If Arnie had been flying on the night of the raid, he would have been killed.
The speed the bomb hit the dam would have set it off at the top, he would have ended up like ‘Z’ Zebra. The mine was designed to bounce, slow down, roll up to the butress and sink to 30ft before detonation, thus, giving the aircraft suffient time to fly clear of the explosion. The bomb was fitted with a ‘crash’ fuse, designed to detonate if the aircraft crashed denying the enemy access to the weapon. In real life he would got his crew killed with that slightly late drop.
It killed the crew of ‘Z’ Zebra on the night, it nearly killed Hopgood when he dropped ‘late’ and it bounced over the dam, in his mortally wounded Lancaster.
As a stand alone programme it was OK, however, all those scientists and engineers, they spun up their mine with a drill to 1500rpm? so it would drop at 750rpm 5 minutes later. Could they have not fitted the drill to the bomb rig and just spun it to the required 750rpm?
The 2 hours it took to tell this story could have been told in 1.
Also, Arnie has 37,000 hrs under his belt, did it in daylight with an inert (scale) bomb, without several 20mm guns knocking holes in him, only 5 minutes flying time from his base. I reckon he had more flying hours than the entire 617 squadron pilots had in total, which, in my mind makes their achievement even more remarkable.
Just my view
Baz
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