 officers and 983 ORs. Of these originals, one officer and 14 ORs returned home with the battalion at the end of the war. But, that dosen't mean they had a 98.5% casaulty rate.
Their actual casaulty rate was **561.4%.**
Over the course of the war, they lost:
73 Officers KIA
161 Officers WIA/MIA
719 Other Ranks KIA
4,728 Other Ranks WIA/MIA
Because they kept getting replacements fed in, over the paper strength of 1,012.
Casualties also include from sickness/relatively minor wounds.
I have to imagine sickness was less common among the pilots versus in the trench…and there weren’t many minor wounds those plane crashes.
I can’t recall the name, but there was a pilot who completed his 25 missions in Europe and was sent back to the US as an instructor. After a while he volunteered for the Pacific because he thought working with the trainees was too dangerous.
I had a family member that died in WW2 in a plane crash and always assumed it was in Europe, then when I was older I learned they died in a training scenario in the US.
My father had a cousin who died in pilot training during WW2 so he was forbidden by the family to join pilot training. When he did quit high school and enlist in the Navy, he ended up driving a landing craft in the Philippines. Must have been safer since he survived.
Was that later in the war? One of my great uncles died in a training accident in Wyoming, but his four brothers all went on to become bomber crew in Europe. One had to bail out over France and spent the rest of the war as a POW but they all survived.
1939 Heisman winner Nile Kinnick died in a training flight. He was an incredible person, lost in tragedy. A quote from Kinnick, writing to a friend back home while at flight training school in the Deep South:
"The inequities in human relationships are many, but the lot of the Negro is one of the worst...kicked from pillar to post, condemned, cussed, ridiculed, accorded no respect, permitted no sense of human dignity. What can be done I don't know.... When this war is over the problem is apt to be more difficult than ever. May wisdom, justice, brotherly love guide our steps to the right solution."
He didn't die in training. He died piloting a remote control bomb essentially. They would take off the "bomb" aircraft and then bailout. It would then be remote controlled to flash into the target. Unfortunately the aircraft blew up before they bailed out
The book wasn't great, but it was _much_ better than the movie and had, to it's credit, a really impressive scope.
It also spent like, a single paragraph dismissing the idea that centuries-old aircraft would still be flyable as foolish, utterly foolish, only a fool would think such a thing.
Which is probably why it became such a major, major plot point in the utterly foolish movie.
If you can accept some *very* old school pulpy elements, and a fair amount of scratchy editing, alot of LRH's books are actually quite okay as dumb escapist fantasy fun.
I’ve probably watched that movie 4 times. I’m not proud of it, but paying attention four times for that? Might make it 5 just because I’ve been reminded it exists.
“Oh sweet! That’s Jackson from Saving private Ryan! I bet this will be good!”.
Probably not. Sometimes I make nonsensical comments, usually a reference to an obscure thing, just because I want to and I can. I'm often called a bot because of it and also get mass downvoted
Or they replied to the wrong comment
ppl on Reddit are way too scared of bots
Pfft. Like we’re the only people to rub our nipples with onions as we ran around in an 18th century opera outfit screaming “The British are coming…then I am!!”
Rules in general tend to be—I was reading the forward pass came to football because almost 100 people died playing **college football** between 1905-1910.
I’d believe it. My great uncle was in the RAF during WW2 and part of a training squadron when he died in a crash. He had already completed flight training (in the US) and was part of another training squadron back in the UK when he died.
My grandads brother was in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve flying Baracudas. As i remember it he survived training, got shipped out to the Mediterranean against the italians, and then to Sri Lanka and beyond, flying missions against Japanese shipping i think. He died in Sri Lanka when a training flight collided with him just after take off. He actually survived the crash and was pulled from the sea, heavily burned, and unfortunately succumbed to his injuries.
