Any of our math/physics/WWII buffs know if .50 cal, 20mm cases falling from dogfight altitudes would be fatal to folks on the ground? Would drop tanks be totally flattend hitting the ground at terminal velocity? Just curious. Would have been quite a bit of crap falling during those 1000 plane raids. Plus flak shrapnel.

Your thread title is too vague. Vague/clickbait thread titles have been getting locked.

Edited to add:

You changed a vague thread title, to a vague thread title.

The purpose of a thread title is to describe a thread without having to open it. Guys, put some effort into this and save us all time opening threads that are ill-titled.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: arcwelder,

I though this was gonna be about baseball.

I'm hoping Bryce Harper signs back with the nationals, but he's usually playing center. If he comes back I'm guessing it will be Eaton or Robles in left. But that could all change on the offers he gets.

No.

Would be an interesting thing to behold.

It's incredible to consider the amount of stuff of all types that must still litter the ground there.

I would think both an empty shell casing and an empty aluminum fuel tank would fall at well under terminal velocity due to aerodynamic drag.

Depending on the shape and dynamic stability, they could also tumble as they are falling which would slow them down much more. They would likely lose all their forward momentum unless dropped close to the ground.

The tank would still be dangerous, possibly fatally, if it hit a person. A shell casing could but much less likely.

Edit: after doing a little reading on the subject I found that most WW2 drop tanks were made of a paper composite. I'm sure if they were strong enough to withstand aerodynamic forces and hold the weight of the fuel they were still something you wouldn't want to hit you. Many were dropped on the far side of the channel when possible.
I suspect falling stray rounds and airplane parts probably killed more people.

I've never been able to choose between Ted Williams and Stan Musial, but I lean towards Stan the Man.
I don't include Bonds in the discussion for obvious reasons.

M-11's question is one I have had for a very long time. Imagine walking along and suddenly a spent .50 casing from thousands of feet up hits you on the top of your head!

Yes, they certainly could be dangerous or fatal. So could all the expended ammunition falling out of the sky, not to mention the aircraft as they descend on fire or in pieces.

There have been many cases of people retrieving drop tanks and other parts for personal use, from storage to cutting them up for animal troughs, etc.

The British hit a point at which they were using single-use paper drop tanks, which were very light weight, covered in paper impregnated with resorcinol glue.

For the most bizarre second world war use of a drop tank, of which I've heard...

quote:

“One morning Sgt. Sing, our Squadron cook, asked me if I would help him with a project to which I agreed of course. He sawed a panel from the top of a paper gas tank in which we carried extra fuel – one that had not been used. He took the baffles out of the inside and hinged the panel he’d cut out so that it could be opened and closed. Into the tank he poured 50 gallons of powdered milk mix, ten gallons of mixed, canned fruit, ten pounds of sugar, some vanilla extract and a few other ingredients that I don’t remember. All this was mixed thoroughly and the tank was hung under the wing of my plane. Sgt. Sing told me to fly up to 30,000 feet where the temperature would be about 30 degrees below zero F. I was to slip and skid the airplane around for half an hour to keep the contents mixed up until it froze, then dive down and land as quickly as possible. When I parked the airplane Sgt. Sing dropped the tank off the wing and opened it up to reveal ICE CREAM. Everyone had a feast.”

--http://warbirdsnews.com/warbird-articles/necessity-mother-invention-paper-drop-tanks-wwii.html

quote:

Originally posted by 220-9er:
I would think both an empty shell casing and an empty aluminum fuel tank would fall at well under terminal velocity due to aerodynamic drag.

Technically they will fall until reaching terminal velocity, which is the limiting velocity due to drag.

I've dropped a lot of objects in flight, and even from under a thousand feet those objects could easily kill someone. Those objects range from a few ounces to several thousand pounds, and when there's nothing to slow them (eg, a parachute failure), they dig in. Sometimes to the point of having to be dug out.

quote:

Originally posted by arcwelder76:
Your thread title is too vague. Vague/clickbait thread titles have been getting locked.

Adjusted

I read somewhere that the terminal velocity of falling shells is around 120 mph. Assuming that is correct, we can calculate the kinetic energy use KE=.5*m*v^2 (remember to convert weight to mass if necessary).

Looking at the kinetic energy numbers, a 2 oz .50 BMG casing falling at a presumed velocity of 120 mph would generate approximate 60 ft-lbs of energy. That is equivalent to being hit with a baseball traveling at 76 mph. While it would certainly sting and probably puncture the skin if hit by an edge, I doubt it would be fatal.

Reopened. Now that the title was edited to be clearer, it's fine.

quote:

Originally posted by jaaron11:
Looking at the kinetic energy numbers, a 2 oz .50 BMG casing falling at a presumed velocity of 120 mph would generate approximate 60 ft-lbs of energy. That is equivalent to being hit with a baseball traveling at 76 mph. While it would certainly sting and probably puncture the skin if hit by an edge, I doubt it would be fatal.

