Can a handgun shot take down a commercial airliner?

Question

Most airplanes, when taking off or landing, are in range of small arms fire, i.e. your every day handgun.

Is it possible to take down a commercial airliner by shooting at it with a handgun? Would one shot be enough, or would several be needed?

Answer 1

shooting at it with a handgun

That's really going to depend on the handgun.

James Bond carries a Walther PPK - this is a .32 calibre popgun with rather limited use outside of a small office. Direct hits on people are usually survivable unless you take a round in the heart or brain. Chances of even hitting an airliner during takeoff or approach are zero - it simply doesn't have the range, and that tiny subsonic projectile will get deflected by the aircraft's wake.

Skipping the middle range and going straight for the hand-cannons, we might get somewhere with a Desert Eagle or a Smith & Wesson 500. Remember the posters for the first Terminator movie? The one where The Ah-nuld is wearing sunglasses and holding up some light artillery? These are bigger. At close range, both guns can crack an aluminum engine block¹ and are one-shot kills on most things smaller than a rhino. Hitting an approaching widebody isn't all that difficult - it's coming toward you, the angle isn't changing, and it's a rather big target.

But aircraft are large, complex systems with a lot of redundancy, so in order to actually take it down we have to hit something critical. Hitting a 767 right in the nose will destroy the weather radar and (maybe, if it has enough energy left) poke a 1/2 inch hole in the forward bulkhead. No one will notice. The flight-deck windows are rather strong, apparently a police sniper tried to take out a hijacker on the flight deck way back in the 1970s and the rifle round (far more powerful) just pock-marked the window. Several hostages were promptly shot as a result.

The best shot (ha!) is the engines. They don't like ingesting bits of metal but just hitting the fan won't do much. You would have to get very lucky to get the round into the engine itself, where it will promptly do a lot of very expensive damage.

But even if one engine literally goes boom it still won't crash the plane. Pilots practice for an engine failure on takeoff all the time, and an engine failure on landing is almost a non-event.

Hydraulic lines for control surfaces are certainly sensitive, but they are well buried in the structure and there are several independent systems. You won't get them all.

So, in conclusion, handguns are sufficiently ineffective at bringing down large aircraft that we really don't need to be concerned about them. There's a reason air forces around the world prefer missiles or 20mm cannon² for this sort of thing. Geese, however, are quite effective if released in sufficient numbers along the takeoff path. Rather noisy though - you won't hide 500 of them anywhere near an airport without someone noticing.

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1. Internet legends of a .50 cal being able to kill a truck refer to the MUCH larger .50 BMG round, available in explosive and armour-piercing and rightfully categorized as a first-class military weapon.

2. The projectile's the size of your thumb, and the gun fires 6,000 rounds per minute. It'll do your plane like a chainsaw.

Answer 2

It depends where the shot is fired and what counts as "taking down".

If you fire a handgun inside the cabin during a regular flight, the pilot will likely divert to the next airport and land. The aircraft is "down", but probably not in the way you were thinking of.

If you fire at the plane from the outside, in most cases the result will only be detected at the next bigger inspection. If you are "lucky" and hit something important, a system might fail and the airplane is marked for repair after landing. But it will not go down in flames.

For the way the question was probably intended to be asked, my answer is No.

Answer 3

It depends on who shoot the plane.

With the spirit of Juche idea, Kim Il Sung (Supreme leader of North Korea) can shoot planes with handgun easily. There is a selection from North Korea textbook:)

General Kim Il Sung left the cave and saw several of the bombers from US imperialists bombarding the base continuously. The heroic People's Army soldiers kept shooting the American aircrafts but useless.

Frowning angrily , the General saw an American aircraft tried to bomb again, he raised his handgun and aimed at the enemy aircraft. When the enemy is aligned the people army again and came down, the General shot. Shortly, a mass of huge fireball erupted in the sky with falling wreckage. The remaining US pilots were scared and escaped. Soldiers cheered toward the General Kim Il Sung:

Long live the Great Leader Kim Il Sung!