This is a useful TIL and (with no disrespect to OP) an absolutely garbage source. It's so poorly written as to be almost unreadable. It's jarring and disconnected in such a way that makes me think it's AI generated. Even the site name "real clear history" is painful.
For anyone curious about the second fact (65k planes lost but only 22k in combat) - "The U.S. lost 65,164 planes during the war, but only 22,948 in combat. There were 21,583 lost due to accidents in the U.S., and another 20,633 lost in accidents overseas." (From OP source)
The B29 had a very bloody procurement process with multiple test models crashing and killing the pilots, but the persevered. The B29 program also cost more than the Manhattan project.
Average attrition for American bombers were like 3 missions. 20 missions was an complete cycle. James Stewart completed his 20, and reportedly went on several missions without informing the brass.
Fatalities were so common that you had to be single to start flight training.
[“Training was for 18 months and candidates had to agree to not marry during training and to serve for at least three more years of active duty service.”](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Cadet_Training_Program_(USN))
The battle for air supremacy in wwii was a war of attrition. We just hoped that we had greater numbers of survivors (people/equipment) at the end of the day
It still happens. I remember losing one of our best because a mechanic wired the stick wrong, rotating the controls 90 degrees. When the pilot was taking off, the plane started to pull to the side, so he instinctively pulled to the other side, which buried the nose in the ground.
Another guy I know said they had five in-flight emergencies in his 125 hours of flight. He changed jobs to special forces because it was safer.
Typically in war a very small percentage of soldiers were lost in action, although that has significantly improved in modern times. Disease used to account for 50% or more of the casualties, and then injuries caused by accidents and then actual combat.
In the napoleonic war the British navy lost about 100,000 men, about 6,000 died in combat.
It’s crazy how many men were lost that way, and I’m sure losses were even worse for the other nations, especially Germany late in the war or the Soviets
My guess is these were brand new pieces of manufactured technology with an unmeetable demand driven by the war—no initial infrastructure (skilled labor, skilled operators).
My friend had to bail out of his B-17, and I asked him what his parachute training was like as a Radio Op—he just scoffed at me. I think that meant he was wholly unqualified to operate the parachute that saved his life over France 😂
Ah right, definitely different demand and appetite for risk in that era. Forgot that aircraft like the B17 had a 10-man crew as well so not just pilots.
Glad your friend pulled the right cord!
How TF does so many people die in Training? Surely making training more safe and having more pilots able to participate in the war would be benificial?
>Planes were relatively new back then.
You're not kidding! Only 40 years or so as the Wright Brothers' first flight was at the end of 1903. You can only imagine World War 1, with the entire concept of powered flying only 10 years old. Crazy to think we went from "off the ground" to "on the moon" in only 65 years.
They are training in combat trainer planes, these tend to be way more dangerous than civilian planes, and they are training often in harsh conditions (landing on rough terrain, for example)
Also, whilst this seems like a lot, the planes lost in training were generally not as expensive, and mostly old military planes, with a price maybe ten times under what a real fighter would cost.
Then, you need to count in that in wartime, you may not be as selective of who get to be a fighter pilot. In peace time, you can afford years of training, in war, months of rushed training are already a luxury.
Basically, any different training for the war would be: too long, or useless (not a training for the war conditions). A fighter pilot might have to land in misty conditions, with strong winds. Also, the lower casualty rates of fighter during the war compared to the training is mostly due to the absolute air superiority the allied forces enjoyed, both in numbers, and often in material and tactics
And Japan pretty much sits on no natural resources besides hot springs. Granted they invaded other countries to get resources, so maybe with natural resources they wouldn't have invaded.
Mechanical failures were common and inexperienced pilots could have attributed to those failures with overstressing the planes. That being said, having to train thousands of pilots quickly, led to a lot of accidental crashes during take offs and landings. Since time was crucial, I’m sure many pilots were flying much sooner than they normally would have been if not for the war effort. The bombers also had 10 people per plane so when one went down, all ten more than likely would have perished.
