Aerial gunnery part 2

Following on from part one of this screed there are a few odd things.

On all exercises a good pilot attempted to fire in as short a burst as possible, say 9 or 10 rounds, this was to give a better chance of scoring. In any case things happened so quickly there was not normally time to get in a much longer burst. On air to air one broke away from the target the opposite side from the attack and climbed up for the next run. Similarly when firing at a ground target, each quick burst was followed by a climbing turn ready for the next run.

The flag target was laid out on the runway with the cable and the bod elected to be in charge had to marshall the tug into position over the eye which went onto the hook on the tug. Spare navs would sometimes be elected? to this post, once the tug was in place one had to duck under the one of the engines, pick up the eye and attach it to the hook. Then one had to duck back out again and marshall the tug forward until the cable was OK, and then wave him off.

When the tug returned from the sortie, hopefully with several holes shot through the flag, the tug had to drop it beside the runway. From here the little flag handling party could retrieve it and scores were recorded by counting the holes coloured by the paint from the tips of the rounds. To avoid wastage and also having the flag hopefully shot to pieces, two guns only were loaded with 50 rounds per gun. Navs claimed that this was the only way pilots could calculate their percentage scores, working from the old adage “You can teach a monkey to fly, but he needs a nav to tell him where he is”.

Incidentally stoppages occasionally happened and that would curtail the exercise on the Meteor because of the yaw induced. This was because in the Meteor NF the guns were mounted in the wings, outboard of the engines. I remember on one occasion a pilot returning from the range, having experienced a stoppage, had a gun run away as he was approaching the airfield. He estimated that 7 rounds were fired, but nothing was ever heard about it, so it was assumed they had fallen harmlessly in some field.

Now another firing exercise which we did regularly in the Muddle East was air to ground, which was done both by day, and far more interestingly, by night.. This was because the Egyptians, on three occasions brought their army up towards our bases along the canal, threatening to chuck us out. This was just bluster and after some posturing and a warning from our brass, they would withdraw. If shooting had actually started, which thank goodness it didn’t, we would be required to keep them awake at night by strafing them, or generally making a nuisance of ourselves. Incidentally that did not prevent them occasionally taking pot shots at us at any time. We collected this hole one morning while doing practice BABS approaches to Fayid.

Any way, air to ground was an interesting exercise, again carrying only 100 rounds. A 10 foot square canvas target was set up at 60 degrees to the vertical. At night the target was indicated by 2 gooseneck flares set out one each side, and another set to the rear such that at angles below 30 degrees it could not be seen. These targets were set up out in the desert with no other indication of where they were. We then dived onto the target at 30 degrees and the pilot gave a short burst when he judged the range to be about 350 yards. He was briefed not to come below 300 feet, when we did this exercise at night the navs had to fly. Their task was to read off the altimeter and tell the pilot to pull out when he had reached 400 feet. It was also necessary to turn away sharply to avoid ricochets and stones. We had a Mosquito written off because a round entered the wing and dented the main spar. Because the damage was within 18 inches of an engine mounting it was deemed impossible to repair the spar.