U.S. aircraft in Vietnam appear to have been extremely vulnerable to AAA

[Bill Walker]

Originally Posted by NickM

And early choppers were definitely more vulnerable to ground fire & light & medium automatic weapons--I'm not even mentioning 12.7mm/14.5mm/23mm. I wonder how many were not total losses: IE: have to crash-land due to having their hydraulics shot out but then recovered & repaired.

My understanding is that many repairable helicopters were destroyed at the crash site because of the difficulty in recovering aircraft when there were no clear "front lines".

Also, it would be interesting to find out how many were actually shot down, and how many were lost in bungled high temperature arrivals or departures at unprepared sites. That remains a leading cause of helicopter crashes today, even when nobody is shooting at you.

And a similar question for the fixed wing types: how many losses were really shot down, and how many were landing and takeoff accidents at relatively short and hot fields? RAF single engine fighter training losses roughly equalled combat losses for most of WW2.