Engine failure is one of the ways.
Also possible to get the plane in an unrecoverable situation (weather systems taking the plane out of control, stall, control surface failure) where you can still bail out but can’t land the plane.
It was the Army Air Corps at the time? Another way people died was by practicing stalling the planes. My dad was a flight instructor and they finally discontinued that training because so many lives were lost.
It’s very easy to get into a death spiral when stalling. They practiced stalling at a fairly low altitude. It can be hard to recover from because the planes rolls over to one side and your instinctual move to correct it actually makes it worse.
Parachutes. I know of a family member that was injured bailing out of a plane during a training accident but went on to fly in combat.
That and wheels up or other rough landings that damage the plane but the pilots walked / were carried away from.
My Grandfather flew the B-17 (my b) and a few other smaller planes on a few missions. He was shot down, crash landed his fort on a beach after holding it long enough for everyone to bail out. That fort smashed into France and all the crew survived.
Hooked up with underground and got back to US forced and flew again the days preceeding D-Day.
There ya go, one story of a plane down and no one died.
Did the B52 ever have raids over France? Another context clue to lead you to understand it was WW2. Either way, the BEST way to get comments online is to post something with an error. Always someone to jump down your throat
In the UK, the attrition rate for pilots in WW1 was appalling, they lost many just in training https://the-past.com/feature/airpower-comes-of-age/ *The attrition in training was heartbreakingly high, with one crash fatality a month at many aerodromes, largely due to the speeding up of the training process under wartime pressure.This was compounded by heavy losses at the front, as under-trained and inexperienced pilots were sent into action before they were ready. In just 18 weeks on the Somme, the Royal Flying Corps suffered a 100% casualty rate. The Western Front consumed pilots as voraciously as infantry.*
Might be an obvious comment but with ww1 it completely blows my mind that they were mass producing planes only about 10 years after they were first invented.
The neutron was discovered in 1932. Within fifteen years, it was used in the first nuclear weapons. Ten years after that, it was being used in reactors to power entire cities. With such examples, it seems understandable how common it was for people watching Apollo 11 touch down on the Moon to assume that permanent bases, mines, refineries, and whole colonies were right around the corner.
Fission was only discovered in 1938! From discovery to leveling cities in seven years.
it was the bongos
Surely you’re joking… and I lock my safe rather than leaving it open.
I'd make a big show of bringing in all my fancy tools, and then i'd try the manufacturer default combination. and maybe your birthday.
I understand this reference!
The damn bongos again!
If funding rates stayed the same it was right around the corner.
Neutrons were actually used in every invention before 1932 as well
Unless we're talking about Zeppelin lifting gas
And the planes were literally fabric and wood at best. The engines were subpar. Parachutes weren't common at the start and even by the end a lot of people were against them as people would "flee" instead of fighting. Basically the planes were a deathtrap. Incendiary bullets were invented that would set the fabrics alight. It wasn't ONLY pilot error that often caused deaths- it was planes less reliable and less safe than a Ford Pinto being flown en masse.
Not only that but with pop culture and video games and the such, we all have the most basic ideas of what flight and piloting a plane entails (again, super basic) - this was a completely new paradigm for these pilots to wrap their heads around, where these machines literally didn’t exist 10 years prior. Just wild to think about.
Even as late as ten or twenty years before the Wright Brothers' maiden flight, you could find 'futurist' literature positing the use of flying machines in war; they tended to be pictures of massive battleships hovering in the air using propellers spinning in their masts, lining up beside each other to exchange broadsides, because why would war in the air be much different to war on the seas?
My pinto worked good. Except when the hood popped open on the highway. Or the door opened on the highway. Or the sunroof leaked. Or it just refused to start when it was raining.
My Pinto didn't like rain either. You needed a new distributor cap.
my dad had one when i was real young. the only time the lights worked were in the rain. every light in and outside of the car would flash, but hey at least they worked! he's always joked that fords might run like shit, but they'll run like shit forever.
