quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:
...There's a new hangar going up right behind mine. I'll take a look at one of the panels before it goes up on the roof...

I'll suggest you have that one camouflaged. I still think you got strafed.

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Originally posted by newtoSig765:

I still think you got strafed.

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Originally posted by rscalzo:

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Really? I'm not familiar with any airplanes that have a roll-down window, like a car.

Used to rent a American Trainer at ERAU in the 70's. The rollback canopy came close.

Cessna 150M that i did the majority of my training in, was certified to fly with the doors removed, for aerial photography, IIRC.

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Originally posted by P250UA5:

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Originally posted by rscalzo:

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Really? I'm not familiar with any airplanes that have a roll-down window, like a car.

Used to rent a American Trainer at ERAU in the 70's. The rollback canopy came close.

Cessna 150M that i did the majority of my training in, was certified to fly with the doors removed, for aerial photography, IIRC.

Yeah, there are a few that can fly with doors removed, some used for sky diving. I used to fly a J-3 Cub with the door latched open, looking for alligators in nearby Lake Apopka, and other low-level sight seeing. Many helicopters fly with doors open or removed. It's still really hard to imagine that somebody decided to fly over the airport and shoot at a hangar.

My money is still on a celebrating fool somewhere within a mile or two of the airport, full of tequila, firing a whole magazine into the air without giving a thought to where the bullets were going to come down. A whole magazine, two rounds landing on the hangar.

Who knows how many other bullets landed on or near the airport, maybe in the grass / dirt / woods (on the west boundary), retention ponds, farmland to the west . . . none of these would have been noticed.

I'm of the mind that your theory is sound.
Other hypotheticals are a bit farfetched. Except the one about the guy with the bad hip blowing off some steam after a bad drive thru experience

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Originally posted by P250UA5:

Other hypotheticals are a bit farfetched. Except the one about the guy with the bad hip blowing off some steam after a bad drive thru experience

Yeah, that one's credible too. Aggravation after receiving unordered waffle fries can lead to some pretty outrageous deeds.

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Originally posted by LS1 GTO:

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Originally posted by sigmonkey:
And yet, they forget, the most important part.

"DO NOT PARK YOU AIRPLANE UNDER BULLET HOLES!!!"

Or next to the cans.

I love that movie.

V-Tail, my brother-in-law is an aeronautical engineer; early on he worked briefly for Ted Smith when the Aerostar was being developed; he left when they moved to Yuma. BiL said Smith was just building the plane to sell the company to someone else. Made it a mid-wing because no one else had one.
BiL now for many years has worked for Boeing, previously for McDonnell-Douglas, on the C-17.

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Originally posted by V-Tail:

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Originally posted by YooperSigs:

So... The slug was able to penetrate a metal roof, then the skin (that I would guess is Aluminum) on the wing and then enter the fuel tank?

Are you guys sure you weren't strafed?

Yup, metal roof then wing. The wing is aluminum, not heavy gauge, and once that skin is penetrated, you're in the fuel tank. On that series of airplanes, the wing itself is the fuel tank.

The V-Tail has an expen$$$ive 40-gallon rubber bladder in each wing, but the Cessna 150 and its close relatives, the aluminum wing itself is the fuel tank.

Wow, V-Tail has an 40 gallon rubber bladder??

I was impressed when I heard he had metal hip!

Bruce

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Originally posted by RNshooter:

Wow, V-Tail has an 40 gallon rubber bladder??

I was impressed when I heard he had metal hip!

Two 40 gallon bladders actually. One on each side. Now I bet you are REALLY impressed!

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Originally posted by V-Tail:
I plan to be there tomorrow. I'd like to find out how many holes in the roof, and how tightly they are grouped.

Absolutely. Tight groups -> not likely to be from some yeehaw firing blindly into the air to 'celebrate' from some random distance. Also, it's possible there would be some evidence (in the damaged plane wing? on the hangar floor?) that might help figure out what sort of rounds came in.

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Originally posted by joel9507:

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Originally posted by V-Tail:
I plan to be there tomorrow. I'd like to find out how many holes in the roof, and how tightly they are grouped.

Absolutely. Tight groups -> not likely to be from some yeehaw firing blindly into the air to 'celebrate' from some random distance. Also, it's possible there would be some evidence (in the damaged plane wing? on the hangar floor?) that might help figure out what sort of rounds came in.

Two pieces of evidence. A bullet that was recovered from the gas tank of a Cessna 150 that was in the hangar, under one of the holes in the roof. If you're not familiar, the gas tank is in the wing of the airplane. Aluminum construction, not really thick. Bullet hole in the top of the wing, bullet retrieved from the gas tank.

A second bullet was found on the hangar floor.

Inspection of the bullets showed that they were 9mm. I do not have any further details, other than the hangar roof is maybe 30 or 40 feet above the ground, so the only reasonable way that the bullet holes could be there is somebody within a mile or two of the airport, shooting into the air, almost straight up, with no thought about "What goes up will come back down. Someplace."

The bet is that a whole magazine was fired and these two rounds just happened to hit the hangar roof on the way down. Just a few yards west of the hangar in qestion is a wooded area, and west of that, farm fields. North of the hangar is a large retention pond. Any rounds that landed north or west of the hangar will probably never be found.

IANAP (P=Physicist), but I still don't believe a bullet just falling out of the sky, shot up in the air from an undisclosed place, would have the energy to penetrate the metal roof and...AND...penetrate the skin of a wing. I don't buy that for one minute...just gonna have to agree to disagree.

