Risk of Being Shot Down as Battle of Britain Pilot - Same Odds...?
 

I was having a discussion with someone about risks in SCUBA diving and they said:

I personally don't believe the former statement but does anyone know of anything to either support or go against this gem?

Regards

I belive this was largely true of Bomber Command, but unlikely in the BoB...

It would seem each flight has a 50/50 chance of that happening....either you will....or you will not be shot down.

However....just as in rolling Dice....at some point you just might "Crap" out!

From memory of the times (although not directly involved), there were two beliefs current among bomber crews:

(a) if you (or, to be exact, your pilot) survived your (his) first five 'ops', you had a good chance of getting through the next 25 (the "infant mortality" theory).

(b) As losses averaged (say) 3% per night, and the roulette wheel has no memory, your chance of survival each time were 97%, and remained the same on your last trip as on the first.

It was my good fortune to be shipped out East of Suez, where most people came back unless they were either unlucky, careless or stupid, and the foregoing considerations did not apply.

D.

Isn't that sort of statistic cumulative though? Hence the one in three chance of getting through a Bomber Command tour?

thing,

Mathematically, '(b)' must be true. Yet the trouble was that some roulette wheels seemed to have memories, in which case the odds on the 'chop' on your last trip could be 3x30 = 90%, as you suggest. And we know that the final overall figure was almost 50% - although training accidents account for part of that - not that matters much to you, if you're one of the unlucky ones.

Was ever an analysis done of the percentage of 'chops' per (single or five-trip experience) bands, that might show a pattern ?

Really we want to have one of the old-timers here (and surely there must be some left) to tell us what sustained them through a period of mental stress such as few men are called on to endure.

D.

Just read a very good book actually Danny by Harry Yates who flew a tour on Lancs during the war called Luck and a Lancaster. No glamour here, he tells it warts and all and how he got very twitchy towards the end.

Danny42C

Whilst I do not profess to having ever been subject to such losses, I do remember early on in flying training that our instructor/course mentor exclaimed that 1 out of the 10 of us would probably not make it to our 16/38 pension point due to our chosen career. He was right and a good mate was lost. How did we all cope? Well none of us ever believed that we would be the one - some call it "denial".

Using this logic, if I were Battle of Britain or Battle of Berlin aircrew, then I would choose to believe that I would be one of the lucky ones! :ok:

LJ

PS. I have ~50hrs in the Lanc and ~100hrs in the Dakota. So my hat goes off to all WWII aircrew; low technology and speed was so much more likely to kill you in those days.

The probability of dying on a bombing trip to Germany (or of dying in any 'event' involving aeroplanes) is a simple calculation once you've defined the variables.

Probability does not vary with the number of times you expose yourself to the likelihood of an event, assuming the variables inherent in that exposure remain constant. So, you were no more likely to encounter an 88mm shell on your last trip than you were on your first, unless your first trip was to somewhere defended by myopic old men with Mausers and your last took you directly over a flak tower in Berlin.

Leon's 0.9 probability of collecting his pension is quite acceptable for a motivated individual. Should it decrease to around 0.5, most individuals - even young Leon - would likely be putting the pins in their seats and moving on to a day job with Tesco's.

Williamson Murray in his book "Luftwaffe" gives the following figures for Hurricane, Spitfire and BF 109 pilot losses. Luftwaffe figures in parenthesis.

xxxxxxxxxTotal Losses xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx% Loss of Pilots*
xxxxxxxxxxAll Causes
July xxxxxxxx84 (124) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx10% (11%)
August xxxx237 (168) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx26% (15%)
September 264 (229) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx28% (23.1%)

* Based on number available at the beginning of the month

If I remember correctly, the existence of Schräge Musik weapons on German night fighters was deduced by Bomber Command statisticians who noticed that the loss rate for experienced crews had risen close to the same level as inexperienced crews, and therefore there must be something shooting them down other than the kind of flak and fighter attacks earlier in the war that experienced crews could better avoid (at least on the flight to and from the target, if not the actual bombing run).

