Be Excellent To Each Other

Would you not use kamikaze drones, in todays war?

Can drones be kamikaze?

Do you think, assuming you had the skill to fly a plane and were in a war, you could ever be a kamikaze pilot?

The planes were pretty much just flying bombs - they couldn't even land! What would have to be at stake to get you into the pilot's seat?

Who the hell wants to die?

If it was the only way to save my family from certain death, maybe.

Who would they possibly be at war with?!?

When the pilots of the 121st Fighter Squadron of the D.C. Air National Guard got the order to intercept Flight 93 [on 9/11], the hijacked jet speeding toward the nation's capital, they figured there was a decent chance they would not come back alive.

That's because the F-16 jets they were rushing to get airborne were largely unarmed, recalls one of the pilots, then-Lt. Heather Penney, leaving them one option to take out the wayward plane: a kamikaze mission.

"We wouldn’t be shooting it down. We would be ramming the aircraft, because we didn’t have weapons on board to be able to shoot the airplane down," Penney told C-SPAN.


In the days before Sept. 11, there were no armed aircraft standing guard in Washington, D.C., ready to scramble at the first sign of trouble.

And with a Boeing 757 aircraft speeding in the direction of Washington, D.C., Penney and her commanding officer, Col. Marc Sasseville, couldn't wait the dozens of minutes it was going to take to properly arm their respective jets.

"It was decided that Sass and I would take off first, even though we knew we would end up having to take off before our aircraft were armed," Penney, among the first generation of American female fighter pilots, said to C-SPAN.

Who the hell wants to die?

Hang on, "largely" unarmed? That makes it sound like they had something.

Penney said each jet had 105 lead-nosed bullets on board, but little more.

“The people on Flight 93 were heroes, but they were going to die no matter what," she said. "My concern was how do I minimize collateral damage on the ground."

As it turned out, Sasseville and Penney never intercepted Flight 93. The passengers of that doomed plane made sure they didn't have to.

A plane with no nose and no tail would likely fall straight out of the sky, its forward momentum halted, Penney said.

Either way I reckon that they'd be able to damage an airliner (smashing into the elevators would be pretty terminal) and then have a good chance to eject. I'm not saying it wouldn't be highly dangerous but it's a completely different cup of tea to kamikaze.

He also thought about his ejection seat. Would there be an instant just before impact?

“I was hoping to do both at the same time,” he says. “It probably wasn’t going to work, but that’s what I was hoping.”

Penney worried about missing the target if she tried to bail out.

“If you eject and your jet soars through without impact . . .” she trails off, the thought of failing more dreadful than the thought of dying.

Either way I reckon that they'd be able to damage an airliner (smashing into the elevators would be pretty terminal) and then have a good chance to eject. I'm not saying it wouldn't be highly dangerous but it's a completely different cup of tea to kamikaze.

bit different on a none controlled, preprogrammed bomb, than a massive airliner ten times the size of you which is under explicit pilot control.

Indeed. I read that in WW2, spitfire pilots were able to catch up with V2 bombs and give them a nudge with a wing to knock them off course. Bit sketchy but you'd give it a go.

"pilot this or we will shoot you"

Malc

Nah, that'll be V1 'Doodlebugs' mate (subsonic, ramjet powered flying bombs; basically the first Cruise Missile) - not V2s. These were hypersonic missiles, travelling vastly quicker upon their re-entry to their targets than any aircraft of the time (or indeed now). That's why no-one heard them coming.

Indeed although I think V1s were pulsejets, rather than ramjets, hence the terrifying sound. Pulsejets are excellent and very simple to make but sadly illegal to play around with now due to the noise. Although to be fair its understandable, I've seen several pulsejet powered RC models fly and even at that scale they make a much bigger din than most full size jet fighters with their afterburners on. It's health and safety gone mad.

"pilot this or we will shoot you"

Malc

"Meh" with a side dose of "fie" to you people scorning this. I think it's pretty chilly, myself.

105 bullets for a gatling cannon that shoots 6,000 rounds per minute? I'm not sure a one second burst could be guaranteed to do meaningful damage at all to a multi-engine passenger jetliner. You'd have to get really lucky and hit a hydraulic line or something. So I think "mostly unarmed" is a fair summary.

Not really - hitting an engine at all would do the job happily. However, that's still really lucky given the 1-second burst you're firing.

There's a reason I said "multi-engined"; UN-93 had two. So now you need both F-16 pilots to get lucky shots, twice. Not odds I'd want to be facing.

OTOH you'd only have to have one bullet go through the pressurised cabin, anywhere, to cause enough mayhem to prevent it reaching the target.

Wouldn't the hijackers just come down to the flying altitude where cabin pressurisation doesn't matter? In fact, if they were smart, they'd come down to that altitude immediately after the hijacking anyway.