I am attempting to create the appearance that a large bomber plane (1/72) has been shot down and a wing blown off. What is the best what to make it look like it crashed landed and knocked the wing off. I have already assembled and painted the plane, so I want to “crash” it without actually breaking the whole model.
Wow, there can be alot of “Well, that depends’” to figure out before you can come yup with a plan. Some of the best things I can think of, i though I’d pass it on.
For starters, it depends on what kind of bomber, and how’d it crash. For instance, B-17’s despite all the the hype, were incredbly durable… The main wing/body joint was very strong. Very rarely did they lose a wing at the fuselage on impact. Usually the tips were torn off from impact with the feild or clipped a tree or truck.
In most cases, large bombers didnt lose (entire) wings. Those things had to hold the weight of the entire plane and load. If a wing did come off, a good chance it was damaged while in the air, either enemy fire or collision, so when it hit, it was all ready weak.
Or with the Europe Theatre ( I am assuming you are doing WW2) trees were horrific. If a crew could find a good feild to land, chances are they hit some trees. Either the field wasnt long enough, or the grass, (In a wheels up landing) would act like ice and the plane woudl just slide… if it hit a large tree, alot of time the imapct would spin the plane and the wing might get sheared off.
I dont think it happen much with a plane coming into crash land and the wing caught the feild and ripped it off. Most of the time if a wing caught hard enough to rip the wing, it just spun the plane into a cart wheel and usually, destroyed itself.
If I were going to do one up, I maybe have a scene were the plane hit a tree just outside the number 1 or the number 4 engine, and lost the outer section. Carve in some serious drag marks in the ground and show how the plane spun some after impact with a tree., maybe like 90 or 120 degress so it wont appear that the plane was going that fast on impact. other wise, it would have just cut through the wing or sheared the tree. If you are doing a diorama, maybe put a largetree in the far away corner and have the plane and peices comign to rest in the
Most aircraft crash sites are really nothing more than a hole in the ground, with a sprinkling of shredded aluminum to say “plane crashed here”
Best way, make an impact crater in your scenery, color the crater black, to simulate burnt fuel, blacken the surrounding trees in a depth of about 3 to 5 trees from the crater. Take some glitter, not much, as it’s easy to over-do this. The glitter will simulate the shredded aluminum of the aircraft’s structure. Take some, not many, and the only things that really survive are engines, landing gear, tires, and other heavy, massive items. In some cases, bombs survive, intact and un-exploded!
To complete the scene, add firemen and apparatus. If you are doing a CONUS site, both military and civil responders will be on the scene. Add a helicopter (military) to the scene, as usally the accident team arrives by air as fast as possable to asscess the scene.
Just as a suggestion, for a more identifyable scene, use a small mil. helicopter. Then don’t screw into the ground as bad as a fixed wing.
(I had to do 2 accident investigations in my carreer. This is how I know what the scenes look like)
I would say that another problem will be getting the right appearance from the aeroplane itself - bear in mind that aircraft use thin alloy skins over bracing, to make a very light but very strong structure. The plastic kit will have edges that are far thicker than would be prototypical, so it may be worth paring them down (use a craft knife to scrape away plastic on visible edges - they should be paper thin in model form). Hope this is of use!
Big scorched trench in the ground. Lot’s of peices of painted burned tin foil laying about.
One thing you always notice at a crash scene is mangled landing gear and wheels still sort of “in tact”.
True - that will often tell investigators useful things about the nature of the crash. Wheels with intact tyres mean that the landing gear was up at the time of impact, while having all the propellor blade tips bent over mean that the engines were running - may be useful information for details. I learned this from a book titled “Stardust Falling” - it’s about a BSAA Avro Lancastrian (a civilian version of the Lancaster bomber) that crashed in the Andes shortly after WW2. The wreck lay undisturbed for decades as it became incased in ice, and was only rediscovered relatively recently.
Thanx for the help!
I saw a special on them finding that plane after the glacier retreated. It was pretty cool seeing all those parts they found 50 years later.
It seems to me that they usualy rip off at the seams where the air craft body and the wing connects. You would have to rip the fuselage like an old fashion can opener sliced it. But I would have 4 or 5 models ready to practice on. then take the real model and crash it.Me and my brother use to blow up model cars with m-80’s , the steel die cast cars not the plastic ones. It was semi realistic. You just got to experiment. good luck Bushmire
It would really help to know what type of plane you are talking about. It is possible to do a google search on crashes by plane type. There are limited number of photos, but some accident reports that might help, but there isn’t much on combat crashes.
In the crash landing scene you described, the term “shot down” isn’t really apropos. If a plane is damaged by enemy fire, the aircraft will either be damaged so that it is almost immediately unflyable, in which case the crew would try to depart the aircraft immediately. If it was damaged to a lesser extent, the crew would try to fly it to an airfield where an emergency landing could be made. In many of these cases, the aircraft situation deteriorates over time. In the Strategic Air Command, we used 16,000 feet above the terrain as the final decision point on whether it was time to bail out or not. The first B-52 to go down in Southeast Asia due to enemy fire is an example. It took SAM damage on a Vinh raid. The crew attempted to fly it back to friendly territory, but had massive hydraulic and electrical problems. They were gradually loosing altitude and had decided to bail out at 16,000 feet. However, going through 19,000 feet the right wing folded up over the top of the airplane and the crew ejected.
