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ChipmunkFood t1_jdvayb6 wrote

Reply to comment by Stevekane42 in Flying through Philadelphia - 1945 by hiding_in_the_corner

It's a dive bomber from WWII.
What's sick or nuts is how there were used.
With a dive bomber you put the plane in a dive, heading toward the target. (They have air brakes to slow the plane down, but it still is a crazy thing).
It turns out that the ballistics problem of aiming the bomb is much easier with dive bombing versus a plane dropping a bomb when flying level (Level bombing). Of course, it takes nerves of steel and titanium gonads to do a dive bombing attack.
Dive bombing was used mainly against shipping. Dive bombing was also used as a "mobile artillery" by the Germans with their (in)famous Stuka dive bomber (Ju 87). [wikipedia on Stuka] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkers_Ju_87)
Other famous/infamous dive bombers were the US Douglas SBD Dauntless and Japanese Val (Aichi D3A).

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Stevekane42 t1_jdvgzjh wrote

I wonder when dive bombing started to phase out. Also pretty wild to see a bombing plane at all flying over philly

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ChipmunkFood t1_je1osix wrote

I think with more accurate bombing techniques/bombsights it went away.
However a bombing plane over Philly is really no different than one of those military plane flyovers during big events. The only difference is that the new military planes could do much, much, much more damage than a dive bomber,

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