[marcosdumay]

AFAIK (what is not much on the military side), fighters are all optimized for performance, and not resilience. And fighters that work on improving the crew options focus on survivability instead of resilience because it tends to weight less.

As a result, resilience isn't great.

Bombers and logistic planes have redundancy.

[thayne]

I guess they just have a big enough budget that losing millions of dollars of plane to a bird isn't a big deal?

[dmoy]

It's more like if you make a plane resilient to bird strikes, you sacrifice a good chunk of performance - envelope, maneuverability, something.

Depending on how fast the plane is going, "good chunk" might be a hilarious understatement too. Hitting an object at 1000mph imparts 4x the damage compared to hitting an object at 500mph.

If you want to see an example of a durable military aircraft, look at the A-10:

(Hit by a literal bird, still flying: https://www.nbcrightnow.com/news/a-10-warthog-hits-bird-at-r...)

(Hit by idk what, giant hole in engine, engine on fire, still flying for an hour back to base: https://theaviationgeekclub.com/heres-another-story-10-warth...)

Anyways, that's a military plane designed to get hit by... stuff... and as a result can take bird strikes. But its max speed is like 400mph and it would get absolutely wrecked by any serious opposition from fighters. The more resilient you make a plane to birds, the more vulnerable it is to missiles, per unit price. And missiles is kinda the point of the whole endeavor.

[lazide]

F22. F14. F18.

[usefulcat]

I heard that the Navy (historically, at least--don't know about today) placed a greater value than the Air Force on engine redundancy. Hence why we have both the twin engine F-18 (Navy) and the single engine F-16 (Air Force), even though functionally there's a lot of overlap between the two.

[lazide]

Sure, but then you also have the F22, F117, B2, A10, SR71, U2, and a bunch more I can’t think of right now.

Some helicopters have a single engine. Most have 2. They are still unreliable death machines, and arguably 2 engines makes the problem a bit worse (more moving parts). They are (sometimes) more tolerant of a single engine out, of course. But transmissions are often the weak spot with helicopters.

Single vs Dual has many factors, not just reliability.

A single engine failure on a SR71 (if I remember correctly) resulted in a airframe loss and ejection at relatively low speeds, and one at full speed would likely result in a complete crew loss on top of it - and it has dual engines. Think catastrophic near instant destruction.

Sometimes you just need more power than a single engine (with current tech) can provide in the space you have available, for instance.

Sometimes, like an A10, you really do want something that can take a massive beating and keep going.

A B52 can lose 2 engines with no issues, and theoretically up to 4 and still be controllable (depending on the distribution of the lost engines). But that isn’t because it needs reliability, but because it’s got 8 engines because it was designed to carry a metric shit ton of explosives, and it only had 60’s era tech jet engines.

Modern jets usually use 2 (much more powerful) engines for similar or even larger payloads.

[hollerith]

They were, but soon the only fighter or attack aircraft operating from the US's carriers will be single-engine (namely, the F35).