Reload the weaponry? Yes sir, if you’ll hand me the pistol, I will personally put 6 new cartridges in!
Being a pilot is still considered to usually be in the top five most dangerous things you can do.
There’s a reason for the checklists. Like many aviation rules, they came from someone bending metal or getting killed.
I don’t think this is true though? In either the civilian or military world?
According to stats from the US Department of Labor, commerical pilots have a fatality rate of like ~52. Which makes it about as deadly of a profession as “Healthcare Practitioner”, and about half as deadly as “retail sales worker”.
I couldn’t find any hard numbers for the military but the last combat death Wikipedia has was Capitan Patrick Olson who died after his A-10 was struck by a missile on February 27, 1991 so take that as you will.
I included all pilots in my comment. Not just commercial or military.
However, there’s this:
https://www.avweb.com/flight-safety/commercial-piloting-quite-a-risky-profession/
A little older of an article.
I don’t think you actually read your whole article. It’s disputing the bureau of labor’s statistics.
There’s two important quotes in there:
Digging further to find those 82 deaths reveals a matrix of flight instruction, sightseeing, ag flying, aeromed operations, pipeline patrol, test flying and so forth.
And
Unfortunately, what appears to have happened here is that any commercial pilot involved in an accident was listed … as a commercial pilot death. So that means the commercial pilot flying a personal trip from Ohio to Virginia was probably listed as a commercial pilot death when he crashed, as was the commercial pilot who died on a post-maintenance flight after working on his personal airplane
Major Bill March, a historian with the Royal Canadian Air Force, is quoted as saying of the early pilots “they used to call themselves the 20-Minute Club because the life expectancy of a new pilot in combat in 1916-17 was 20 minutes.”
I understand that in the early part of the war pilots were being sent into combat with less than 9 hours flying time – basically, they knew how to take-off. But of course, we all know that there is a lot more to it than that, being able to land is probably optimistic, but useful if the need presented itself.
That’s grim, hadn’t heard that before. I guess that the aces were the ones good at learning quickly and improvising.
I’m not an expert, but I can see the military minds of the time thinking that training people would be a waste of time because flying was so deadly. In their minds it would be like training people to swim across the Atlantic from New York to London; it was a matter of luck, not training.
imho
Had a buddy walk out during a community college placement test because it was getting too hard. I tried telling him the point of a placement test is to have hard questions but it never clicked.
Early airplanes were a hell of a thing, too.
A lot of airplanes in WWI were powered by rotary engines. No, not wankel engines, reciprocating rotary engines. The crankshaft holds still and the entire engine spins with the propeller. Something something you don’t need a flywheel because engine is flywheel.
These engines were lubricated with castor oil. It spewed everywhere including into the pilot’s face. Most of them had a chronic case of the squirts for that reason.
These engines didn’t have a throttle as such; the fuel had to get in via the crankshaft, after all. You’d reduce power by canceling ignition to some of the cylinders via a “blip switch.”
Having that much spinning mass in the nose did some unintuitive shit to the airplane’s handling. To this day we teach pilots about gyroscopic precession because even a modern propeller will do it somewhat: when you tilt the propeller disc, the propeller exerts a force 90 degrees around the disc. With a prop that turns clockwise when seen from the cockpit, pitching down will cause the propeller to exert a left yawing force. This killed a lot of early pilots on the runway; they’d lift the tail during takeoff and suddenly veer to the side because of the almighty gyroscope in the nose.
Oh, and for the British at least, they invented the concept of firing machine guns through the prop disc before they invented the interrupter gear, so they’d shoot their own propellers off.
Edit to add: That big spinning mass of engine often meant a plane could turn faster in one direction than the other. The Sopwith Camel had double the rate of turn in one direction than the other.
Flight of the Phoenix. A crew is stranded in the desert and has to rebuild their plane or die. [full movie]
This Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines. 1960s silliness about the early days fo flying [trailer]
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-guns-above-robyn-bennis/1131183611
The Guns Above. Basically the Napoleonic Wars, except they have an unlimited supply of helium. The author builds the airships by hand, you can smell the wicker works and laquer. [novel]
Educate yourself. Go back to the source Rowan stole from…
Slave trader, rapist, turncoat, scoundrel, bully, cad, thief, coward, and winner of the VC. General Sir Harry Padget Flashman, damn your eyes!
The hand cranking lad was before the time they started engines with shotgun shells.
Context? Context? We don’t need no stinkin’ context!!
See the original, not the terrible remake. I was reminded because of starting an engine with a gun.