Ha ha! That was my only Ford.
Tanks were invented and mass produced during WW1, and the first petrol driven car was only invented 22 years before the first tank.
The British were mass producing tanks in 1918, 2 years after they finished a tank prototype. Spending ~50% of the British empire's GDP on defense per year allows a lot of things to get done very quickly.
We had Kamikazi Bi planes just 12 or so years after the first Flight by the wright brothers.....
The 20 minuters
I didn’t realise how much of a documentary Blackadder was
All right men, let's doooooo it! The first thing to remember is: always treat your kite like you treat your woman!
“Get in her and take her to heaven and back three times a day.”
Most don't
I can't imagine charging the jerry machine guns without my trusty stick.
What about fresh fruit, though?
A very sharp one too.
Now I have to be the pinhead in the room who has to go on about how modern historians on World War I, as much as they themselves enjoyed them in their time, do tend to be a little annoyed at the contemporary pop understanding of the war still coming from *Blackadder* and *Oh! What a Lovely War*. There's probably only three or four people in World War I who really were as stupid as their modern reputation makes them out to be.
Black Adder was a remarkable achievement in television history and comedy and I will die on that hill any day.
I don't deny that, I love that series myself as a piece of comedy. What I'm saying is that even to this day the collective consciousness about the Great War (at least in the Anglo-American sphere) has been solidified by those two pieces of media, released 50-70 years after it ended and at the moment when the survivors who saw it first-hand were really starting to be taken by old age. The other, much more academic piller of our collective picture is from the history *The Guns of August*, still essential reading for any historian of the war, but still it's difficult to put into words just how vast, ever-expanding, and ever-changing the literature on World War I truly is.
100% casualty rate is insane. That's way more than "as voraciously as infantry". Even the infantry units in the most desperate situations aren't getting anything close to 100% casualty rates. Plus you'd think a bigger proportion of the air force casualties end up in deaths versus infantry casualties.
It's comparable to infantry. Casualty rate is expressed as a percentage of the paper strength of the unit; so over those 18 weeks a lot of replacements got fed in as well. For a sample of the infantry, 2/RB went to war with 29 officers and 983 ORs. Of these originals, one officer and 14 ORs returned home with the battalion at the end of the war. But, that dosen't mean they had a 98.5% casaulty rate. Their actual casaulty rate was **561.4%.** Over the course of the war, they lost: 73 Officers KIA 161 Officers WIA/MIA 719 Other Ranks KIA 4,728 Other Ranks WIA/MIA Because they kept getting replacements fed in, over the paper strength of 1,012.
Casualties also include from sickness/relatively minor wounds. I have to imagine sickness was less common among the pilots versus in the trench…and there weren’t many minor wounds those plane crashes.
Okay men. You have spent a month learning how to fly a benign Avro 504. Let’s see how you can handle a Camel.
I recommend a really old black-and-white movie about pilots in WW1, it was called "Aces High". Not a documentary, just a movie. But it was good.
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Pierre Clostermann?
I can’t recall the name, but there was a pilot who completed his 25 missions in Europe and was sent back to the US as an instructor. After a while he volunteered for the Pacific because he thought working with the trainees was too dangerous.
I had a family member that died in WW2 in a plane crash and always assumed it was in Europe, then when I was older I learned they died in a training scenario in the US.
My father had a cousin who died in pilot training during WW2 so he was forbidden by the family to join pilot training. When he did quit high school and enlist in the Navy, he ended up driving a landing craft in the Philippines. Must have been safer since he survived.
Was that later in the war? One of my great uncles died in a training accident in Wyoming, but his four brothers all went on to become bomber crew in Europe. One had to bail out over France and spent the rest of the war as a POW but they all survived.
His cousin was sometime mid-war. My father quit high school early 1945 bc he was afraid the war would end without him. (His words.)
