WHAT WAS IT LIKE TO BE A DIVE BOMBER PILOT? George Walsh has a wonderful description of what it was like to be a dive bomber pilot:
“You came flying in straight down, hanging by your seatbelt and looking at the ship that was your target,” he said. “You had two-second intervals between the aircraft. You had six planes in a division with two seconds of separation. So you had six planes coming straight down at a Japanese ship…. [D]ive bombers were trained to fly at a flight path of 70 degrees while the altitude of the plane was vertical. A yoke, or displacing gear, was attached to the bomb to throw the bomb clear of the propeller….You were hanging in the cockpit from your seatbelt and you’re looking straight down at the planes ahead of you. You could see their bomb drops and them pulling out before you made yours.”