Description
Mr. Kondra describes the technology used in bomb aiming, and the variables, such as wind speed and visibility, that affect the accurate delivery of a bomb load.
William Kondra
On January 14, 1922, William Kondra was born in Prudhomme, Saskatchewan. He finished Grade 8 at his local school, and, with difficulty, finished high school through correspondence. He was working on local farms for a pittance, so he decided to enlist in the Air Force, where he trained as a bomb aimer/front gunner. Mr. Kondra's tour of duty was completed with his original crew members aboard a Lancaster Bomber, and primarily consisted of air strikes on industrial Germany. Mr. Kondra offers many insights into the technology, strategy and stresses of flying in a bomber.
Transcript
For night bombing we had a new and improved bomb sight whereby a lot of those manual settings were taken from aircraft instruments and fed into a computer box, yes, we had computers even then. They didn’t look like today’s computers but that was called a computer box and that information from the air craft instruments were fed into it so all I had to set on the new bomb sight was wind speed and direction and terminal velocity was what the bomb load that we carried. It had to be set on the bomb sight too. So and wind speed and direction were obtained by aircraft that flew weather spotting conditions and they would find wind speeds and direction then that would be broadcast to our radio operator who in code would pass it on to our navigator and he would pass it on to me because wind speed and direction are the most important factors in bomb aiming. No bombing, no bombing is one hundred percent accurate even today with their laser and electronics because too many factors affecting wind conditions which vary at different altitudes so... they try to find the latest wind conditions for our bombing assignment on that particular night.