Talking of "bombing" from a Shackleton....
Back in the 1980s, some bright spark on 8 Sqn came up with the concept of combining an annual dinghy drill in the Moray Firth with a practice Lindholme Gear drop from a Shackleton. A Lindolme drop started with marking a flare path outbound from the dinghy using smoke floats - the Shackleton would then tear drop and, using the smoke trail as a marker, run back onto the dinghy to drop the Lindholme. The initial position of the dinghy was marked by the "bomb-aimer" in the nose (gash member of the radar team calling for another chap in the rear of the aircraft to manually drop the smoke float through a tube in the aircraft floor: "Mark! Mark!" using the dinghy as the target for the first smoke float, followed by timed smoke drops. Note - anyone on the crews called "Mark" was rechristened as his name was the executive command to drop a float whenever it was called).
Come the day of the exercise - we were the crew in the water with our 9 man dinghy - it was a nice day and so we were all sitting on the canopy watching the circling Shackleton as it prepared for the drop and bantering amongst ourselves ("sorry about the fuel figures, Skipper" said the flight engineer with a nervous laugh). In it came - 140kts at 140feet, when we saw the first smoke float leave the aircraft and come hurtling towards us. Normally, we were lucky to get the smoke float within 100 yards of the target (we had no actual aiming equipment - just a window and the Mk 1 eyeball combined with the reaction time of the man letting go of the float) but this one seemed to be heading straight for us. Should we dive into the water; what will happen if it hits; this is going to be close? We flinched and closed eyes....it missed by a few feet and ignited, smothering the dinghy in acrid smoke.
The converstion changed to "Who's bright idea was this?" (or unprintable words to that effect). The rest of the exercise went to plan and we watched in relief as the Shackleton disappeared back to Lossie while we waited for the Sea King to pick us up.
At the debrief afterwards, it was decided that we would not carry out a similar exercise in the future and the keen CSRO was given the cold shoulder for a while.