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Comment by hei-lima | Hacker News Reader

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This is an obvious troll post, but it is interesting how an airliner kept flying in spite of taking a missile hit (or two?)

The answer is that surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles don't generally slam into their target and erupt into a big flamey explosion.

Instead, they are more like shotgun shells that explode near their target. Moving targets are hard to hit (especially e.g. a fighter plane attempting to evade) so this gives them a greater chance to damage their target.

It's also not generally necessary to blow a target to smithereens. Planes are fragile and insanely complicated. Militarily, damaging one is as good as destroying it. Even if it remains airborne that plane is going to have to leave the fight and even if it makes it back to base it's not going to be flying again for a long time, if ever.

So it's not too surprising that an airliner stayed aloft for a time after a missile hit. It would not have been blown to bits, and it has at least two engines. A single missile, exploding nearby, could leave at least one engine and some/most control surfaces functional.

(Of course, often a missile strike is fatal to an airliner, as we have also unfortunately seen throughout history)

It looks from videos like the hit caused fatal damage to pitch control, probably damaging the horizontal stabilizer or its hydraulics.

It probably exploded near the aircraft. That would explain the shrapnel damage.

All air missiles explode near the target.

Traditionally. Newer interceptors like PAC-3 are designed for hit-to-kill, using the kinetic energy of the interceptor itself to hit and destroy the target directly. The downside is you need more advanced sensors to get the required guidance accuracy, the upside is less "dead weight" for a warhead.

That's super interesting. I did not know that! Thank you!

Worth noting MANPADS try to get much closer than all the bigger ones because they can't carry too much shrapnel (if any).

A lot of modern AA missiles don't use any traditional shrapnel at all. They use what's called a continuous rod warhead. It's a bunch of steel rods arranged as a cylinder with alternating ends welded to each other on each side effectively making it one long rod. The explosive charge is placed in the middle and when it goes off the rod expands into one big rod in a circle which then cuts the aircraft in half.

Yeah, it's fascinating to me. In casual discussions (the only kind I am qualified to have) I just refer to it all generically as "shrapnel" but as you say it's more nuanced in practice.

For casual discussions it's IMO generally sufficient to just call it all shrapnel, to differentiate between reality and the Hollywood images of missiles slamming directly into planes and making big fiery explosions.

An Airbus has also survived a missile strike: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Baghdad_DHL_attempted_sho...

You must be a troll.

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