dgaad
Posts: 864
Joined: 7/25/2001
From: Hockeytown
Status: offline
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People, including myself, tend to forget (if they ever knew) that the ratio of planes damaged and shot down to those engaged is very very low, and was throughout the war. We tend to forget because we've all played those fabulous flightsims where you can shoot down 12 Stukas single handedly over the Channel.
Battle of Britain : on days when upwards of 1000 fighter planes were engaged at one time, you would get on average about 15-30 fighters damaged and an equal number shot down (this is a total for both sides). There might have been more than one engagment per plane, maybe less. Basically, this works out to a damage+shootdown/engagement ratio of about 4-6 to 100. Restated, during the Battle of Britain you would expect, on average, to get 4 planes either damaged or shot down for every 100 plane to plane fighter engagements.
I used the Battle of Britain as an example because it has the most data. There are variations. Later in the war, when CAP control was more effective, and pilots were better trained and more experienced, the ratio could go up.
Look at it another way : Take a look at some of the aces in the war like Bong or Sakurai or some British or German aces. Sure, they have impressive stats, 20, 40 or more shot down. But how many sorties did they go on? How many engagements did they fight? Its in the hundreds for most of them, some more than 2000 (the Germans and Japanese in particular had very large sortie numbers for their aces). They fit this 4-6 to 100 ratio too. The vast majority of pilots, if they had an air-to-air engagement, were very lucky just to get a HIT, much less a shootdown.
If you are talking about bombers, the ratio is a bit higher because bombers are basically slower and larger, making a bigger target. On some of the massive allied air raids in Europe where you had over a thousand bombers, several hundred escort, there would be maybe a few dozen or if they (the defending fighters) were lucky around 100 fighters attempting to engage these formations at one time, or over the course of several waves. Still, most of these types of attack still fit the basic rule of thumb ratio 5 to 100.
There were notable exceptions to this ratio rule of thumb, such as the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot and some of the big bomber raids like Schweinfurt, but thats just it; they were exceptions.
Don't expect all of the air encounters in the game to rack up large numbers of kills all at once, history didn't play that.
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