Archie to SAM: A Short Operational History of Ground-Based Air ...

FROM GUNS TO MISSILES
flak rockets that reached 10,560 feet. But there are no indications
of any successes with this weapon, and reports of its firing
faded out by December 1952. 6
How effective was Communist flak in the Korean War? It did
not prevent air operations, but it did make them more expensive.
Hostile fire forced airmen to fly higher and thus reduced
bombing accuracy. The USAF estimated that dive-bombing accuracy
declined from a 75-foot circular error probable (CEP) in
1951 to 219 feet in 1953, which meant that more sorties were
required to destroy a target. 7 Likewise, B-29s that earlier had
attacked in what one writer describes as an “almost leisurely
fashion” as low as 10,000 feet with multiple passes, now operated
at 20,000 feet or above. 8 Nevertheless, despite increasing
Red flak, USAF loss rates declined during the course of the
war from 0.18 percent per sortie in 1950 to 0.07 percent in
1953. Overall, American (Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy)
combat losses of 1,230 aircraft on 736,439 sorties amounted
to a rate of .17 percent. The airmen believed that all but 143 of
these were claimed by ground fire (flak and small arms fire). 9
A further breakdown reveals that USAF losses were not
evenly distributed. That is, fighter-bombers sustained 58 percent
of aircraft losses, although they logged only 36 percent of
sorties. Jets suffered less than did propeller-powered aircraft,
as they operated at higher speeds and altitudes. The Navy’s
piston-powered F4U Corsair took hits at twice the rate of the
jet-powered F9F and was considered 75 percent more vulnerable.
Similarly, the USAF’s famous propeller-powered F-51
Mustang was much more vulnerable than the jet-powered F-80
Shooting Star (fig. 39). 10 In the period July through November
1950, the Mustang had a loss rate of 1.9 percent of sorties
compared with the Shooting Star’s loss rate of .74 percent. 11
The Air Force assessed the loss rate of prop aircraft to be triple
that of jet aircraft. A breakdown of losses in August 1952 indicated
that light flak was the main problem. In that month,
flak destroyed 14 Fifth Air Force aircraft and damaged 153
others. During the entire war, the Air Force credited light flak
with 79 percent of the downed aircraft and 45 percent of the
damaged aircraft, small arms with 7 and 52 percent, and heavy
flak with 14 and 3 percent. 12
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