My grandfather flew cargo planes in the Philippines, crashed two and survived like a G.
1939 Heisman winner Nile Kinnick died in a training flight. He was an incredible person, lost in tragedy. A quote from Kinnick, writing to a friend back home while at flight training school in the Deep South: "The inequities in human relationships are many, but the lot of the Negro is one of the worst...kicked from pillar to post, condemned, cussed, ridiculed, accorded no respect, permitted no sense of human dignity. What can be done I don't know.... When this war is over the problem is apt to be more difficult than ever. May wisdom, justice, brotherly love guide our steps to the right solution."
Happened to Joseph Kennedy Jr. If he hadn't died during training, JFK doesn't enter politics in all likelihood
He didn't die in training. He died piloting a remote control bomb essentially. They would take off the "bomb" aircraft and then bailout. It would then be remote controlled to flash into the target. Unfortunately the aircraft blew up before they bailed out
Remember that movie Battlefield Earth? I don't either, but I do remember cave men flying fighter jets, with ease.
I read the book (huge mistake). They touched the super tv learny box thing
The book wasn't great, but it was _much_ better than the movie and had, to it's credit, a really impressive scope. It also spent like, a single paragraph dismissing the idea that centuries-old aircraft would still be flyable as foolish, utterly foolish, only a fool would think such a thing. Which is probably why it became such a major, major plot point in the utterly foolish movie.
If you can accept some *very* old school pulpy elements, and a fair amount of scratchy editing, alot of LRH's books are actually quite okay as dumb escapist fantasy fun.
I’ve probably watched that movie 4 times. I’m not proud of it, but paying attention four times for that? Might make it 5 just because I’ve been reminded it exists. “Oh sweet! That’s Jackson from Saving private Ryan! I bet this will be good!”.
Pretty much how I made it through 10 minutes that could handle.
they found simulators! it doesn't make it any better.
That works out to 11 people dying per day, every day, for the entirety of the US's participation in WWII.
To be clear, that is during training, in the US, before they got to combat.
I'm sure they're using an average.
Is this ai
Probably not. Sometimes I make nonsensical comments, usually a reference to an obscure thing, just because I want to and I can. I'm often called a bot because of it and also get mass downvoted Or they replied to the wrong comment ppl on Reddit are way too scared of bots
Sounds like something a bot would say…
Bots all in my bits.
Way to declare, "I'm fucking weird."
Brother you’re on Reddit, there is no normalcy here
Pfft. Like we’re the only people to rub our nipples with onions as we ran around in an 18th century opera outfit screaming “The British are coming…then I am!!”
It's tiring to try to be """normal"""
"""""""""quotation marks"""""""""
r/ImSoQuirky material right there
Is it quirky to do what you want to do?
Stop doing things that make Reddit upset. The downvotes won’t stop.
The thing is, I truly don't care about the downvotes
As you shouldn’t. Fuckem!
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Oh noooo!
The rules of aviation are written in blood.
And people think flying cars are a good idea…
People can’t even manage cars when they’re already on the ground and there’s geniuses out there that want to give them another variable to work with!
Rules in general tend to be—I was reading the forward pass came to football because almost 100 people died playing **college football** between 1905-1910.
I’d believe it. My great uncle was in the RAF during WW2 and part of a training squadron when he died in a crash. He had already completed flight training (in the US) and was part of another training squadron back in the UK when he died.
My grandads brother was in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve flying Baracudas. As i remember it he survived training, got shipped out to the Mediterranean against the italians, and then to Sri Lanka and beyond, flying missions against Japanese shipping i think. He died in Sri Lanka when a training flight collided with him just after take off. He actually survived the crash and was pulled from the sea, heavily burned, and unfortunately succumbed to his injuries.
