Question: do the jet fighters still have unpressurized freezing cold cockpit ? And how about bomber/spy planes that have to fly very high to avoid getting shot down ?
Question: do the jet fighters still have unpressurized freezing cold cockpit ?
Nope, they are using pressurized cockpit, but not as pressurized as passenger planes. Fighter pilots were still required to wear jumpsuit probably because of the high velocity of their aircraft, they also wear those masks and helmets for communication (if my memory is right, there's a radio communicator attached on that masked and a radio receiver from the helmet) to make communication more convenient. The pilot use the oxygen mask once the pressurize cockpit (or the plane itself) has been shot by an enemy aircraft or there was a technical problem, it is the same for the jumpsuit, just in case of emergency.
And how about bomber/spy planes that have to fly very high to avoid getting shot down ?
A crew from a B-29 bomber were wearing "Bomber Jackets" which could withstand negative 50 degrees Celsius temperature. I also found out that several specific parts inside the B-29 were pressurized since they were built for high-altitude long-range bombing (but they cannot fly in high-altitude during night flight).
After roughly the jet age, they stopped doing things like having open-air cockpits. At high speed, it creates too much drag.
WWII-era aircraft were generally made to be cheap and mass-producable, and the Japanese, especially, didn't give a damn about safety or the longevity of their aircraft, so they were fairly flimsy and potentially quite porous, even before taking fire.
Aviation's come a long way since then. Planes are made with triple redundancies, and are designed to last for decades of being ridden hard and put away wet.
---
Oh, and as Mythbusters proved once, drinking alcohol is actually bad for you when you're in cold weather.
See, it opens up your circulation to your extremities, which your body shuts down to preserve core body temperature at the expense of the hands and legs. The total amount of heat in your body doesn't change, and in fact, the reason your body was shutting it off to the hands and legs was because those parts lose heat faster, so you're dropping in body temperature even faster thanks to the alcohol. It makes the pain of the cold in your hands and legs go away, and you might "feel warm", but it actually brings you closer to death by hypothermia than just gritting your teeth and bearing it would have done.
NWSiaCB said: Oh, and as Mythbusters proved once, drinking alcohol is actually bad for you when you're in cold weather.
See, it opens up your circulation to your extremities, which your body shuts down to preserve core body temperature at the expense of the hands and legs. The total amount of heat in your body doesn't change, and in fact, the reason your body was shutting it off to the hands and legs was because those parts lose heat faster, so you're dropping in body temperature even faster thanks to the alcohol. It makes the pain of the cold in your hands and legs go away, and you might "feel warm", but it actually brings you closer to death by hypothermia than just gritting your teeth and bearing it would have done.
Hence the fairies here should thank Junyo, or else they might be killed before they could even do their work.
This wasn't supposed to be a text wall, but then it all just vomited forth. I really can't help it, the crap just falls out of me at the slightest wiff of military and technical nerdishness...
Question: do the jet fighters still have unpressurized freezing cold cockpit ?
Show
Modern fighters are indeed pressurized... to a point. The cabin is pressurized, but as noted not as much as an airliner since the idea is mostly to keep it just dense enough to prevent the worst effects low pressure on the body (the bends, gas expansion, etc) while the mask will be used to prevent hypoxia. This also gives leeway for some minor leakage during maneuvering and allows the cockpit to be built lighter since it's holding less pressure. However the oxygen mask is not merely some emergency safety feature it's very much required. Fighters can get higher then airliners and as altitude outside climbs the 'effective altitude' in the cabin does too. At a certain point even with the limited pressurization a mask is required to retain sufficient oxygen to remain alert.
The exact number varies by aircraft, but it appears common that fighter aircraft retains a bit under 10,000 feet of pressure up to around 30k feet and then it starts dropping off to a bit less then 25k feet inside at the common maximum operating heights of around 50,000 feet. Even at lower cabin altitudes the mask is not optional most people tend to start feeling the effects of hypoxia at around 10,000 feet and any physical activity (like say straining hard against G) rapidly increases the effects and makes any effort much harder. Further even if one might not pass out even mild hypoxia can dull the senses and cognition in a manner not entirely unlike being drunk which is hardly acceptable for a pilot. Above 20,000 feet most people will eventually pass out after some span measured in minutes, and fighter cabins can reach that level at the upper end of their altitude capabilities making the mask absolutely required.
They're all well heated though. Bombers can be different for various reasons (less maneuvering, weight somewhat less of a critical factor, etc) and a number of them seem to have cabins closer to airliners though for various reasons most still demand the wearing of oxygen masks regardless.
