[slimbill]

The following information has been acquired from a former air force pilot and WW2 fanatic who served in the Indo-Pak Wars of 1965 and 1971.

As most of you know, normal bullets are impossible to see. So if a dude fires at another aircraft and misses, no biggy. He wont see that hes being attacked. But the moment he sees those buzzing yellow splotches of light, hes gonna be onto you.

A little unknown fact is that tracers have a slightly different trajectory than normal bullets, specially at longer ranges. Iv been told that this is because of the heat generated by the burning chemical on them. So when a pilot sees tracers coming out of his aircraft, thats not really where his rounds are going.

When an aircrafts ammunition is hit, its usually not the ammunition that explodes but the Phosphorous tips on the tracers catch fire and they cause the ammo to explode.

Lastly, though this practice was stopped later, throughout most of the duration of the second world war, the last few rounds on an aircraft were all tracers. This was to tell the pilot that he was out of ammo. The dude that hes chasing will now slowly smile to himself after seeing the consecutive tracers, turn around and blow the poor bugger out of the sky. The idiots who came up with this stupid idea might have missed that the pilot will know that hes out in any case when his guns stop firing.

[FlyingBoxHead]

Interesting.
I found that out on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracer_round Like majik.

[slimbill]

No need to bite, I just got this email from the guy i mentioned and i copied it here. Thought itd be informational.

[BillSwagger]

Makes sense considering the chemical composition is also burning and the weight of the round changes the further it flies.

I think the question to ask is at what ranges do the tracers become increasingly unreliable or inaccurate?

For a 50 caliber tracer round, the velocity is higher than that of an AP round, but also slightly lighter.
There is little detail on how accurate they are but some pilots have mentioned they also curve and spiral after about 300yards.

This may or may not be such a big deal in an air war where most targets are being shot at with in 300 yards, however shooting at ground objects it can be increasingly difficult to follow a bead to its target but its also shown that those bullets tend to follow there intended path and don't require deflection.

We also see the invention of the Incendiary round, which was initially designed to emit a flash on impact to let the pilot know where or if his shots were hitting. These are not the same as tracer rounds, although they do have Incendiary Tracer rounds.

As for cannon rounds, tracer rounds seem to give a wider spread than the actual bullet path because the tracer element itself actually makes the projectile spin and flutter. Again, cannon weapons are typically used beyond 200 meters so it doesn't make much difference. This is reason to expect that lighter caliber tracer rounds are used in conjunction with cannon rounds to help get a better indicator of where cannon rounds are expected to travel at longer ranges, particularly in the case of heavy cannons like Mk108s.


I also read that load outs for on P-47 and P-51s carried minimal tracer rounds on only two guns and that tracer rounds were included in the last 50 rounds of every gun to act as an indicator to the pilot that he only had a few seconds of trigger time left, which for a ground attack mission might be reserved for the return flight.


Bill

[ACE-OF-ACES]

The following information has been acquired from a former air force pilot and WW2 fanatic who served in the Indo-Pak Wars of 1965 and 1971.

As most of you know, normal bullets are impossible to see. So if a dude fires at another aircraft and misses, no biggy. He wont see that hes being attacked. But the moment he sees those buzzing yellow splotches of light, hes gonna be onto you.

A little unknown fact is that tracers have a slightly different trajectory than normal bullets, specially at longer ranges. Iv been told that this is because of the heat generated by the burning chemical on them. So when a pilot sees tracers coming out of his aircraft, thats not really where his rounds are going.

When an aircrafts ammunition is hit, its usually not the ammunition that explodes but the Phosphorous tips on the tracers catch fire and they cause the ammo to explode.

Lastly, though this practice was stopped later, throughout most of the duration of the second world war, the last few rounds on an aircraft were all tracers. This was to tell the pilot that he was out of ammo. The dude that hes chasing will now slowly smile to himself after seeing the consecutive tracers, turn around and blow the poor bugger out of the sky. The idiots who came up with this stupid idea might have missed that the pilot will know that hes out in any case when his guns stop firing.

Actully that is not totally accurate

Alot of the allied pilots in WWII had a say in their ammo mix..

Some swore by tracers some didn't

Col Kit Carson didn't care for them

For some of the reasons you mentioned

He prefered to use the hit sparckes regular ammo provided as feedback when he was on target

[KG64_Cnopicilin]

Actually some pilots did use tracers like Ace said. If you watch some guncam footage you'll see burst of normal bullets, burst of tracers and then normals again. Mixes were commonly used, for example AP, HE, Normal tracer, normal,normal, AP, HE...

[Guest]

Yeah there's so many combinations; tracer in one gun, tracer only when the guns run out etc Once a pilot was used to combat and had his say, there's no real right or wrong