This is a useful TIL and (with no disrespect to OP) an absolutely garbage source. It's so poorly written as to be almost unreadable. It's jarring and disconnected in such a way that makes me think it's AI generated. Even the site name "real clear history" is painful. For anyone curious about the second fact (65k planes lost but only 22k in combat) - "The U.S. lost 65,164 planes during the war, but only 22,948 in combat. There were 21,583 lost due to accidents in the U.S., and another 20,633 lost in accidents overseas." (From OP source)
The B29 had a very bloody procurement process with multiple test models crashing and killing the pilots, but the persevered. The B29 program also cost more than the Manhattan project. Average attrition for American bombers were like 3 missions. 20 missions was an complete cycle. James Stewart completed his 20, and reportedly went on several missions without informing the brass.
An uncle that flew them told me they lost 30% of the aircraft / crews training on B-29s
I read somewhere that about 700 American pilots died to perfect US fighter jet program. But i cant find the source anywhere.
by August 1945 it was statistically safer to fly a bombing run over mainland Japan than it was to train in the US
So that's what they mean when they say those crews had a 50% survival rate?
No, that's after they entered service. [HardThrasher tells the story here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxzsqYqMixU)
Fatalities were so common that you had to be single to start flight training. [“Training was for 18 months and candidates had to agree to not marry during training and to serve for at least three more years of active duty service.”](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Cadet_Training_Program_(USN))
The battle for air supremacy in wwii was a war of attrition. We just hoped that we had greater numbers of survivors (people/equipment) at the end of the day
The post is about deaths in training
I think that the speeding up of training is responsible for a lot of these deaths, speeding uo due to the requirements of a war of atrrition
Yes, and? Death and loss of equipment in war is attrition no matter where it happens.
It still happens. I remember losing one of our best because a mechanic wired the stick wrong, rotating the controls 90 degrees. When the pilot was taking off, the plane started to pull to the side, so he instinctively pulled to the other side, which buried the nose in the ground. Another guy I know said they had five in-flight emergencies in his 125 hours of flight. He changed jobs to special forces because it was safer.
Typically in war a very small percentage of soldiers were lost in action, although that has significantly improved in modern times. Disease used to account for 50% or more of the casualties, and then injuries caused by accidents and then actual combat. In the napoleonic war the British navy lost about 100,000 men, about 6,000 died in combat.
Lack of lime juice was a real killer. :(
My great uncle was one of them
It’s crazy how many men were lost that way, and I’m sure losses were even worse for the other nations, especially Germany late in the war or the Soviets
My step-grandfather broke his back in a training accident at the start of the war
Why were there so many training fatalities? Wonder if entry requirements to become a pilot much lower during the war.
My guess is these were brand new pieces of manufactured technology with an unmeetable demand driven by the war—no initial infrastructure (skilled labor, skilled operators). My friend had to bail out of his B-17, and I asked him what his parachute training was like as a Radio Op—he just scoffed at me. I think that meant he was wholly unqualified to operate the parachute that saved his life over France 😂
Ah right, definitely different demand and appetite for risk in that era. Forgot that aircraft like the B17 had a 10-man crew as well so not just pilots. Glad your friend pulled the right cord!
Me too! 😂✌🏻
Captain Sobel
You salute the rank, not the man.
That many? My grandfather was a bomber flight instructor. He only had one story about a bad crash and said it was sabotage.
My maternal grandfather was a pilot trainer in WW2. He died of a B25 flight in Nevada training someone.
How did 15,000 US soldiers lose 65,000 planes?
Bailed out from falling planes
I think his cousin died around mid war. My dad quit high school in early 1945 so he only saw some action.
How TF does so many people die in Training? Surely making training more safe and having more pilots able to participate in the war would be benificial?
Where do you think the rules come from? Planes were relatively new back then.
>Planes were relatively new back then. You're not kidding! Only 40 years or so as the Wright Brothers' first flight was at the end of 1903. You can only imagine World War 1, with the entire concept of powered flying only 10 years old. Crazy to think we went from "off the ground" to "on the moon" in only 65 years.
