What's new
Van's Air Force

Don't miss anything! Register now for full access to the definitive RV support community.

Bullet Holes

rv6rick

Well Known Member
Another reason to make sure your fuel gauges work, and not to just 'time' your fuel.

A 172 (may as well have been an RV) left my home base the other day for a short flight. When he returned he discovered that he had been a target. The bullet missed the left fuel tank by about 6".....and it missed the pilot by only about 4'.

Here's a pic of where the round entered the bottom of the left wing:



Here's the exit hole in the top of the wing....slightly larger than the entry hole:



If you look closely at this pic you can see daylight from the entry hole clean through the exit hole:



For comparison, the round universal rivet heads are 1/8" (shank). Any of you rifle owners care to take a guess on what size bullet would make a hole that large?

I suppose an investigation would be difficult at best?
 
My guess is .30 caliber. An 1/8" rivet is .125 and I load and shoot my own .308 rounds and that looks close enough to more than double the factory head to me. (.308 is the caliber in inches BTW) Without witness' and knowing exactly where he was when he got hit I'd guess it would be impossible to know who did it.
 
Looks like a 22 to me

It looks like the the velocity was low enough the that it tore the lower skin then tumbled (keyholed) out the top.

Bob Axsom
 
It looks like the the velocity was low enough the that it tore the lower skin then tumbled (keyholed) out the top.

Bob Axsom

Depending on altitude and the angle the dumb*** shot it at a .30 cal could lose enough velocity to tumble after it hit. The .30 cal is *really* only good to 500 to 600 yards without falling exponentially in velocity and ft-lbs of energy. Don't get me wrong... a .22 could do the same thing but the hole looked too big for less than .100" difference.
 
It might be just me, but I would report this to the authorities. If it happens once, it can happen to someone else. There would be at least one point recorded for beginning a history. Maybe there is a GPS or radar track of where the plane went. Luckily, no one was injured. The next plane might not be so lucky.

Just my thoughts.

Tom
RV-7A N175TJ Flying
 
I think DHS, TSA, and the FBI would like to hear about this one. After all, it is a federal offence to shoot at a plane.

Two things, I suspect he was low when he was holed. Probably around 500' AGL. The other thought would be to check his GPS track and then go ask the neighbors in the area if they heard any shots at that time.

As an odd thought, I wonder if someone is growing some special crops on his route of flight.
 
Make report

I agree with Bill: you must report this to the authorities.

Ray Williams
Australia

7A emp, QB wings and fuse ordered
 
Report it

That's a dang "good" shot to actually hit an aircraft moving - maybe 110 knots - a few thousand feet up. Scary.
 
Illegal activity below?

About six years ago I was involved in some special (super secret) radio waveform testing for the government. The tests were conducted in TN. My job was to design and integrate antenna's on 10 C-172 and 10 ground vehicles. The C-172's would fly dedicated patterns in the area, multiple aircraft if the air most of the time for hours. The ground vehicles were parked throughout the country side.

We were given a bus tour of the ground vehicle's parking locations months before the test. During the tour the local Air Force base commander told us that prior to the tests the sheriffs deputies will go door to door telling the residents about the pending activity.

The reason? So they won't shoot at the ground vehicle's or C-172's that will be passing overhead for weeks and weeks.

There are a lot of interesting things growing down there.

No offense to TN, it is very pretty state.

Paul
 
I'd also recommend reporting the incident. There could be other, previously reported incidents in the area of your flight, and each report could help the good guys connect the dots and maybe close the net around the bad guys.

Glad your friend wasn't hurt or worse. Scary scenario, that's for sure!

Whew!

Bob
 
Years ago, a .22 bullet hit the leading edge of my Cessna 120's propeller. I heard it ring in flight and wondered what the #@!! that was. I found it on my next preflight, complete with the copper plating from the .22 bullet. I didn't report it. When you report things here, you are made to be the criminal. It's best to keep quiet. I just make it point to keep safe altitude over areas where pot is grown.
 