A crew from a B-29 bomber were wearing "Bomber Jackets" which could withstand negative 50 degrees Celsius temperature. I also found out that several specific parts inside the B-29 were pressurized since they were built for high-altitude long-range bombing (but they cannot fly in high-altitude during night flight).
Show
"Bomber" jackets come in two types actually the commonly seen one was actually just a fairly light weight outer shell and was often worn even on the ground as a fashion statement. That said this outer jacket was used by pilots and other crews 'up front' in bombers during flight, but that was because the cabin area was actually heated so a simple jacket over the uniform was enough. The guys in the back though... they had no heat and no jacket on earth could protect you against temperatures that might be as bad as 60 below for hours on end. The wore a second type that was heavier and actually plugged into the plane and was heated like an electric blanket. The B-29 though was fully pressurized and heated the crews actually went into combat wearing simply khaki uniforms without even full length sleeves (you can find film of this easily). Anyone wearing a jacket in the B-29 was doing it purely for fashion reasons.
The US in general had it the best by and large regarding cabin comfort though since the demands for high altitude work placed on so many of their aircraft meant more or less all their main line fighters had robust cockpit heating that would make a mockery of anything less then sub-arctic conditions. Bombers tended to have heated cabin areas, but gunners had it rougher as noted above. Others weren't so lucky and many aircraft from before the war not originally envisioned for high altitude work lacked effective cabin heating. Spitfires and Me-109 for example fell into this group a few of the former got only marginally useful heaters later on and pilots of the later sometimes wore heated jackets and boots in the vein of the above bomber crews if they were available. The Zero at least also seems to have lacked any sort of cockpit heating and given how austere most Japanese planes where regarding any sort of intangibles I'd suspect the vast bulk of Japanese aircraft were similar.
Also the B-29 can fly as high as it wants at night, but there was no need since the utterly inadequate Japanese air defense system posed rather modest risk while an altitude drop improved accuracy considerably.
NWSiaCB said: WWII-era aircraft were generally made to be cheap and mass-producable, and the Japanese, especially, didn't give a damn about safety or the longevity of their aircraft, so they were fairly flimsy and potentially quite porous, even before taking fire.
Aviation's come a long way since then. Planes are made with triple redundancies, and are designed to last for decades of being ridden hard and put away wet.
Show
This is... wrong is more or less every way imaginable.
No modern fighter would last five minutes in the conditions that prevailed at a WW2 fighter base in the South Pacific. Compared to modern aircraft WWII machines were built like tanks; they took hits that would disintegrate a modern fighter and flew around with so many chunks and bits blasted out of them that even an A-10 would feel inadequate by comparison. They were, literally in most cases, armored plated. They were also comparatively simple and you could legitimately keep one running with know how, elbow grease, and hand tools. Very similar sorts of aircraft are still in wide use in the most rugged conditions because they're so much tougher, easier to keep going, and rugged then modern designs.
Modern fighters are fiendishly complex princesses that require a literal staff of dozens to be coaxed into doing their job and die young due to the sheer stress of said job. Seriously you think anyone is going to be doing this with F-16 and F-15 in 60 years?
No modern fighter would last five minutes in the conditions that prevailed at a WW2 fighter base in the South Pacific. Compared to modern aircraft WWII machines were built like tanks; they took hits that would disintegrate a modern fighter and flew around with so many chunks and bits blasted out of them that even an A-10 would feel inadequate by comparison. They were, literally in most cases, armored plated.
You know what conditions are worse than that of a fighter base? Carrier operations. You've got the aircraft parked on the deck, subject to adverse weather for however long it needs to be, under seawater corrosion and constant rolling motion. And surprise surprise, we still have modern carrier based fighters that can function under these conditions.
Old WW2 planes were armour plated because they still shot low velocity 20mm and rifle caliber 7.62/12.7mm rounds at each other. No aircraft, modern or old, can carry enough armour for it to matter when 20+ lbs of HEF or 5 kilos of 30mm HEI want to ruin the airframe's day.
Modern planes don't bother trying to mitigate the damage, they just make sure you can fly with that damage. Show me any WW2 plane that can fly with this degree of damage.
Reliability and ruggedness
They were also comparatively simple and you could legitimately keep one running with know how, elbow grease, and hand tools.
And they did, leading to an accident rate 50 times what you get on modern aircraft.
