Post by SolomonWhttps://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-hump-was-the-deadliest-cargo-flight-in-history-13fe4ff5a09
The aircrews had a one in three chance of being killed. Some 700 planes
went down.
While I agree it was a dangerous transport route the rest needs
some clarification.
Deadliest implies the most number of human casualties but the planes
rarely flew passengers, making other routes more deadly as there were
often more people on board even though there were fewer crashes.
Next is the USAAF did most of the flights and reports for the entire
war the CBI lost 406 transports to all causes, 369 front line and 103
second line. However the airlift was mostly run by the Air Transport
Command and they report their efforts separately.
The Air Transport Command took over the operation on 1 December
1942 but the USAAF Statistical Digest only gives tonnage figures
from January 1943 onwards and aircraft figures from December 1943
onwards, those say 373 transports were lost from 156,977 eastbound
trips and presumably almost the same number of return trips, they
usually managed more than 1 trip per day per aircraft in service, and
just under 1 trip per aircraft assigned.
Monthly loss rates as a percentage of aircraft did peak at 10% or
more 6 times between December 1943 and August 1945, the rate
per 1,000 trips figures also start in December 1943 and peak at 8 in
January 1944, it was 5 in May, down to 4 in June, 3 in August, and
was usually 2 from November 1944 onwards.
At the 8 losses per 1,000 trips figure a crew would have to fly over
50 trips to have a one third chance of writing their aircraft off, at 4
losses per 1,000 trips they would need to fly nearly 100 trips.
Though clearly averages hide the peak periods and then comes what
losses are being defined as, whether they include accidents, it seems
the Statistical Digest figure is lost/missing and does not include write
offs. The Wiki article lists total aircraft losses as at least 469 US and
41 Chinese, plus 81 missing without trace, 1,314 people killed and
345 missing. Which would equate to a death per 1,160 tons delivered
and 2.75 deaths per aircraft loss.
The USAAF says battle casualties in the Chine Burma India theatre,
which would exclude the ATC operations, were 1,263 fatalities and
1,575 missing or interned captured but that excludes losses outside
of operations. Aircraft battle casualties are put at 1,076 including
774 fighters. Enemy aircraft are listed as causing 382 losses, anti
aircraft fire 267 and other causes 427. Total CBI aircraft losses are
put at 3,289 of which 2,536 were first line.
The ATC lost some 603 aircraft on foreign ferry operations July 1942
to August 1945 and another 438 on domestic ferry operations from
282,496 total deliveries, but of course many of the foreign deliveries
and some of the domestic ones would involve multiple flights. In terms
of rates domestic write offs happened about 1 per 4,000 flying hours,
foreign about 1 per 3,500 hours.
So clearly the air transport route to China was dangerous but so was
other flying. While at times there would have been a high casualty rate
1 in 3 crews lost over the entire operation is overstating things.
Geoffrey Sinclair
Remove the nb for email.