Easy but heavy

How easy to bullet proof under seats and tanks?

In our C-130s we add 5000 lbs of Kevlar to the cockpit and put foam in the gas tanks. The only time I had a hole in a wing tank was from the top... In the desert they like to spray bullets into the air and they all have to come back down :eek: (something about gravity)
Then again we do fly at 60 degrees of bank a lot too :D

KC
 
There are a lot of interesting things growing down there.

There is a lot of interesting things cooking down there.

Report it. We had duck hunters threating to shoot at planes taking off from a local airport because they where scaring the ducks. (many airports around here on on the river flood plane that they flood in the fall for duck hunters). Feds take it serously as just threating to shoot a plane is an offense. Not sure of the outcome but I believe the Feds said they would shut down the duck hunting if anything happened.

Let's all play nice together, please.
 
Last edited:
Someone seems fed up...

.....or just plain crazy/mean.

Several years ago I had a really riled up guy come out to the airport I was fertilizing out of (not my home base), demanding to know "who in the he!! was flying that butt-ugly yella airplane! His house was under crosswind and he was trying to break a horse.

He warned me that if I flew over his house ?ne mo' time" that he'd get his 30.06 and that would put an end to it. I didn't feel like testing him but I went home and reported him to the Sheriff, telling him that to explain that if I'm threatened again, the guys in the black suits and ties would come and haul him off.

I found out that he'd apologized and kinda meekly decided to stow the gun.

Regards,
 
a Visit?

Another reason to make sure your fuel gauges work, and not to just 'time' your fuel.

A 172 (may as well have been an RV) left my home base the other day for a short flight. When he returned he discovered that he had been a target. The bullet missed the left fuel tank by about 6".....and it missed the pilot by only about 4'.


Rick,
So when we fly over to visit you...........
we should stay high and circle down into the pattern?
Wonder what the tower will say??

Do the shooters like to hit "lead"?
or "tail end charlie" ????:eek:

Just another reason to fly RV's and fly high where there is less drag, better cooling and ........fewer bullets....:D
 
This will make some "interesting" damage history for this 172... Imagine reading that logbook entry!

I'm glad every is OK! I would report this. I wonder if the shooter even realized that he hit the aircraft? It probably continued to fly without any signs of impact. Maybe if he saw a newspaper article saying something like "authorities investigate shooting of small aircraft" he will stop doing it for fear of being arrested?
 
Last edited:
bullets

We had our Twin Comanche shot once. Bullet went up thru the middle seat right behind the pilot. Traversed the back of the seat frame from top to bottom and out the top. A couple of weeks later the feds raided a neighboring farm for growing the "wacky weed".
 
OK, dumb question time. I wonder how high you have to be on a cross country to avoid being hit by a bullet. When does a vertical bullet loose it's "umph"?
 
OK, dumb question time. I wonder how high you have to be on a cross country to avoid being hit by a bullet. When does a vertical bullet loose it's "umph"?

Depends on the gun/cartridge used.

Dumb answer, top of its flight path.
 
OK, dumb question time. I wonder how high you have to be on a cross country to avoid being hit by a bullet. When does a vertical bullet loose it's "umph"?

Supposedly from a book written in the 60's about ballistics:
The Haag article used a ballistics computation program to calculate vertically fired bullet performance and came up with results comparable with Hatcher's work. Using bullets ranging from the .22 rim fire to the 180gr .30 caliber spitzer in the .30-06 the time of flight (up & back) ranged from a low of 25 seconds for the .25ACP to a long of 77 seconds for the M193 ball. Maximum altitudes ranged from a low of 2288 feet for the .25ACP to a high of 10,103 feet for the 180gr .30-06. Terminal velocities ranged from 134 f/s for a tumbling .22 Short to a high of 323 f/s for the 180gr .30-06.