We have a 20:1 mhr/flight hr ratio not because we need that much maintenance for the same performance, it's because we're asking for the ability to take off in 5 minutes from hangar storage, travel faster than the speed of sound, land a missile on a target you can't see, drop a bomb from a dozen miles away with enough precision to hit a tank dead on, refuel in midair then fly the thousand miles back to base; all with reliability rates nearly a hundred times more than what they asked for in WW2.
Very similar sorts of aircraft are still in wide use in the most rugged conditions because they're so much tougher, easier to keep going, and rugged then modern designs.
No, we build them because they are cheap. You don't need speed on a crop duster, so why would you put a turbofan on it? You don't care about air-to-air capability, so why would you put a doppler radar on a Twotter? Wanna save costs? Go from stressed skin to spaced-frame, it's heavier but costs less and is cheaper to maintain!
Modern fighters are fiendishly complex princesses that require a literal staff of dozens to be coaxed into doing their job and die young due to the sheer stress of said job. Seriously you think anyone is going to be doing this with F-16 and F-15 in 60 years?
Yes. Beyond the sheer idiocy of comparing a well-preserved, rebuilt P-51 funded a budget of 'I don't care, just get this plane working again' to the USAF's need to reduce operational readiness cost to allow for expansion; have you not noticed that 50+ year old 707s, DC-3s, DC-9s are still doing routine flights? Planes work because we have incentive to keep them that way. In 50 years, someone will look at the USAF museum's Streak Eagle and say "Gee, it would be cool if we could make it fly again", then you will see it in the air once more.
This is... wrong is more or less every way imaginable.
Minimin already covered a lot, but to go into the Japanese in particular...
Show
The Japanese planes were built not just "austere", but built in a downright criminally negligent manner. The Zero, in particular, was ordered up on design specs that were simply impossible with the engines of the day, and had every single safety feature they could think of removed to save weight, much less a pilot comfort issue. They were functionally unarmored, having very thin aluminum shells at a time before they had learned how to make aluminum more resistant to stress cracks from changes in altitude. Worse, they picked a type of aluminum that was specifically lighter, but MORE vulnerable to corrosion and cracking than normal aluminum alloys.
It was noted that, by Midway, many of those planes on the four Japanese carriers were already at the end of their operational lives (after only about 2-3 years of use on a carrier) but were still being used because production had been limited, or in the case of some of the primary bombers, completely stopped. Many planes were malfunctioning, including a rather notable reconnaissance plane that would have spotted the American carrier force had it flown its intended path at its intended time.
While it may be true that WESTERN power planes were built like tanks, Japanese planes would, since they had much thinner armor made of more brittle material and fuel lines with no armoring or self-sealing fuel tanks, light up like a match at the slightest hint of damage. In fact, American engineers who were keen on learning how the Japanese had built a plane so maneuverable were stymied for nearly a year of the war because no Japanese plane damaged ever actually survived the trip to the ground in anything but a disintegrating fireball. When they finally got one, (shot down by a simple rifle from the ground, no less,) they were absolutely horrified at what they were subjecting Japanese pilots to. Like a racecar, it was built to maximize performance on a small engine by removing all weight, which meant armor and safety gear. You could ignite Japanese planes with a well-placed shot from small arms. (If they didn't fall out of the skies themselves because they had cut every corner imaginable, and were impossible to maintain.)
NWSiaCB said: Oh, and as Mythbusters proved once, drinking alcohol is actually bad for you when you're in cold weather.
See, it opens up your circulation to your extremities, which your body shuts down to preserve core body temperature at the expense of the hands and legs. The total amount of heat in your body doesn't change, and in fact, the reason your body was shutting it off to the hands and legs was because those parts lose heat faster, so you're dropping in body temperature even faster thanks to the alcohol. It makes the pain of the cold in your hands and legs go away, and you might "feel warm", but it actually brings you closer to death by hypothermia than just gritting your teeth and bearing it would have done.
It may just be me but when I'm flying at 400 mph in a metal box that fights my every move and attempting to push it to limit to avoid getting shot at while later on, performing high-precision maneuvers just to touch the ground without becoming a fireball, I prefer to have some heat in my extremities rather than all focused in my heart and head. It's the difference between dying of hypothermia in five hours rather than dying in a plane wreck in two hours.
They're not just to look coolIn Showa 12-15 (1937-1940), it's said that every pilot on winter duty always bring a bottle of AwamoriReason for the mufflersI drank them. Sorry
tehe peroThat bastard, she drank it again!It's really cold up there*shivers* *shivers*Temperature drops 6℃ for every 1000 metres climb. When going up to 6~8000 metres, the temperature is already below freezing pointThose mufflers pilots are wearingElse their body won't last