Bouncing Bomb on Channel 4 last night

[gordon-in-aberdeen]

How doos folks,

Did anyone else see the Bouncing Bomb documentary last night on Channel 4?
I thought it was good TV, though they kind of spoiled it a wee bit by having footage of the final attack on the dam in the introductory credits at the beginning...

[Rick Piper]

Yep watched it

That Canuk DC4 pilot was Top Banana

How hard did the dummy bomb hit the dam in the 1st try!
it almost went straight through 10ft of concrete!

Great Program
Regards
Rick

[Chris Sykes]

Hi Rick,

i caught the last bit of it as i had it set on record, i think that might be because they had to remove a bunch of the concrete lugs that hold the blocks together... Or the release was very late??? But very engenius way of delivery of a bomb!

[AllanL]

I think he admitted - and the film confirmed that he dropped it low and late to make sure of hitting the dam. They were running late and the water was seeping round the side of the dam - so he didn't want to risk dropping short and the dam collapsing before he got a second shot. It did connect with one almighty thump. They did not reshow the bounce back off the dam, but claimed that the "bomb" had continued spinning backwards and crawled back down the face of the dam. Not so sure, but it gave the excuse to fire off the explosive and knock the dam down!

A neat bit of flying for a single shot on target, perhaps he imagined the pesky idiot who caused him so much grief by landing the CL215 wheels up to be standing on the top of the dam.

[gordon-in-aberdeen]

Hi guys, It might have been some lugs missing in the wall there, but I thought they had that problem at the ends rather than the middle of the dam. It looked like there was way too much energy still in the bomb, I thought the whole point was to kiss the wall and sink, not embed itself in it

Considering it sounded like it was dropped too fast and too low, they were lucky it didn't bounce off the top of the wall, would have made a mess of whatever it hit


Yes Rick, the pilot was a cool customer, I noticed he is one of the blokes in the youtube clip mentioned in the http://www.cbfsim.org/cb-bb/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=21723 thread. He seemed quite pleased that he'd hit it first go..

I was somewhat surprised that they hadn't some sort of accurate height measuring radar, even a portable set, on the plane to judge the height, but the Pilot seemed to be very good at judging it by eye alone, must be an experience thing..

Top stuff though I wonder if half the crew on the project had never seen the movie either going by their antics

[JohnWillimas]

For those of you that want to try this, there's always Jens Christensen's DC-4 with its Buffalo Airline paint job ....


http://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?DL ... CatID=root

[Chris Sykes]

Just watched this, seems that when the water was seeping round the sides, this was after the bounching bomb hit, if you noticed there is the two concrete blocks sticking out of the dam, which later disapear when doing the drop... Anyway its a good documentary!

[Lewis - a2a]

Bugger I missed it!

God bless catch up TV on youtube