Haag calculated the performance of the .30cal 150gr M2 ball round fired by Hatcher as a maximum altitude of 9330 feet and a round trip time of 57 seconds which is, for all intents and purposes, the same as Hatcher's observations.
 
Back in the GA Avionics days we had a collection of mushroomed out bullets that we found on the ramp after New Years each year. It is really eye opening to see how many people fire into the air on holidays. One year my father in law found a hole in the wing of his Comanche on New Years Day and a distorted piece of lead underneath it on the ground. He was a broken man and you would have thought a close family member had been shot. Oh yeah, I get it, that's kinda what happened in a guy sort of way. It was extremely tramatic for him.

On another note, here in the Bay area there has been some recent news stories about a system that is being placed in cities with high crime rates. The equipment detects and pinpoints gunshots giving police a location to go pick up the gang banger who fired. Most recently it was installed in an area of Richmond, CA which has so many shootings that it isn't shocking to hear about them any more. The first arrest got press about 3 weeks ago when they went right to a house and took care of business.
 
Thanks for those facts and figures Brian. Very interesting. All the more reason to fly high. Pooped out bullets and and a smaller target.
 
Just my two cents....

But having been a competition shooter for several years in my misspent youth, I would concur with the 30.06/08 consensus (hard to tell with a photo). That being said, I think tracking down the shooter is a lot easier than many people would think.

My humble opinion is that his would have had to happen very low. Most cartridges supporting that caliber (Springfield or NATO 7.62) cannot propel the round with any accuracy onto a point target beyond 500 yards. This assumes a trained and competent rifleman on iron sites (most shooters cannot locate and engage a moving target with a scope). The average joe-hunter cannot hit a point target at this range with any sort of consistency (more or less a fact). My observation is that the average druggie can't hit the broad side of a barn (clearly my opinion -- but backed up by my Grandfather who was a rural county sheriff for 12 years).

A moving aerial target is just about an impossibility at 500 yards. The technique for engaging an aerial target is to maintain a sustained rate of fire in front of the target and allow the target to fly into that cone of fire (so sayeth the U.S. Army). Even using this technique with multiple combat rifles, such as the M1 Garand, hitting a target like that at 500 yards would still be more a matter of extraordinary luck (although the more rounds, the more barrels, the greater your chances). Maintaining a sustained rate like this involves a semi-automatic weapon (or automatic if you're not worried about the law).

Therefore, our shooter would have to have either:

a) fired at a rapid and sustained rate

or

b) fired while the target was very low

or

c) been exceptionally lucky

Of the three I go with B (don't believe in luck). In any case I would be very suprised if there were no witnesses (audible or visual) to the event. Especailly in rural areas where noise travels and every neighbor knows what every other neighbor is up to (my life experience:D). But, if you take option A, then you've effectively eliminated most rifle types in existence and reduced the options down to a relatively small number, which could make the offender easier to locate.

Okay, that was more like a buck fifty...

Way off topic I suppose, but awakened me to a flying risk I quite frankly had not considered. Doug has such an interesting site!

Now, how to return fire.......:eek:
 
That is exactly what all those extra switches, triggers, and button are for on the grip!
 
Question

The TSA is protecting the general public from the terrorist threat posed by GA. Who is protecting GA from the terrorist threat posed by the general public?
 
Funny this thread is current today... just this morning in my local paper the crime blog noted that someone living on the road adjacent to the airport threatened that the next time a noisy plane flew over his house he was going to shoot at it.

If you're flying to Ellensburg (KELN) watch out for the small caliber AA!:eek:
 
With a really accurate GPS track, combined with recorded EFIS data and the angle of the hole through the wing, you could potentially draw a line on a map intersecting the location of the shooter at some point along the flight path. Nothing to it! Book 'em Danno!
 
With a really accurate GPS track, combined with recorded EFIS data and the angle of the hole through the wing, you could potentially draw a line on a map intersecting the location of the shooter at some point along the flight path. Nothing to it! Book 'em Danno!