Long live the Great General Kim Il Sung!

But for other people, it seems impossible. Major damage of shooting comes from explosive within warhead. In WWII, most of the fighters installed 20mm machine gun or even larger, however, there is many case which the heavily shooted fighters have successfully landed on runways and aircraft carriers. Handgun even cannot kill a man for some times, how can it shot down a plane by most people?

Answer 4

Small arms fire absolutely can take down aircraft: http://www.lonesentry.com/articles/defga/ (WW2)

In one instance in Africa, an eye-witness reported the destruction of three Italian planes in 5 minutes by small-arms fire. In another case, the Germans claim to have brought down a Soviet plane with an automatic pistol.

United States Army Air Defense Artillery School "Small Arms Defense" describes tactical doctrine: saturate the region in front of the plane aircraft with lead and hope that enough hits are made to critically damage it.

Answer 5

This when I got to give “the lawyers answer“ to: Well, it depends...

It depends on the kind of gun that you use, where are you hit the airplane, and how much energy the bullet has at impact.

My basic answer would be that it’s very unlikely you could do this.

Some basics: handguns are notoriously inaccurate and under powered - some firearms instructors go so far as to say the only purpose for a handgun is the fight your way back to a long gun. The main purpose for such a firearm is as a compact means of self protection at close ranges and they were never intended for anti material use. A typical handgun in the hands of an average shooter has an effective range of about 50-100 yards and packs about 300-700 Ft-Lbf of muzzle energy with poor ballistics (~1000 FPS, depending on model). Larger handguns do pack a bit more energy (~1400 FPS and ~1500 Ft-lbf at the muzzle) but the application still remains the same. This rules out the use of a gun against an airplane for anything but at point-blank range i.e. a guy hanging out at the fenceline of an airport taking a potshot at a 737 waiting to take off probably is either not going to hit it at all or with such poor accuracy that it can’t hit a vital system which could disable the airplane. Given the low muzzle energy of handguns, it’s unlikely that the round could penetrate critical components such as either the engines or the APU and disable them. There is a chance though that’s such a round could penetrate the cabin of an aircraft and injure or kill a passenger.

As to whether a person could shoot an airplane flying overhead with a handgun, my response is no. Airplanes are notoriously difficult to hit with firearms in flight and dedicated anti-aircraft systems will either utilize radar guided automatic weapons of a much more powerful round than a handgun uses, or large quantities of ballistic artillery shells fitted with proximity fuses and blast/fragmentation warheads to saturate an area where the aircraft is. A single person with a handgun has virtually no chance of hitting an airplane like that.

Answer 6

If the bullet is able to damage a tire, such that chunks of the tire fly off, those chunks could cause even more damage than just the bullet alone. That was enough to bring down a Concorde (Flight 4590).

Answer 7

If the round from the handgun penetrated the partially-filled fuel tank of the aircraft, the ullage area would likely have a fuel vapour and air mixture and be prone to explosion leading to the separation of part of the wing from the aircraft. Large numbers of combat losses are attributed to this phenomenon before the introduction of either mechanical or chemical methods of preventing this fuel-air mixture from accumulating in the tanks of combat aircraft even as recently as the mid 2000s. Since this adds weight and potentially reduces available fuel capacity I don't believe this is included in civilian airliners.

So the answer to your question is yes. If the aircraft were on short finals or just departing then your handgun round could possibly take down an airliner.

Answer 8

If it pokes a hole, the pressure in the cabin will be lost (which involve possible injury to the ear drums or death of the people inside, as at cruise altitude there is not enough oxygen in the air for the human body, which is why it is pressurized inside and maintained at near sea level pressure).

The aircraft can be damaged to the point of losing a structural panel, but not necessarily crashing. Unless the pilot falls unconscious due to the lack of oxygen. (Oxygen mask only have about 15 minute of oxygen by the way).

If the bullet hits an engine, or poke the wing (i.e. fuel tank), then there is high risk of explosion, with dramatic consequences.