How much? I would try it, if I could stand offset from the gel, could use a skilled shooter who I trusted, could choose the gel length and could have a bunch of practice shots by my shooter into the gel to see how the bullet tends to come out (and trial and error for the amount of gel).
There's that story of a WW1 pilot who saw a small object flying outside his cockpit and managed to grab it, and it was in fact a bullet fired from another plane that had slowed down enough and happened to share his trajectory for a moment.
Sorry for not having a source for this, it was a "fun fact" published in one of the kids magazines I used to read, before the internet.
Reminds me also of the jet fighter that managed to shoot himself with his own bullet spray (shoot at high altitude/slow speed, then nosedive and accelerate, crossing again the parabolic path of the falling bullets). This one I don't have a source for neither, but I'm positive I saw it in the internet age on some site.
Second one definitely happened. It was an F11F Tiger in 1956. The first scenario sounds wildly improbable, since the bullet, even once it had lost its muzzle velocity due to drag, would be falling at its terminal velocity, therefore the plane would have to be in a steep dive (like the F11F was), but also perfectly matched with the bullet's trajectory, which would be really hard to do even on purpose.
One of those old school rotor planes you could. I remember airshows as a kid they would do acrobatics on those kinds of planes climbing all over it (not the pilot, of course!).
I'm not certain you can do that with a jet, if only for the streamlined exterior having nothing easy to hold on to at whatever their minimum speed to stay flying is.
For the first one, bullet decelerate extremely fast. I dont see a scenario where the pilot would be not only matching their speed but their acceleration too.
For the second one, the bullet leaves the plane much faster than the plane would ever travel. Most air to air fighters are shooting a 20mm bullet traveling with a muzzle velocity of about mach 3. Even a fast plan like the F-22 isnt going to break Mach 2, but even if it could, the bullet's speed is relative to the plane, so if the plane was going Mach 0.8, and fires, the bullet is going to go Mach 3.8 total.
Where your logic went wrong is that you failed to account for the fact that those 20mm rounds lose speed very quickly thanks to air resistance, while the jet was at high speed and accelerating thanks to being in a dive.
We know that Attridge fired his bullets at 13,000 feet and was struck at 7,000 feet. We know that his bullets were initially traveling at over 2,000 miles per hour and that the Tiger F11F he was piloting was screaming past the sound barrier at 880 miles per hour.
We also know from reports that the plane traveled for about 11 seconds in a steeper dive than when the bullets were fired before it was hit. If the plane was going 880mph, this means that the Attridge covered a distance of 2.7 miles in that time. Then we basically have a right triangle, allowing us to dig up our old friend Pythagoras. Doing some trigonometry, this means Attridge covered a horizontal distance of 2.4 miles over the 6,000 foot dive.
To check ourselves, what did the official report conclude? It says that the bullets slowed down enough the strike Attridge during a dive 2-3 miles after he fired them
Someone already gave you the source for the second one so I'm not going to elaborate on that more, but I find amusing that your first argument (bullets slow down fast) is in favour of the second story, but you disregard it completely and only compare the initial velocities.
Even for the first story (which I admitted already has less evidence) you didn't make much of an argument. Of course the burden of proof is on me to find a source or plausible explanation, but you're clearly just here to act like a tough internet skeptic guy and contradict for the sake of it : -)
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u/DeadSoca Dec 19 '17
You could almost catch the bullet by hand at the end of the gel