Reply With QuoteNice cool link, thx!
Russian aces over Korea
I found this very interesting article about the secret soviet involvement in the air war during the Korean war. There some excellent pictures and lots of data for tha aviation history lovers.
Enjoy!
http://www.acepilots.com/russian/rus_aces.html
Nice cool link, thx!
In every piece of literature I read American pilots enjoyed a kill ratio heavily in their favour during the Korean War, that article states otherwise...
That is because "every piece of literature" was written for Americans...Originally Posted by Brozozo
In every piece of literature I read American pilots enjoyed a kill ratio heavily in their favour during the Korean War, that article states otherwise...
Do you think Americans would appreciate or like hearing/reading that their pilots are not "the best in the world"?
In this particular case I am inclined to believe soviet numbers because their involvement was secret and therefore there was no need for any propaganda adjustments in numbers.
If not for the dissolvement of the USSR, we'd never know the truth about what really happened in the sky over Korea...
I used to read that science fiction too.In every piece of literature I read American pilots enjoyed a kill ratio heavily in their favour during the Korean War, that article states otherwise...
This subject was discussed some time ago between me and Kingpin:
here the link:
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums...er=asc&start=0
I looked at the pages and pages of all aircraft shot down in the war. These were air force documents that gave date, location, pilot, tail number, aircraft, and cause of aircraft loss. Even when taking into account the 'unknown' F-86 losses, they still came out ahead.
Overall, the F-86 had a 4:1 kill ratio over MiG 15s. The commonly stated 10:1 kill ratio was by the inflated numbers. That number goes down when cross-referenced with the other countries documents. Of course it was not 4:1 when talking about soviet aircraft alone, but the soviets didn't have a 2:1 kill ratio.
You all seem to not really understand what a kill ratio is.
A kill ratio is ALL air-to-air kills over ALL air-to-air losses.
Aircraft lost to accidents, ground fire, or mechanical problems don't count. They never did and they never will. This goes for all countries.
That means if a MiG 21 shots down 2 helicopters and an F-5, but gets shot down by a Mirage, it has a 3:1 kill ratio.
If an F-86 is damaged in a dogfight, and is flying back to base, but get hit by ground fire later, and crashes, it was the ground fire that shot it down. The same goes if the situation was reversed with the MiG-15 getting shot down like that.
The often quoted 2:1 on this site for Soviet MiG-15 kills has an important point--its for total UN aircraft kills.
So, how does the 4:1 ratio for the F-86 in regard to MiG-15 kills, and the Soviet 2:1 kills for the MiG-15 work out?
They actually both make sense. The 4:1 kills for the F-86 only take into account MiG-15s. It has a slightly higher kill ratio, but since most of the aircraft the F-86 shot down were MiG-15s, it does not change all that much.
The Soviet 2:1 may very well be true too because they take ALL aircaft shot down into account. There is nothing wrong with that because that's still a true kill ratio.
If you get into only F-86 kills, the number goes down, and that's because there were other F-86s shooting them down. That will give much closer to a 1:1 kill ratio for MiG-15s in relation to the F-86s.
The 4:1 kill ratio takes into account both Chinese, NK, AND Russian MiG-15s. Its clear that the US didn't have a 4:1 ratio over the Soviet aircraft. All indications I've seen point to around a 1:1 ratio with the Soviet aircraft as well (perhaps a little lower). With the ratio between the Chinese and NK aircraft higher than 4:1 (maybe around 5-6:1) to ballance it out.
That kill ratio actually makes sense. The MiG-15 and F-86 were very evenly matched. This was before the day of the missile, so it was still WWII style fighting were the man in the cockpit made the largest difference.
The American pilots had a significant amount of training, and a large amount had a great deal of WWII experence with many of them being prior aces. The Soviets were in much the same boat. At the time, they also had good training and most of the Soviets flying also had WWII records. When you have evenly matched aircraft, with pretty much evenly matched pilots, using only guns, it makes sense that the kill ratios would be very close to 1:1. I would still give the soviets a slightly greater than 1:1 though because they could use China as a shield. If they were in trouble, they just had to fly a few seconds north over the river and land. The US fighters on the other hand had to fly hundreds of miles south to get back to their bases with the MiGs being able to follow them the whole way.
Its important in these cases not to look at just the 'surface' numbers. By doing a little bit of digging in actuall documents, you can get a much more clear picture of the situation.
Great post AFACadet.
AFACadet is a pro!!!!
......just give a look to my post in the other tread; you will find some useful infos!!!!
Regards,
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