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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_railway_station_att...
overall i prefer any mode of transport that is not being shot at