Mother F***ing Flyboys

[Ithikial_AU]

On the flip side sometimes you get lucky. Was playing Road to Nijmegen last night and this happened. (Possible minor spoilers)

Went on for a total victory due to German surrender but it was a tough slog.

[Ultradave]

I hope you bought a lottery ticket :-)

[Splinty]

Wow! That'll never happen again, guarantee that! LOL

[A Canadian Cat]

I love the "Stop, stop, stop" over the radio as the pilot is blasting away. Amazing. Oh it will happen again but the next time it will be the enemy that will get away Scott free

[altipueri]

I think I read that operations research analysis of Typhoon attacks showed they only had a 4% hit rate. So the chance of surviving 4 attacks would be: .96 x .96 x.96 x.96 or about 85%.

Not that I would want to chance it.

The Typhoon pilots claimed hit rate was much higher of course.

[Placebo]

Is that the chance of hitting the intended target or anything. I would say with all those troops in a small area the chance of them hitting something must be pretty high!

[YankeeDog]

I think I read that operations research analysis of Typhoon attacks showed they only had a 4% hit rate...

If I'm remembering the same operations research analysis you are, IIRC 4% was roughly the chance of a Typhoon on a rocket run actually KOing a tank that it could see and was aiming at under test range conditions (target stationary, no AA fire, good visibility, etc.)

While I don't know of any hard stats on this, It's a logical conjecture that if you're talking about a salvo of rockets fired into a concentration of units, it's much more likely that at least one of the rockets will land close enough to *something* to cause casualties and/or systems damage.

[altipueri]

Could be - and I can't recall if it was per rocket or per attack.

Trucks and horses and men of course suffered. But they don't count because we like tanks.

[Michael Emrys]

I think the research in question was to discover all the causes of destruction of German tanks, and the 4% (if that is the correct figure; I think it is close) refers to that proportion destroyed primarily due to aerial attack.

Michael

[YankeeDog]

I think the research in question was to discover all the causes of destruction of German tanks, and the 4% (if that is the correct figure; I think it is close) refers to that proportion destroyed primarily due to aerial attack.

Michael

Two different sets of research.

There definitely are figures out there estimating overall % of German tanks in the ETO KO'd by Air Attack. Depends a bit on what study you read, but regardless it's not all that high a proportion. However, IIRC it's higher than 4%... more like 8-10%, I think. There's a pretty large margin of uncertainty though, because in most studies I've seen a pretty high proportion of the German tank losses are listed as "unknown" or "abandoned".

During the war, the RAF also did some bombing run tests to discover just how effective F/Bs were at hitting and KOing tanks with rocket attacks. These are the tests I'm thinking of. It would take some digging to find them again, but IIRC a 4% "kill chance" is in the right ballpark for what the bombing run tests found (again, under ideal, test range conditions, which indicates that the actual chance of a F/B KOing a tank on any given attack run under real combat conditions would be somewhat less than 4%, even against a stationary target in the open).

[db_zero]

Besides tanks, how much of the other stuff did air attacks take out? Trucks, half tracks, prime movers, artillery. The German army relied on horses and don't think horses and air attacks go well together.

Air attacks is also disruptive. The Germans were masters of mobile defense and counter attacks and it pretty hard to do that when the enemy rules the skies.