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Show fey GapiaUi B&mand BncoJzei BASIC FLIGHT INSTRUCTION Hani Boy, tiaf's uhal Td like to do! Robinson Hot so fast, brother. You see, before the actual bombing the crew likes to make a trial run over the target, just to make sure that everything is right and ready for the show. That's called the bombing run. The data got together on the sighting run are used in the bombing run. On that second run the bombardier sees the objective come into his sights he watches for the right point and when that comes, he presses' the button, and the bombs fall directly on the target. tar-get. Or so we hope, if the data of the sighting run are correct! Hank Gosh, that's the stuff! And hoto is it done in dive bombing? Robinson Well, there are two kinds of dive bombing. There is precision pre-cision bombing done in a slight dive, and this mustn't be confused with true dive bombing. The second kind, the true dive bombing, is done at angles in excess of 40 degrees. .When you dive bomb, you aim the whole plane at the target. And here's something many people don't seem to realize: the bomb is released re-leased a fraction of a second after the pull-out has begun. This timing Is used in order to launch the bomb with the direction of the plane, and LESSON NUMBER FIFTEEN Hank And what about the rest of the squadron? Robinson They follow the leader, but each of them may show better Judgment than he, and though he may have failed to come out of the )dive, that does not mean that the rest will suffer the same bad luck. However, while the leader may have made his dive and gotten away, the attack undoubtedly will have brought out combat planes and possible antiaircraft anti-aircraft fire, so that the accompanying accompany-ing planes are more apt to be brought down by enemy fire than the leader. Hank You said a while ago that the big bombers now have so much speed and maneuverability that they don't need the protection of combat planes. Do you mean to say that the importance of the combats is gone? Robinson I didn't exactly say that bombers don't need fighters, Hank. I simply said that they are no longer so dependent on them for protection. But fighters are and always will be Important, not only to fight off combat com-bat planes attacking or attempting to attack the big bombers, but also bs the very best offensive against enemy bombers. The fighters and combats are able to keep the bomb- ers at such altitudes that they can't do any accurate bombing, and they played the biggest part in keeping the German raids over the British Isles from being as effective as the Germans hoped they would be. Moreover, More-over, it's the fighters and the combats com-bats that bring down the bombers. Whenever you he'ar of a bomber lost, chances are ten to one that it was those fast little aerial dragonfties that did the job. But such losses are decreasing the bombers being turned out by both the United States nd Great Britain are not only bigger big-ger and faster and easier to handle, they are also much better armored. It takes some gunfire to get through Iheir tough hides. Hank The weight of bombs they carry car-ry must be enormous. About how much does a big bomb weigh? Robinson Oh there's no one size of bombs, any more than there is one lize of bomher. The biggest ones o far in use weigh nearly two tons. Hank Do you mean two tons per iomb? Robinson Two tons per bomb. Hank Gosh! What a load of destruction destruc-tion that is! Robinson It's just that a load of destruction. A bomb contains approximately ap-proximately as big an explosive Charge as thirty 15-inch shells. Hank Can't be much left standing tfter one of those fellows hits. Robinson No, and remember I've been talking about just one bomb. Figure what it counts up to when every bomber carries whole racks of those babies, and that the bombers bomb-ers operate in squadrons. Hank The marvel is that anything at ill is left after a big bomber visit. But there are different types of bombs aren't there? Robinson Oh yes. Besides the incendiary in-cendiary and gas bombs there are two types of demolition bombs the Instantaneous and the delayed type. No use to go into the construction Df the two types, but the distinctive feature of the instantaneous type is that it explodes immediately it strikes the objective, and scatters its force over a wide area. It's the bomb best adapted for use where the objective is low such as docks, ammunition dumps, material concentrations, con-centrations, railroad vards. and the but not least. Hank, there is the height of the target to figure on its height above sea level, I mean. Hank But I thought a modem bomb-sight bomb-sight took care of most of those things! Robinson Good for you. The modern bombsight does reduce the bombardier's work to a minimum. It takes care of a lot of things automatically. auto-matically. To give you an example, the bombardier reads off his air speed and his height above sea level on instruments in front of him. From the information these instruments give him he can fix these variables on his sights. Hank Sounds easy. Robinson It is easy if you know your mathematics. A good bombardier bombar-dier must now his math! Let's take his work step by step. Let's see how he does his high-level bombing not dive bombing, which is quite a different thing. Now, in your high-level high-level bombing there's your plane's speed, first of all. The faster the plane flies at any given height, the earlier the bomb must be started on its way. The forward speed of the bomb lags slightly behind the