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Originally posted by erj_pilot:

IANAP (P=Physicist), but I still don't believe a bullet just falling out of the sky, shot up in the air from an undisclosed place, would have the energy to penetrate the metal roof and...AND...penetrate the skin of a wing. I don't buy that for one minute...just gonna have to agree to disagree.

Go back to your high school physics. Conservation of energy.

Other than the energy converted to heat via the aerodynamic drag, if you shoot a bullet into the air, when it returns to the same elevation on the way down, it will have the same velocity as it had on the way up. A bit less, but not a lot.

The hangar roof is not very thick / strong metal. And consider the thin skin of the wing on a Cessna 150. I have seen a bird strike puncture it. Bird is relatively soft compared to a 9mm bullet, and the C-150 is barely doing 100 mph at "fast" cruise.

Here's a question for you: Can you offer an explanation that you think is more likely, for two 9mm-sized holes in the roof, one 9mm size hole in the top of the C-150 wing with a 9mm bullet recovered from the tank (inside the wing), and another 9mm bullet on the hangar floor?

IANAP. My brother is, so I sent him an e-mail to see if he can do the math...Sheldon style.

In all seriousness, do y'all have a junk airplane at the airport where you could put it inside a hangar, go to the top of the hangar, and drop a 9mm projectile onto the top of the wing to see if it penetrates? I have to believe that the bullet penetrating the roof would lose an AWFUL lot of energy and be unable to penetrate the wing as well in the last portion of its trajectory. JMHO...

Are you absolutely SURE there aren't idiots in your area that aren't capable of doing a slow fly-by and shooting the hangar from the air?? Stupid pilots do some stupid stuff. Just sayin'...

Saw this:

“The popular scientists on the TV show, Mythbusters experimented with the premise that “Bullets fired into the air maintain their lethal capability when they eventually fall back down.”
They found that a bullet fired straight up (an almost impossible achievement for a human), will tumble on its return trip and falls at a slower rate due to terminal velocity. In addition, they found that a bullet in this circumstance is therefore less lethal on impact.

However, they also discovered that a bullet fired at a non-vertical angle will be able to maintain its speed enough to be very destructive on impact. In determining if the myth was ‘Busted’, ‘Plausible’ or ‘Confirmed’, they proposed that this myth would receive all three ratings at the same time.”

Wasn’t there a statement made earlier that there was an angular offset between the roof hole(s) and the wing hole, thus suggesting that this was a non-vertical situation?

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Originally posted by erj_pilot:

go to the top of the hangar, and drop a 9mm projectile onto the top of the wing to see if it penetrates?

Fallacy* in your thinking. If you are standing on the ground or even on the hangar roof and drop a bullet, it won't be going very fast when it hits.

If you drop it -- not shoot it, just drop it -- from pattern altitude, it will be traveling a lot faster when it arrives at the surface. The higher you drop it from, the faster it will be going when it arrives at the ground (ignoring the fact that aerodynamic drag will impose a cap on the velocity, this is called "terminal velocity"). So when you shoot a bullet straight up, or close to straight, the "pull" of gravity slows it down, until it reaches the top of its arc at which time its velocity is momentarily zero. It then starts back down, accelerating as it goes, and when it returns to the surface its velocity is almost the same as when it left the muzzle of the gun. If we could do this in a vacuum, the returning velocity, coming down, would be the same as the starting velocity when it went up. We're not in a vacuum, so there is a fairly small loss of speed due to drag.

Remember, in a vacuum, if you drop a feather and a bowling ball, they would fall at the same speed.

Ignoring drag, any object dropped from altitude will continue to accelerate at 32 ft. per second per second (that's not an echo) until it comes to an abrupt halt, as in the sudden stop at the bottom.

*re Fallacy: Some students of Sigmund Freud claim that a cigar is a sex symbol. But that is not the truth. It is a phallacy.

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Originally posted by tsmccull:

Wasn’t there a statement made earlier that there was an angular offset between the roof hole(s) and the wing hole, thus suggesting that this was a non-vertical situation?

It was pretty close to, but not exactly, vertical alignment. This suggests that the bullet was fired upward from someplace close to, but not on, the airport, fired into the air, but not precisely straight up.

The demographics of the area around the airport suggest that tequila or cerveza might have been involved. Probably half, maybe more, of the small restaurants on the highway in the vicinity are taquerias. Now that I think about it, I wonder how the lone Taco Bell stays in business.

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e to straight, the "pull" of gravity slows it down, until it reaches the top of its arc at which time its velocity is momentarily zero. It then starts back down, accelerating as it goes, and when it returns to the surface its velocity is almost the same as when it left the muzzle of the gun

This is not true, which is why a few of us have explained that it's not likely as having happened in the fashion you describe.

Short of being shot in a parabolic arc, a bullet falling from the sky will only fall at terminal velocity. And although this might just be enough to get it through the roof (but maybe not), it would have almost no energy left to puncture anything else.

Two holes in near proximity increase the odds of the roof being an intentional target. Look at any of the testing where bullets were fired upward, and they're darn near impossible to find afterwords. To get two to land in one spot is lottery winning odds.

Here is a refrigerator that was shot with a 9mm through the front a few feet in front of it. The bullet goes through the door and through the center divider, both of which are foam filled. This slowed the bullet to a point where it still had enough energy to penetrate the thin steel rear panel, but that panel took the rest of the energy right out of it. It barely dented the drywall behind the fridge.

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Originally posted by a1abdj:

a few of us have explained that it's not likely as having happened in the fashion you describe.

You have undoubtedly examined the site of the occurrence, so I bow to your superior knowledge.