Dangers of close formation flying

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Description

During bombing runs, air craft would fly dangerously close to one another. Mr. West talks about the dangers of bumping into another plane while large groups of aircraft were flying together.

Transcription

You can't imagine how many aircraft bumped into each other at night. In fact, we saw two one night as we were going across the North Sea at a thousand feet. That was a story in itself, because the thousand feet was a very dangerous height if you had two or three hundred aircraft concentrated at that level, you had a potential danger. And, however, the reason for doing so was all well and good because the enemy's radar would not detect us until we approached the coast. And by that time, we would climb and, but we would have them. They wouldn't be there waiting for us. But the losses were bad from collision. Y'know, there, there was lots of losses from collision over targets, too. But, we saw, we saw two go down that night, when we were flying at a thousand feet, just a short distance away. And that's a little bit scary.

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