A figure which stunned me:
Mi-26, the successor to the Mi-6 was involved in the deadliest helicopter crash, after being shot down during the second chechen campaign. It was carrying 142 passengers, 127 of which died.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Khankala_Mi-26_crash
>the helicopter crash-landed in a minefield that made up part of the federal military headquarters' perimeter defenses. Some of the survivors, attempting to abandon the wrecked Mi-26, are reported to have been killed by 'friendly' anti-personnel mine explosions
Not to dismiss either the "shot down", or loss of life - but that does illustrate why very large passenger helicopters are a bad idea. Too many lives at stake, and a helicopter is generally a far more fragile basket than a fixed-wing aircraft.
Flight 17 was shot down with a Buk missile. Wikipedia says 150 lbs. warhead.
Flight 655 was shot down with 2 SM-2MR missiles. Wikipedia is mum about warhead weight...but the missiles themselves would be over 3,000 lbs. (combined).
Vs. the helicopter was shot down with a 24 lbs. missile, with a 2.6 lbs. warhead.
One extremely clear lesson from WWII was that hitting a fixed-wing aircraft was very different from shooting it down. Size mattered. Once the combatants realized that, they replaced their start-of-war "you might get a hit in just the right spot" pea shooters with the heaviest AA weapons that they could use.
I'm saying that helicopters are more fragile, period. It doesn't matter whether you are testing that via consequences of weapons damage. Or counting the number of failure-critial moving parts. Or digging through flight-safety statistics. Or computer modeling the effects of the sudden loss of the outer 1/4 of one [wing|rotor blade]. Or getting quotes on life insurance for a career pilot. Or asking a savvy fortune teller.
> So you're saying that fixed wing airliners are better than helicopter airliners because shooting them down requires larger missiles?
Yes, it not only increases the barrier to entry for attackers but airlines can install some defenses against MANPADS since they're easier to counteract than more advanced missiles. Some Israeli companies have developed and certified flare based anti-MANPADS systems like Flight Guard and laser based ones like C-MUSIC, though I don't think airlines have widely deployed them yet.
Once they're at cruising altitude, man portable AA can't bring them down.
These shoot downs are such uncommon events that it makes no sense to judge passenger aircraft by them. You may as well say that helicopters are better because, not using runways, they avoid a repeat Tenerife scenario.
Any consideration like this is completely washed out by practical/economic considerations; how much money can you make operating an airline with either kind of aircraft, and what kind of capabilities do they provide? This is why fixed wing aircraft are almost always better, except when the particular capabilities of helicopters invoke their use.
I think what they're saying is that you can't easily target a fixed-wing aircraft flying miles above ground with hand-held equipment like you would a helicopter
My grandfather flew in WWII and had many stories of both his planes and those in his group making it back with what mechanics would have thought was catastrophic damage.
Shooting down any aircraft with a rocket is likely to take anything down. Planes can handle damage much better from what I understand.
Anti-aircraft weapons have gotten better. In WWII the Axis didn't have proximity fuses so the shells would explode at a predetermined range and throw shrapnel.
Now anti-aircraft weapons explode at a very specific distance and create a rapidly expanding ring of metal which slices the aircraft in two.
And they are actively guided onto their targets. Even bullets are aimed by radar and a computer plotting a solution involving the trajectories of the target, your own aircraft, and the bullets themselves.
For sure. I wasn't raising 80 year old flights as a direct analog to today's weapons, I'm just pointing out a direct example I have of planes landing safely after some really serious damage. Helicopters aren't nearly as likely to make it back with similar levels of damage.
Survivorship bias is related to how you respond to the data though, in this case reinforcing the wrong parts of the plane based on where you saw holes in planes that returned.
I do believe it is still true that planes can take more damage and still land safely compared to helicopters.
I can't find any good data to support it now though, maybe someone going by here will have a good link to data that shows real world data either way.
An anecdote, but in 1983 an Israeli F-15 famously landed successfully with one of its wings almost completely sheared off after a midair collision during training exercises.
Would it make sense to add the 'height' factor? An airplane reaches and does most of its course at 3km, while a helicopter at a much lower heights and thus well within the firing range of far more weapons.
Well, it should be noted that the helicopter in question was designed to be used by an organization that couldn't care less about loss of life, as we have again seen in recent years. So I guess this aspect of human life wasn't a big concern to the designers, the military can always get new human resources from Siberia or whatever poor part of the country.
Yes, NATO countries have hollowed out their military-industrial complexes. Everyone is aware now that was a mistake but it will take time to rebuild the industrial capacity necessary to fight wars of attrition. And of course it's cheaper to manufacture artillery shells in Russia since the country has lower wages and is now running a partially mobilized command economy. But once you normalize for quality of the shells, the difference isn't quite as bad as it first looks.
> The research on artillery rounds by Bain & Company, which drew on publicly available information, found that Russian factories were forecast to manufacture or refurbish about 4.5 million artillery shells this year compared with a combined production of about 1.3 million rounds across European nations and the US.
Rheinmetall intends to increase their annual production to 750k by 2025 and the US is aiming for 1 million annually by 2025. That's still much less than Russia and that's before considering they have access to the significant reserves and the factories in North Korea.
> Since August, Pyongyang has shipped about 6,700 containers to Russia, which could accommodate more than 3 million rounds of artillery shells or more than 500,000 rounds for multiple rocket launchers, according to the South Korean Defense Ministry.
NATO war doctrine doesn't use nearly as much artillery as Soviet (Russian)- preferring air superiority and bombs/missiles instead. While it isn't clear this is really better (and I hope we never find out), it does mean that having less production ability may not be an issue. Which is why the US Air force is the largest air force in the world, followed by US army, then US navy at 4, and US Marines at 7.
Where the problem is, is Ukraine is trained on the Soviet war doctrine but are getting backing from NATO - but without all the airplanes NATO would use (and it isn't clear if they could train pilots/crew fast enough if given, but they haven't been given much) they need something to fight with.
Though my impression is that shell production is still a "meh, I guess we probably should do something..." priority in the great majority of NATO countries.
Russia actually has a pretty strong tradition of pilot safety in the military. For example, the Ka-50 attack helicopter is one of very few such helicopters to be fitted with an ejection seat.
Pilots costs many years to train, the OC is commenting about the mobiks, the soldiers used for their meat not brains. There is evidence to support that Russia or better said the Putin regime still gives less almost zero value to human live.
What government that has an active military cares about the lives of their soldiers beyond their utility value? I don't see how the US is different in that regard.
Generally the US does a pretty good job training and keeping their grunt soldiers alive, and evacuating them if wounded. Russia really hasn't done well in these aspects if we look at the Ukraine war, or any earlier wars for that matter. Their tactics tend to prefer quantity over quality.
But yes, as pointed out I'm sure Russia places some more value on lives of skilled, well trained personnel than the average poorly trained grunt soldier, simply due to higher utility value.
Public opinion is a big deal in democratic countries, which makes them very much averse to loss of soldiers lives. Much less so in a dictatorship like Russia. They are losing more in a month than the US lost in years or decades in active campaigns.
That is the point, if you sacrifice the soldiers lives you should do it for something valuable, even using pro-Rus maps Russia is gaining at best something less then 1 square kilometer a day and has 1000+ dead or wooded, I am sorry for you disillusions with USA but in civilized countries nobody would think that 1 soldiers live is worth 5000 square netters of field. Sure probably they are sacrificed not for that land but for buying time for Putin, maybe Trump or other miracle move will save him. So from Putin's POV 1000 soldiers for 1 more day on the throne is a price he can pay, in a democracy this would have ended a long time ago.