Saw this and found it interesting. Being a pilot and flying in Florida, I fly at a lot of the WW2 training fields. So many airfields in Florida were built for WW2. Most fields have placards of what kind of aircraft used the field for training. A joke among us fliers in Florida is that if you are a mile high you can glide to a field. My home field, KBKV, was a heavy bomber base - B-17 and B-24. Because of that, we have lovely long runways that were constructed for a heavier load and have weathered time quite well.


https://www.realclearhistory.com/ar...men_killed_in_training_in_ww_ii_412.html

The number of deaths is staggering

As the article points out, WWII was a war with staggering numbers for virtually any category you can think of. It truly was a global war in every sense of the word.


Here's one stat that has always dumbfounded me:


Number of Soviet soldiers killed and captured during Operation Barbarossa (1941): Approximately 6 million

It was a different time. Risks had to be taken to try and get pilots and aircrews out of training as quickly as possible. I remember reading Chuck Yeager's autobiography. He told a story where he and 3 other of his fellow students were flying P-39s on a cross-country. If I remember correctly, they bounced some Navy planes for some mock dog fighting and one of the planes stalled and auger'd in, killing the pilot. Both the Navy and Air Force planes flew back and carried on. It was a trial by fire.

Now days, if that would happen, there would be a safety investigation that would last a year or longer. Pilots and planes would be grounded. Some may even be court-martialed. They just didn't have the time for that during the war.

+1


Just look at how the modern news media reacts when a few civilians in Afghanistan are killed unintentionally by a drone or aircraft bombing attack. Now imagine what their reaction would have been to things like the Dresden bombing of Feb. 1945 or the firebombing of Japanese cities in 1945 where several hundred thousand civilians died.



The world that existed during WWII was indeed a very radically different one from what we have now.

Plus fighters/training were cheap compared when adjusted to inflation to the multi million tech/lengthy training schedules these days. We can't just pump out replacement F/A-18s by the month that they did back then with the bombers.

I read that article OG.
I don't recall the B-24 being called a Flying Coffin. I know the B-26 was named something close to that because of crashes early on.
My point is that what is his data? The B-24 had a higher loss rate in Combat over the B-17, but that is not the same.

We were talking last night, and one of the guys had met a local WW2 Fighter pilot that still had his original log. He had under 17 hours stick time before they shipped him out.

Correction: The Pilot had 7 hours of stick time.

Yikes!

Surely that was in type, not total.

The B-26 was known as the "Baltimore Whore". Due to being built in Baltimore and the small wings, IE "no visible means of support"

The B-26 had several nick names.

B-26 crews gave the aircraft the nickname "Widowmaker" Other colorful nicknames included "Martin Murderer", "Flying Coffin", "B-Dash-Crash", "Flying Prostitute" (so-named because it was so fast and had "no visible means of support," referring to its small wings) and "Baltimore Whore" (a reference to the city where Martin was based).

One of the best sources for WW2 USAAF statistics is, http://www.91stbombgroup.com/91st_info/army_air_forces_statistical_digest_ww2_1945.pdf

Table 48 (pg 67) list number for Eliminees and Casualties by a/c type and trade.

Some aircraft nicknames.

http://web.mit.edu/btyung/www/nickname.html

yeah its a good think we dont tolerate those anymore, also back then the propaganda was controled, no one was going to announce the brits bombed an school full of children, it was the X fleet sucessfully completed their run on target of Y with B cassualties.....no one anounced the ground kills.

Oh jeez.

Blade completely misread my post but I’m not surprised.

i read exactly what you meant, and you know it, but i wont continue and risk drag this down to PWEC as it is not the intention of this thread

Yes, 7 hours on type, I'm sure. Not total hours. U.S pilots got the best training of the war. Nine months of it was the norm. Even more if you were going on to some special job like photo reconaissance. And still the numbers were high. My fathers uncle Joe was one of them. Killed during basic. Probably in a BT-13.

At our local airfield, which was a training base during WW II, 14 pilots were killed. One time a BT-13 landed on top of another. One made a shallow approach and the pilot of the higher plane couldn't see him and landed on top of him, killing the pilot of the lower plane instantly when the propeller chewed into the cockpit.

It was definitely a different era, and we can't place today's values on the people of that time.

Appears to have happened often enough. Here two Ansons in Australia, https://worldwarwings.com/pilot-lands-avro-anson-another-avro-anson-top-midair-collision/. In a book I have of BCATP has a photo of a similar accident.