Ah. A fellow CSI fan :)
 
Last edited:
Bullet in Prop

I live and fly in Northern Idaho, the land of everyone has an arsenal and a few wacko's living out in the sticks. I lost a piece of my wood prop blade a couple of years ago for no apparant reason. It wasn't cracked, and the wood was sheared across the grain. I assumed at the time that I had been hit with a bullet, or hit a bird. There were no feathers, however. When I called to try to locate a new prop, one of the manufacturers said I had probably been hit with a bullet, they had seen it several times.

So if the risk of flying and experimental airplane, with an experimental prop, with an experimental engine, rebuilt by an experimenal mechanic weren't enough, now there is getting shot at. As one other poster always says:

Let's all Fly Safe Out There!
 
Press "Mark"..

....on your GPS as quickly as possible if you happen to hear or see a bullet damage your airplane. Precise coordinates could go a long way to ID'ing the perp.

Regards,
 
Big caliber rifles are not that common these days, my guess you caught a golden bb from some immature kid with an assault rifle, probably a .223 or a 7.62x39 from one of the Russian/Chinese specials; possibly a 9mm depending on altitude.
 
...[snip]
Therefore, our shooter would have to have either:

a) fired at a rapid and sustained rate

or

b) fired while the target was very low

or

c) been exceptionally lucky

Of the three I go with B (don't believe in luck). In any case I would be very suprised if there were no witnesses (audible or visual) to the event. Especailly in rural areas where noise travels and every neighbor knows what every other neighbor is up to (my life experience:D). But, if you take option A, then you've effectively eliminated most rifle types in existence and reduced the options down to a relatively small number, which could make the offender easier to locate...[snip]
I think that this is well said and puts into perspective the difficulty of hitting a target at 500 yards / 1500'. I think that option C is still a real possibility since I believe in statistics - it is unlikely that someone can hit an airplane at altitude, but if enough people try it enough times, eventually it is going to happen. That said, I believe you are correct that the most likely scenario is B, which would allow the authorities to potentially narrow their initial search to when the aircraft was flying very low, most likely on landing or takeoff.
 
Imagine the look on the poor souls face when he decides to shoot at an RV...not knowing its armed...and then he sees the RV roll inverted and do a split-S for some return strafing!! HAHAHA!
 
I think that this is well said and puts into perspective the difficulty of hitting a target at 500 yards / 1500'. I think that option C is still a real possibility since I believe in statistics - it is unlikely that someone can hit an airplane at altitude, but if enough people try it enough times, eventually it is going to happen. That said, I believe you are correct that the most likely scenario is B, which would allow the authorities to potentially narrow their initial search to when the aircraft was flying very low, most likely on landing or takeoff.

Oh, absolutely option C is still a viable possibility, I just think it unlikely. That's what took me to B....but you're right, as rtry9a indicated, you could always run into that kid with the "golden BB".

Now, how do I mix up that napalm again?:D
 
A Sightseeing Story

When I worked as a lineboy many years ago, a guy landed after a pleasure flight late one Saturday afternoon. I went out to park him and noticed some odd aluminum work on his fuselage. I asked him about it as we both started looking at it. He said that he had heard a few pings, but didn't know what they were from. He had probably four or five holes in it very similar to the photos shown. We called the local sheriff and the story finally came out. He apparently had been sightseeing a little too low over the local nudist camp and a camper expressed his displeasure to the pilot! The pilot didn't go back. At least not at that low an altitude!
 
Reporting this is key, you never know. Working in Law Enforcement there are many times when you may get a call or hear about someone shooting in an area where they may or may not be allowed to. Had that call came in at a time during the flight, boom you've already got the jerk. Besides, most crimes can be solved with good interviews if you have the general location.
 
How high?

Common velocity math suggest a rifle bullet would go 8000 to 9000 feet if fired straight up. I'm sure some "experimental types" could figure how to make them go even higher. Any vets out there with practical experience?
 
Back
Top