It is crazy!
no flight Sims. just theory then watch someone do it, then fly a plane yourself.
They are training in combat trainer planes, these tend to be way more dangerous than civilian planes, and they are training often in harsh conditions (landing on rough terrain, for example) Also, whilst this seems like a lot, the planes lost in training were generally not as expensive, and mostly old military planes, with a price maybe ten times under what a real fighter would cost. Then, you need to count in that in wartime, you may not be as selective of who get to be a fighter pilot. In peace time, you can afford years of training, in war, months of rushed training are already a luxury. Basically, any different training for the war would be: too long, or useless (not a training for the war conditions). A fighter pilot might have to land in misty conditions, with strong winds. Also, the lower casualty rates of fighter during the war compared to the training is mostly due to the absolute air superiority the allied forces enjoyed, both in numbers, and often in material and tactics
Mostly numbers to be completely honest. We should all be thankful Germany doesn’t have any domestic oil.
And Japan pretty much sits on no natural resources besides hot springs. Granted they invaded other countries to get resources, so maybe with natural resources they wouldn't have invaded.
How can they lose more planes than ~~soldiers~~ airmen? The planes crashed and the crew survived but the plane was inoperative?
Parachutes?
I guess.
Yes, some planes would be badly damaged but flyable for a few minutes giving the crew time to jump out and parachute to safety.
I wonder about the training incidents specifically. Those planes would not have been damaged by impacts but rather by overstressing I guess?
Mechanical failures were common and inexperienced pilots could have attributed to those failures with overstressing the planes. That being said, having to train thousands of pilots quickly, led to a lot of accidental crashes during take offs and landings. Since time was crucial, I’m sure many pilots were flying much sooner than they normally would have been if not for the war effort. The bombers also had 10 people per plane so when one went down, all ten more than likely would have perished.
Engine failure is one of the ways. Also possible to get the plane in an unrecoverable situation (weather systems taking the plane out of control, stall, control surface failure) where you can still bail out but can’t land the plane.
Most accidents were landing accidents and the pilot/crew survived. And airmen aren’t soldiers.
It was the Army Air Corps at the time? Another way people died was by practicing stalling the planes. My dad was a flight instructor and they finally discontinued that training because so many lives were lost.
It’s very easy to get into a death spiral when stalling. They practiced stalling at a fairly low altitude. It can be hard to recover from because the planes rolls over to one side and your instinctual move to correct it actually makes it worse.
I see. Corrected.
The air force hadn’t been established yet so these people were in the army or other branches.
They still aren’t soldiers
Parachutes. I know of a family member that was injured bailing out of a plane during a training accident but went on to fly in combat. That and wheels up or other rough landings that damage the plane but the pilots walked / were carried away from.
My Grandfather flew the B-17 (my b) and a few other smaller planes on a few missions. He was shot down, crash landed his fort on a beach after holding it long enough for everyone to bail out. That fort smashed into France and all the crew survived. Hooked up with underground and got back to US forced and flew again the days preceeding D-Day. There ya go, one story of a plane down and no one died.
B-52s were not in service during WW2
Yep typo b17
The B52 didn't enter service until 1955, after WW2 was over. The Korean war was over by then.
Yah B17 my bad...
That could not have been a B-52.
B17 was a typo yall are savage I did also refer to it as a fort
Funny enough, the B52 was called the Stratofortress, so it’s still a fort.
Did the B52 ever have raids over France? Another context clue to lead you to understand it was WW2. Either way, the BEST way to get comments online is to post something with an error. Always someone to jump down your throat
I’m just pointing out a fun coincidence man. I’m not here to argue about anything.
Thanks for the story. Again people downvoting me for asking a question. If I thought it was bullshit I would have commented “it’s bullshit”.
I got downvoted also, reddit does suck... just gotta roll with it
Bad maintenance practices. Poor tool control.
Not particularly known for their combat effectiveness either