The other interesting statistical observation involved working out when the aircraft landed, was observing where on the airframe they were getting hit. Say if the vast majority were getting hits in the wings then the statisticians recommended that the tail and fuselage was armoured. This initially sounds bizzare - if the aircraft were getting hit in the wings - why wouldn't you armour plate them rather than the untouched fuselage and tail? The logic was that if your wings were peppered full of holes and you still made it back to base then that was OK. Obviously if your aircraft was hit in the fuselage or the tail, they were not making it back to bese to be counted - ergo the seemingly strange logic.

Danny42C,

Assuming that the chance of being shot down on any single sortie remains a constant 3%, the mathematics of probability dictate that the likelihood of surviving 30 consecutive sorties is 0.97^30, which works out at 40%. This is pretty close to the observed figure of 50%. Reverse-engineering that 50% (by taking the 30th root of 0.5) indicates an average single-sortie loss rate of 2.3%.

Sorry, don't have any useful observations on that, but thought the mathematical input would at least be of interest!

agreed. We are not talking here about the chance of not returning from a single sortie, but of not returning.

If the Met man is offered a trip to Berlin and turns it down, his chance of not making it back is zero.
If he goes along, it is say 3% or the chop rate for that trip.
If he is as mad as a hatter, he takes every ride offered throughout the war, and, reductio ad absurdem, if the war went on for ever minus a day, we would not expect him to be casting the runes or consulting the seaweed awaiting the last trumpet call.

war statistics are bull****.

they are taken over the period of the entire war.
this assumes that the war was a totally uniform event from start to finish.
well it wasn't.

during periods when an enemy has superiority the probability of a pilot meeting his demise is significantly higher than at periods when the enemy is beaten into submission.

the australian RAAF lasted two weeks into the pacific war and were totally wiped out. after resupply of aircraft, primarily by the USA, they rearmed and went on to a creditable effort. the overall statistics I'm sure will give no hint of the utter demise they suffered in the first two weeks.

Mk 1

That theory doesn't take into account the changes the Germans made
to the weapons used and that they didn't target the fuselage in case they
detonated the bomb load.

In addition, they targeted the wing fuel tanks which it was said caused
an instant fire and or explosion. So those who made it back with a heap
of holes in the wing might have given a distorted view.

But of course they didn't know that.

quote: war statistics are bull****.

Just what I wanted, a balanced and dispassionate analysis from first principles explained in simple language.

By the way, Group Captain Cheshire's surviving 100 or so missions was down in the weeds:

0.04755, about 5%.

you exaggerate :E

if you read the accounts there were guys coming on line well after the BOB who flew defensive patrol after defensive patrol over homeland england and never saw a single german aircraft in all their service time.
their statistics must sway the averages to the point that numpties could say world war per se wasnt a dangerous experience.

I believe the majority of allied fighter pilots in WWII never fired a shot in anger, never mind had a shot at an enemy a/c. Not taking anything away from them, just an observation.

It always comes down to this (as someone else said, and which I've copied ad lib), "We each had to fight the war we were given". There was no choice.

No two pilots (or anyone else) had the same war. Some thought they were going to have a soft war, but got a hard war - or vice versa. A hard war could turn soft, or a hot one hard. It was in the lap of the Gods.

It is interesting to compare the mathematical chances of survival, but at the time we were always confident of who was going to get the 'chop' - the other bloke! Not me !

I'm interested in the idea that you could pick and choose where your shots might land - unless your enemy were straight and level, and sound asleep. They should have told me about this on my Spitfire OTU in '42 ! Most ordinary chaps were delighted if they hit him at all !

I grant you, Shräge Musik was a special case. where the guns were angled so that the night fighter could come up under an unwary Lanc, which had a blind spot underneath (so they tell me). As the obvious thing for the Ju88 (or whatever) to do was to "formate" direct line astern under his victim, and the closer he tucked in, the harder he was for the rear-gunner (so they tell me) to spot, or to depress his guns if he did. He was then well placed for the cannon shells to go straight up into the wings where the engines and fuel lived.

I'd imagine that survival rates were about 0% after that.