Can a modern day fighter pilot survive in a WW1 dog fight?

Question

Take away the missiles the cannons the radar the afterburners ,give them a biplane of the era german or allied cut them loose how long would they survive do think that there training would be an asset

Answer 1

Interesting question. I don't think modern fly-by-wire planes provide the stick-and-rudder skills that a WWI pilot would need.
They would be toast.

Answer 2

I'd have to agree with those who say the original pilots would do much better given only the old flying machine. Many of the WWI fighters were among the most difficult airplanes to fly that were ever designed. The designers were making it up as they went along, and the pilots had much more testosterone than they had either (a) good sense or (b) flight training. And many if not most of them were killed figuring it out.

I tried to fly a replica of a Fokker Dreidekker once and had a lot of trouble just keeping the blue part above me and the green part below me. Very squirrelly machine, and it frequently decided which way to go by its own thinking, and without regard to the control inputs made by the pilot.

And that's after flying a P-51 and a B-17.

Most modern fighter pilots are trained in airplanes that are flying armchairs by comparison. Computerized stability augmentation, coupled navigation systems, fly-by-wire, and advanced autopilots give a false sense of what it means to be flying an airplane. It's mostly point-and-shoot.

So I suspect most F-16 jocks, with all due respect for their bravery and skill in the jobs they do today, would not make it to the battlefield without extensive training in type.

On the other hand, give them the hours in the Sopwith Camel that they have in the F-16, and I think they would even it out. And I would pay to watch, I guess.

Answer 3

That's all very good. Yes, it's true that modern day fighter pilots are more "comfortable" and more reliant on technology.

BUT, let's not forget that today's fighter pilots are more... tough in a sense. Fighter pilots today are trained to withstand up to 9G's CONTINUOUSLY. They're going to be more tolerant to physical stress.

Fighter pilots today also have another advantage: training. During WW1, training is most of the time hastily done due to the urgent nature of the war.
Training today is extremely difficult and VERY thorough. Pilots run through endless simulations and are required to log in more hours. So, pilots have more time on aircraft and should be able to adapt relatively quickly into WW1 era aircraft.

We also have history on our side. During WW1, strategy was still being pioneered. Today, people study formations and tactics that have been successfully proven in combat and pilots can employ strategy and formations in the blink of an eye.

Technology also has helped. Pilots today have to outmaneuver highly agile aircraft, even more agile missiles, and dodge AAA's and SAM's. Pilots today have a better sense of how to dodge enemy projectiles.

So I'd have to say: Yes, if the pilot is competant and willing.

Answer 4

A modern day pilot has one thing all but a few pilots had in WW1, a parachute. WW1 leaders thought a parachute would make them afraid, and waste valuable aircraft! More pilots were lost in training than in combat, it was the "if you can fly it, your a fighter pilot, if you die, too bad" type of flight training until late in the war. So those that survived the first 2 weeks (average time before you got killed) you were something special. Mannock, Ball, Udet, Bolke, Richthofen, Lufbery etc. All learned how to become skillful killers, and that is what they were, by the end of the war, the "fragile kites" had turned into (for the time) fast, deadly killing machines. Today's pilot would of course have to be trained on flying a WW1 aircraft (heavy controls, slow, very tricky to maneuver etc.) but they would be able to adapt easily, I would think. Of course most would be older than the average WW1 pilot (19-20) with vastly more flight time, but they could do it.

Answer 5

In WW1 you didn't have to know much to fly a plane. Pilots were gunned down all the time, they had to come up with others to fill in for the dead ones fast. By the time the war started they had more planes than pilots, and in the preparations gunmen were far less expensive to train than pilots. So they just put 'the next best thing' in a plane, explain the controls, and send'em up. It wasn't much to it either, there weren't that many controls to manage once engaged in an air fight; there were more for landing and taking off than for shooting.

I think today's pilot would look like he has no idea what he's doing for 10 to 20 minutes but after that he'd master the plane--and why not, find it even more fun than today's aircrafts.

It's the same thing as asking whether a modern gamer would be any match for a 2D '80s arcade maniac, It would take him a couple of extremely childish losses but eventualy he'd shoot his way to the end with far more class.

Answer 6

They can survive, after all they also trained with low speed aircrafts, and probably even done simulated dog fights with these things if their training required it.

Some of them for entertainment probably also play around with ordinary PC flight simulators and/or even done simulated dog fighting with real crafts.


However, most World War I pilots probably will certainly die if they are in modern jet fighters. Considering that most them only get a few weeks (or even days) of training before their first flights, the low speed and low altitude crashes are more surviveable, and they become ace only due the hours of experiences they accumulated in the air.



Now as for firing and hiting each other with weapons, that's another matter.

But suffice to say, the average modern day jet fighter pilot probably can be as good as the average World War I ace.



Things can be quite interesting though if a World War I fighter and a modern jet fighter done a dog fight against each other, both them probably will find it very hard to shot down each other.

The other is too fast, while other is too slow.

The bullets from the World War I fighter couldn't catch the modern jet fighter, while the modern jet fighter keep outrunning the World War I fighter before the modern jet fighter pilot can lock his gun on the World War I fighter.

It's also probably harder to lock a radar guided missile on the World War I fighter, due to on how small it is and its material.

Answer 7

A modern pilot would annihilate a WW1 pilot, because modern pilots have such a better understanding of aircraft behavior, what causes them, and how to deal with them.
In the past there were many pilots killed by things we easily overcome, such as torque and stalling tendencies.
Pilots in WW1 were not trained on how to recover from spins and about how to get maximum performance out of their aircraft.
Modern pilots receive a great deal of training that didnt even exist back then, and the tactics we have now would easily outclass the tactics used back then.
A modern pilot uses a great deal of teamwork to win in a dogfight, but back in ww1 the fighting was almost entirely independent without much teamwork.
I have two fighter pilots in my family, trust me, they are phenomenal pilots. They have literally years of combat training before they are actually fighter pilots and they receive a enormouns amount of training.

Answer 8

Of course they would; before they could even think about training to become a 'fighter' pilot, the candidate would have to be an above-average pilot. After Korea, some genious in Wash. D.C. decided that fighter pilots were no longer necessary and started buying aircraft that, though designated 'fighter' were little more than delivery platforms for stand-off weapons. They found out how wrong they were in the early days of 'nam when 'fighter' pilots were getting their butts handed to them by N.V. pilots in the relatively low-tech MiG-17 which was designed for dogfighting. After that Navy & Air Force fighter pilots started getting 'back to basics'-that is, learning to dogfight first then figuring out how to work in all the high-tech stuff.

Answer 9

Certainly they'd survive. Realistically, you'd have to give the modern pilot a certain amount of flight time to check him out in the aircraft. But modern fighter pilots are trained in dogfight manuevers and would adapt to the lower performance and technology of the WW1 aircraft. In fact, they might still have an advantage because they benefit from 90 years of tactical development.

Answer 10

Head-to-head with a piston engined bi-plane, there is no comparison... The ww1 fighter ace would wipe the skies with modern jet pilots, but that's mostly because modern pilots are not trained to fly the old, slow, underpowered, wood and fabric bi-planes. Of course, the majority of WW1 fighter pilots who were trained in the old airplanes didn't survive their combat experiences either.

Answer 11

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