I wonder if that much energy might be enough to knock a chunk of your skull into the brain the way some have been accidentally killed with movie gun blanks to the head.

Regarding falling aircraft drop fuel tanks-

Back around 1971 I routinely did commercial saltwater fishing while in HS. I would flounder gig at night. (For those who don’t know about flounder gigging- you are in a small skiff/boat with underwater lights and a long gig, with which you pole the boat and use the gig end to impale flounder). One calm weekend night I was poling through a marsh and suddenly through the dark I saw what looked to be a silver aircraft tail sticking up out of the water. As I got closer I realized it was an aluminum alloy military aircraft drop fuel tank. It was about 10 degrees from vertical and stuck about three feet into the muddy bottom in shallow water. This was on the Outer banks of NC with nearby military airfields like Cherry Point, Bogue Field, Pope, Seymour Johnson AF Base, Simmons- among others.

I had seen these around before and we had used them for various creative things. By lashing the bow of the boat to the tank I was able to use the buoyancy of the boat to rock it out of the mud. The nose had crumpling damage, but it was watertight and I towed it back home.

So it was approximately 12’ long, tapered and the width of your arms making an “o” and was aluminum alloy. Likely dropped from a low altitude.

I don't know what terminal velocity on a shell casing will be, but it should be considerably higher than a person. 120 is at the low end for a person in freefall; 210 is closer if in a max-track or head down position. I know that if I were to be in freefall and drop something like a .50 shell casing, it would accelerate away from me, even if I'm at terminal, unless it had a streamer or some other drag-producing device.

Terminal velocity decreases with a decrease in altitude; objects fall faster at higher altitudes and slow as the air density increases; the change from a typical B24 cruise altitude of 12,000-15,000' or so wouldn't be appreciable. They could fly higher, but typically didn't push altitude limits.

I've been nearby objects that were dropped from aircraft when thy objects impacted the ground, and I'd have not wanted to get hit.

One would be unlikely to survive a metal drop tank.

Terminal velocity is a function of mass, air density, drag coefficient, and cross sectional area. The problem with a casing is that it would likely be tumbling, so the area and the drag coefficient would not be constant. However, being a hollow cylinder (terrible drag coefficient) with a very small mass, I wouldn’t expect the terminal velocity of a casing to be higher than a person.

Not specifically about cartridge cases, but people have obviously been killed by falling objects that weren’t intended to do so. Although it evidently wasn’t well publicized, there were a number of civilian casualties during the Pearl Harbor attack that were caused by falling antiaircraft shells, and possibly fragments and bullets. Nowadays something like that would lead to calls to stop the war, or at least stop shooting up into the air at attacking aircraft. Farfetched, you say?

During a first Gulf War briefing, one of the journalists asked (paraphrasing now), “If you shoot down a SCUD missile, what are you going to do about the debris that it causes and falls to the ground?” (Is truth; I heard it myself.)

In World War II the band leader (and Army major) Glenn Miller’s small aircraft disappeared on a flight over the English Channel. Decades later it was claimed there was evidence that the plane was hit by a bomb jettisoned by a bomber returning to England after an aborted mission.

One of my locations in Iraq was Basrah, where we had two CIWS missile defense systems on base. On occasion, they'd be tested. It required shutting the system down and re-orienting it 180 degrees, firing over the flight line into the desert, and required sending personnel out to ensure that nobody was down range, for precisely that reason; a lot of falling metal after a test.

In a gunfight, it's another matter. Bad things happen, people get hurt. There's a lot of flying shrapnel, ricochets, misses. The truth is that the vast majority of what goes downrange doesn't hit it's target, but it goes somewhere. Whether unexploded and waiting, or raining down on the local population, or ricochets, it goes somewhere.

One aspect of this, at least with regard to bullets fired from the ground and impacting the ground is that only if the bullet is fired straight up, will it come to a stop and then start falling as if from a standstill. Most of the time when people are injured it is blocks or more away which indicates that the vertical portion of the vector was added to by a sometimes significant amount of lateral vector. In other words, it isn't necessarily the up and down, but the side to side that gets you.

Likewise, bullets from aircraft may still have a fair bit of their velocity left when they impact depending on which way the gun was oriented when firing. Flack of course would be the same, when the shell goes off, some of that stuff is going to be launched downwards at great speed, other will be lofted a long way up before it starts it's fall.

I recall from my younger days listening to a recording of a radio war correspondent during the blitz describing the sound of the debris falling from the sky as "metal rain on the roofs of London" or something like that. If people get hurt by hail, it souldn't surprise me at all to believe that people exposed outdoors could take serious injury or death from AA and cannon shells falling from the sky.