Originally Posted by
METO Guido
fwiw
Turns out 15’ Goblin, stowing wing-foil’s and all, was engineered to hook back up on a host ship for no gear recovery. 7 operational tests conducted. 3 successful. All logged by the same kook who managed to walk away from belly landing the rest, 1948.
Yeah, except…
So they drop you out to turn and burn with the interceptors to protect the bomber with your four Browning 50 caliber machine guns. Now assuming you can actually engage long enough and successfully enough in an aircraft without anything like the maneuverability of its opponents, your likelihood of getting back aboard the B-36 or B-29 really wasn’t worth mentioning.
Not that someone of that generation wouldn’t have flown it anyway.
I remember reading about the 8th AF loss rate bombing Germany in WWII. It was just over five percent…per mission. Which was bad enough until you considered that the initial tour was 25 missions - later raised to 30, and then to 35. It was very Catch-22-like.
For those of you that don’t have Alexato to do the math for you, 0.95% return rate to the 25th power is about 28%.. to the 30th power it’s about 21%. The guys who didn’t make it back from a mission were 26,000 Kia’s and 21,000 POWs.