Long Punch

One lesson learned in World War II is that a daylight bomber is only as good as its gunnery. This week the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp. announced an electronic gun sight which, its inventors said, extends the effective range of bomber machine guns from 600 to 1,000 yards.

The inventors, H. Erwin Hale and Irving Doyle, began work on the sight in 1938. With military secrecy lifted, Hale told the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences in Dayton that the sight, known as K8, has been found three or four times as accurate as mechanical sights. K-8 is not the first electrical sight: the British have a similar one, called Mark II, and a third, developed by General Electric, is in use in U.S. Superfortresses (the Germans are believed to have no comparable sight).

But, according to Hale, K-8 is the first to compensate for all the factors that deflect a bullet in air combat.

A turret gunner in a bomber must consider a complex of factors -- the speed and altitude of his own plane, the angle and speed of his target, range, bullet speed, etc.

All these computations must be made in two to seven seconds. Even with the help of tracer bullets, a trained free-hand gunner gets a very low percentage of hits.

Deadly Defense. With K8, a gunner needs relatively little training. He sets three dials, recording the altitude and speed of his own ship and the wing span of the target plane (after he recognizes the type), then looks through the sight itself --a circle of orange light with a dot in the center. Using a foot pedal to regulate the circle's size, he frames the target, from wing tip to wing tip, in the circle (see cut). The machine then instantaneously makes all the necessary computations; all the gunner has to do is press the trigger.

Hale declared that at 1,000 yards in fast-moving air combat K-8 scores 50% as many hits as a stationary gun firing at a stationary target on the ground. Said Hale: "When it is realized that a pursuit ship must come within 200 to 400 yards to score effective hits, it is readily apparent that the K-8 sight provides a really deadly defense" But while K-8 takes some of the human element out of shooting, there is still a wide margin for error.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.