The more likely scenario you want is a plane that suffered battle damage, but was flyable to an emergency landing site. There would be shrapnel holes in the aircraft (some small and some several feet in diameter. A portion of a wing might be missing. Might be burn marks around an engine that had caught fire and was extinguished. You might have a windshield broken or missing.
Ruling out a landing short of the runway, a crash could involve skewing off the side of the runway or going past the far end of the runway into the surrounding terrain. Typically, landing gear might collapse or be sheared off as it goes through ditches, barriers, approach light standards, etc. If it hit a tree on one wing, it might skew the airplane which
Okay, I will provide more detail. It is a light patrol bomber flying over Germany on a bombing raid, was damaged by AA guns, and crashed there into the field. The crew remained with the plane to the end and survived.
That may apply to today’s modern aircraft. The B-17 was nothing less than a masterpiece of aviation. This plane had the ability to stay in te air with over 60% of its flight surfaces destroyed or missing, 2/4 engines and no hydraulics. The plane had main flight surface control with Hydraulics, back ups were provieded with cable control and that was also backed up by manual cranking at stations around the plane. This plane was designed and build to be shot at and take it and bring its crew home. My grandfather was in Brittan durring WWII and his job was a machinist(sp sorry) repairing these planes. My father has a picture of him standing with 3 buddys in a hole in the wing of one of these planes and the plane is on the ground being repaired. They had a high survivability but they were shot down alot. canazar hit what I would imagine was a pretty typical belly landing for one of these airplanes if it were to hit a tree. The B-17 could be belly landed jacked up and within a few hours to a few days be back in the air again. Now if it nosed into the ground well the crater and parts everywhere would sound about right.
Boy, we do get some strange ones on here. Funny how air force people like trains.
I stumbled across this because I was looking up a name of “aardvarknav”. I used to be one of those too - a WSO on F-111. But the guy was writing about SAC, so must have been on the FB-111.
Aircraft forced to make an emergency landing due to battle damage, with minimum damage to the aircraft:
One (or two) engines not running at impact, so propeller blades not in contact with the ground would not be bent. If liquid-cooled, could be caused by coolant loss (shrapnel damage from close under the aircraft AAA blast, which might not cause much damage to the upper side of the aircraft.) If radials, loss of engine oil for same reason, which would have black oil all over everything aft of the oil tanks (including the aft fuselage and empennage.)
Since the pilot’s intention was to walk away, if possible, proper form would be wheels up, high flare just before impact. If the ground was reasonably soft, the main feature would be a deep gouge shaped like the underside of the aircraft. If a wing sheared at the root, the probable reason would be the engine nacelle on that side digging in, so have a mound of dirt in front of it. (If a wingtip dug in early, the plane would have done the bouncing frisbee thing and the scattered aluminum foil description would have applied.)
Emergency hatches on top or sides of the aircraft would be lying on the ground adjacent to the plane, or missing altogether if jettisoned before impact.
A close flak blast would probably have shredded some of the fabric covering the ailerons and elevators. There would have been a lot of holes in the underside of the aircraft, hidden in the piled-up dirt after the bird stopped sliding.
I’ve been assuming that the cause of the battle damage was an 88, not an ME109 or FW190. A fighter would have followed the target and kept shooting until a controlled landing would have been impossible. (Dead pilots don’t make controlled landings.)
Could be an interesting scene, but not one that I’d want on my layout.
Chuck (MSgt USAF, Ret, former Quality Control inspector)
As suggested, do a Google Image search on “military aircraft crash” and variations on the text, it should get you many images. I just did it an there were many pages of images.
Bob Boudreau
I thought “Where’s the trains”? but… whatever.
You may not realise that American Bombers leaving UK airfields in WW2 flew off with the bombs already primed by ground crew (unlike Enola Gay… fatboy was primed in flight). This meant that bombers that stalled on takeoff left massive big holes in Lincolnshire (for the most part) and no-one came back. Similarly an aircraft hit by flak over occupied territory or Germany would not see the crew coming back… much less walking away unscathed.
What we should all do is take a few moments to think about what all those guys did for us … and what their families lost.
Assuming the crash was in the UK and assuming it was an RAF aircraft you can get information from the Royal Air Force historical section (you would probalby need a specific incident). There will be two reports
1)crash investigators report…which is rather simple … a first generation punch card …the kind that was sorted manually with long needles rather than computer, with bare bones information, including check boxes, plus a few lines of info from the investigator,
2)the record of the board of inquiry, if one was called, this one would be more detailed and might have photographs.
There is likely to be a US Air Force equivalent and I am sure someone here can point you in the right direction.
I obtained the reports for the crash of an RAF Dakota at Hong Kong Kai Tak airport in 1946 from RAF history section and a summary of the board of inquiry from a source. In this case, the Dakota was taking off when it encountered cross winds related to an offshore typhoon and nosedived into the hills of Kowloon Tong. Since the Dakota was fully fulled for a trip to Saigon and Singapore, it exploded on impact and was completely destroyed. So the fuel level would be a factor in reproducing any crash for a model.
Robin
OK… so some of you guys know a lot about airplanes and go to great lenghts to let us know how much you know. Is this a Model Railroad Forum or is it not? Why don’t you just direct this guy to an appropriate forum or site?[?][:(]
It’s nice to be friendly and helpful when possible[:P]
I still remember hearing about how years ago near my father’s childhood home a plane went down in The Monongahela River near Rankin. The army had every road blocked off with army trucks allover the place. Supposedly the plane was never found. I think they found what they wanted and left. Whatever was in there must have been extremely important. Some people have said it was a nuclear bomb or some kind of communications equipment.