forward for-ward speed of the airplane. Suppose the plane is 10,000 feet above the ground and is more or less directly over the target. You drop the bomb at that height, and the bomb itself Is only 100 yards behind the airplane. If you are 20,000 feet the bomb Is 190 yards behind. Hank Height makes a difference, doesn't it? Robinson Yes, it certainly does. The higher your plane the sooner the bomb must be released. Why? Because no bomb drops vertically. It follows a curve, and its forward speed Is lost only slowly. The maximum maxi-mum velocity of almost any bomb is reached at about 17,400 feet of falL Hank But Tve heard that some bombs fall faster than others. Robinson That's true. A German bomb rarely falls faster than some 600 miles per hour, while certain British-made bombs drop as fast as 720 miles. In other words, a German Ger-man bomb takes about 48 seconds to drop 20,000 feet as against some 30 seconds for a British bomb. That's a point for our side, Hank, because, you see, a faster bomb has a greater penetration. Hank You said something about the ' wind. Does that affect the bombardier'i airH? ' Robinson Only insofar as it changes the speed and relative direction di-rection of your plane. But let's imagine we are on one of those bombing nights. Here is what you see. Hank. If you are in a heavy bomber, the bombardier's platform is just behind the nose turret. That's where he lies flat on the floor to watch the ground through the window. win-dow. Yes, the window is right there, on the floor. He makes note of the height, the speed, and the temperature, temper-ature, and adjusts his bombing apparatus ap-paratus accordingly. He looks through the drift wires of his bomb-sight. bomb-sight. That's how he checks the exact ex-act course of the bomber. You know by now that a strong side wind may shift the plane slightly off its path. He checks this variable, and makes one more adjustment accordingly. . . . All those adjustments allow the focal point of the target to appear in the sighting apparatus earlier or later, lat-er, as the case may be. And that, my friend, tells him exactly when to press the bomb-release button. to counteract the force of gravity. If not counteracted, that force would tend to pull the bomb from its slight angle of attack. By releasing the bomb a fraction of a second after the pull-out begins, you counteract that force of gravity. Hank That certainly is a job to pull out the plane and release the bomb in a split second. Robinson Certainly is. The Nazis made that job easy. You know, their Junkers two-motored dive-bomber JU 88 it's called has a special apparatus ap-paratus that automatically pulls the plane out of the dive and releases the bomb. All the pilot has to do is to press that button at the right time over the right target Easy as pie for him. The moment he presses that .button, hydraulic relays do the job. They shut the dive brakes, release re-lease the bomb, and turn up tabs on the elevator, and that straightens out the course of the raider once again. Hank Do we have tricks like that loo? Robinson I guess we do. Hank. After all, don't forget we were the ones who invented dive bombing. We were just playing at it when we invented in-vented it. We didn't mean to make dive bombing out of it, but the Nazis took it up and made murder out of our pleasant stunting. You remember remem-ber how those Nazi Stuka bombers used to raid English towns and English Eng-lish shipping. But it's done much less frequently now. The British, you see, found ways of dealing with the Nazi dive bombers. The RAF punished the Stukas plenty, and they just gave up, more or less. Hank Precision bombing Is better than dive bombing, would you say? Robinson Most certainly is, brother. It does just what It gays: precise bombing. like. . . . The delayed-action bomb Is better for higher objectives factories, fac-tories, tall buildings, and ships, also for underground concentrations or trenches. Its construction is such that it may pass through three or tour stories of a building, or a like distance into other objectives, before be-fore it explodes. You can see that i In such a process the whole works ' would be wrecked, whereas if the tame objective got an instantaneous bomb, the top might be blown off and the rest of the thing building or what not remain unharmed. Hank There's a different technique for what's called level bombing and for dive bombing, isn't there? Robinson Yes, there is considerable consider-able difference. I'm no military aviation avi-ation or bombing instructor. My job here is to give you basic training, and that I've been doing. I've already al-ready taught you how to do the acrobatics acro-batics of flying the zoom, roll, spiral, spi-ral, loop, Immelmann, and all the rest. They are essentially basic training for the army pilot, but I'm warning you that just knowing how those tricks are done does not mean you've mastered them. Hours upon I hours and days upon days of prac- tice are required before a pilot can perform the stunts with clocklike precis'on and clocklike precision is essential to a bomber or fighter pilot. Htt.ik There are lots o things to know, aren't there? iUb.nssn Yes, you Lave to watch a lot of things as you bomb, to be sure to hit the objective. While you ' aim, you've got to remember the plane's speed through the air and height over the ground, and the speed of the wind which takes the plane off its true course. Vou have also to consider the rale of the bomb's fall. Re.nember: the rate Cradually Increases with height, up to its veri.ii al velocity. And lasl |