Good skills or good luck?

During the “Manhattan project” (the making of nuclear bomb), Fermi asked Gen. Groves, the head of the project, what is the definition of a “great” general. Groves replied that any general who had won five battles in a row might safely be called great. Fermi then asked how many generals are great. Groves said about three out of every hundred. Fermi conjectured that considering that opposing forces for most battles are roughly equal in strength, the chance of winning one battle is ½ and the chance of winning five battles in a row is 1/32. “So you are right General, about three out of every hundred. Mathematical probability, not genius.”

Question: what fraction of fighter-pilots became "aces"?

Another question:

Somewhere I read that a victory is when an opponent was forced to the ground. He was not necessarily killed. This means that even surviving aces could have one or more defeats in addition to their victories.

I would be very interested to see a list of aces, which along with the number of victories gives the number of defeats.

This would allow to estimate what fraction of victories of the top-scoring aces is due to skills and which is due to pure luck.

Of cause, there is no chance that all 80 victories of Manfred Richthoffen are all by chance (1/2^80 ~ 10^(-24) ). However it is possible that his intrinsic success rate was not 80/81, but something like 19/20.

To make an actual estimate I need mentioned above defeat data.
Would be happy to collaborate with anyone who can get such data.
I have developed statistical methods to do the rest.

Mikhail Simkin
http://www.ee.ucla.edu/~simkin

[wulffo]

Great idea. There is a lot that can be done here. Given the amount of near misses (winscreens shattered, parts of the plane shot away etc.) we are dealing with skill on one side and probability on the other. A stray bullet at 1000ft can kill the best ace. Hence it has been my theory that the 'best pilot/potential ace' probably got killed before the career even took off. It would be great to be able to calculate probabilities of getting terminally shot down by using the number of hits generally occurred in an engagement and the to start calculating odds for survival. It appears most pilots did this and guys like Richthofen have realized during their career that their 'odds' for survival were slim. It would be great to be able to quantify this.

[Tailspin]

He wasn't 80/81. He was 80/82. (actually this doen't count the MANY actions where he didn't shoot a plane down, but that's another issue).
Rittmeister von Richthofen was hit twice in his career, and both times were more a matter of luck than skill. The first time was when the observer/gunner in an FE2 fired at improbably long range and somehow managed to bounce a round off the fellow's scalp. Von Richthofen passed out and would have been killed had he not regained conciousness in time to crash. The second, more permanent defeat has been contraversial for 85 years. Either a Canadian Camel pilot hit him from an angle he couldn't reach from where HE says he fired from, or one or another Australian machine gunner hit him from a long range as a crossing target in a little airplane (go watch a Cessna fly by from 200 to 500 yards away and realize how small the target is). Or one infantryman hit him with a single shot from a bolt action rifle. As far as anyone knows, there were no other bullet hits on the airplane (again open to debate because souvenier hunters stripped the thing). In any case, he fell more by chance than due to the skill of the opponent - TWICE!

It's my opinion that most air to air combat was brief and one sided or prolonged and inconclusive. You either bounced him and got a quick kill, or he got you into a dogfight until one or the other broke it off or was reinforced.

Tom

[Shooter]

Tom, success in air combat is always a matter or luck to some degree or another. To be successful in air combat 80 times must be to some degree or another also a matter of skill.

Exactly where one decending curve intersects the other rising curve (a literary assumption, since both curves could ascend or decend together) is a matter that may well be quantifiable.

Add to this the fact that the stress of combat also plays a factor. If I am certain of any one issue it is that the strain of flying combat missions eventually played a strong contribution in the death of MvR. When Brown bagged him (assuming Brown did) the Baron brought less than his "A" game to the contest, that is for certain.

You have raised a worthy thread, Mickey. Thanks.


Shooter sends

PS: Yeah, I know, you do not need my approval, but ya got it anyway.

[retread]

Were Manfred von R. , Robert E. Lee, Bonaparte or Nelson lucky or good? I suppose the answer would be yes. They had the skills, the knowledge to make educated guesses (calculated risks), and a set of brass ones. They handed the rest over to fate / dumb luck as you choose. You have to play to win.

[Alan]

I'm sure there were more pilots than MvR who were shot at and came back to fight another day. I'll leave that to those in the Know.

However, I will say that what were the odds that MvR's 15th victory would also come back and shoot down the next highest scoring ace (at the time) for Germany?

I speak of James McCudden. MvR got him, and then Jimmy had a hand in Voss' demise even though Rhys-Davids delivered the coup de grace.

What are the odds of that happening?

[Tailspin]

Alan,

I've used von Richthofen as an example in this thread simply because of how much has already been previously discussed about him. There is obviously a huge amount of skill involved in surviving prolonged periods of intense combat in a flimsy little unarmored airplane. There is also a great deal of luck involved because there are so many variables that are outside of the pilots control, like weather, material defects and the proximity of heat sensitive ammunition to engines that are prone to running hot. Sometimes low flying airplanes flew into the path of indirect fire artillery, for Pete's sake. There were lots of ways to get killed without the enemy even getting involved!

Tom

[Barker]

Originally posted by Shooter@Dec 3 2003, 06:27 PM
[b] You have raised a worthy thread, Mickey.* Thanks.

If people were machines? Yes.

Since they are not and will not ever be, it breaks down further:
You can quantify "what" to oblivion.

You can not quantify "when", even if you say you can ('how often' is not the same as 'when&#39

Which one and when?


"Any Given Sunday" applies in any given athletic contest.

It also applies in any air-to-air contest.

Any good card player is aware of the odds.
The best players do the Wrong Thing at the Right Time.

Thus far, no one has been able to provide an adequate statistical model for that very human (non-mechanical) event.

As "death" is win/lose binary, Good Luck.

[stephen]

Opportunity - or the lack thereof - also figgers into this somewhere. Luck encompasses not only success in combat, but finding it.

[Barrett]

Nobody is ever likely to know the proportion of aces among a fighter pilot population for the huge majority of WW I/II air arms. Not even the USAF can say how many fighter pilots flew one or more combat sorties in WW II. Figures are more manageable for Korea, but Vietnam is a mess. Thousands of aircrew cycled thru tactical wings during the 4-year "Let Hanoi Catch Up" phase 1968-72. IMO, Vietnam is not worth studying in that regard: 2 aces (+3 backseaters) out of thousands of aircrew over 9 years.
As we've noted before, not quite half of all Jagdflieger scored in WW I. About 12% of jagdflieger became aces, claiming 66% of the kills--both very high proportions.
Also, as OFTEN noted here ( B) ), the various Great War air arms had drastically different victory credits. Only the German scores are 1:1 (1 victory, one kill) while the French are next best. Though they assigned shares, the top scorers had very few shared. Brits had The Worst System, since they reckoned moral victories the same as smoking holes in the ground. Check the Articles section for more info, but as a quick measure, Bishop's 72 includes 17 nonfatal credits; others had much higher OOC rates. Americans were little better (Rickenbacker's 26 equals maybe 9 air and 2 ground kills). Therefore, if a meaningful comparison is to be made, the Allied claims gotta be stripped of the OOCs, DDs, FTLs, and ETCs. In 1918 40% of the RAF claims were of the OOC variety.
Furthermore, the foregoing figures do not account for the unavoidable errors in the "destroyed" column, let alone (ahem) "exaggeration."
Follow the bouncing ball, boys & girls: "Every kill is a victory but not every victory is a kill."