What's the truth about 50 cal guns vs. jetliners?

[Double Naught Spy]

beerslurpy said

Small debris and birds get sucked into jet engines all the time and the engines dont explode. You have to remember that you can put a half inch hole in many parts of even the engines and nothing bad will happen.

The engine may not explode, but even fairly small birds can cause some pretty significant damage if sucked into an engine.

http://www.compfused.com/directlink/853/

Bird strikes and birds sucked into engines cause problems for lots of planes that while not always causing crashes, do cause forced emergency landings.

http://www.birdstrike.us/birdstrike_reports.htm

So while birds and small debris may get sucked in all the time, supposedly, they also cause some very real problems.

Where a .50 comes into play is that it does NOT have to do a lot of damage to bring down a plane or to disable a plane before take off. It only needs to upset the spinning turbine's balance, fuel flow, or alter the path of hot gasses to cause an engine to fail.

With that said, terrorists and others do not us single or semi-auto .50 bmg rifles to shoot down aircraft for one simple reason...they don't have much realistic chance in hell of hitting a flying aircraft with a single shot. In combat, when planes are brought down by .50s, it is usually from multiples of .50s firing in full auto and even then, only a fraction of the rounds fired actually hit the aircraft.

An incendiary round through a wing or fuselage tank would do the trick, no doubt. Once again, it is a matter of actually hitting the plane.

I don't know where folks go the idea of 5 miles. According to the USMC, the M82A1 only has a range of 7000 yards and is only really considered effective to about 2000. Yes, there is the occasional shot greater than that range, but those are the exception shots, not the norm.

 

[RavenVT100]

Yes, there is the occasional shot greater than that range, but those are the exception shots, not the norm.

The rifle cannot shoot that way on its own. An exceptionally skilled individual needs to be behind the rifle in order to do it.

 

[DeseoUnTaco]

Lucky shots

Exceptionally lucky shots can bring down planes. I'm thinking of the way the Concord crashed. It was going down the runway for takeoff. It ran over a small piece of metal that had fallen off another plane. That piece of metal was able to cause the tire to burst. The tire burst in such a way that a piece was expelled with enough force to pop the fuel tank. The pop was severe enough that the plane caught on fire and went down, kill everyone on board.

All that because of a little piece of metal. A terrorist could have gotten near the unway and tossed a piece of metal like that and bring down an airplane.

Except... that's one of those things that's so bizar, so out-of-this-world that it could never be done intentionally. If a terrorist really wanted to do that he would need a trainload of litle bits of metal and he would have to sit there throwing them onto runways for many decades before he would get his result, if ever.

It seems that that's the same situation with 50 cals.