Pilots Missing Over Korea 1952/53

[JoeB]

Originally Posted by vzlion

Korean War Aircraft Loss Database. Very interesting that there is a data bose on Korean War aircraft/crew losses but not on Vietnam.

There's a book that's equivalent, "Vietnam Air Losses" by Chris Hobson. Actually it has much more detail of each loss than Korwald, which you might expect for a book you pay $ for v. a free website. Same theme of get what you pay for, while Korwald is IMO an amazing piece of research to be available free to everybody, it's got some limitations, and some debates of KW combat losses and claim/loss matching go off track due to those limitations, esp if trying to be precise.

For example on the classic debate of how many F-86's were *really* lost in air combat, the "damaged" F-86 air combat incidents in K are a pretty small subset of all such cases, not particularly the more serious ones and not writeoffs as some assume (fairly reasonably assume since it's "damaged" in a column headed "circumstance of loss"). The K damage incidents are just those in a certain type of record (v. other types the compilers don't seem to have used). And a few outright losses have wrong causes or are omitted (esp. if a pilot wasn't lost, because it's about aircrews bottomline, not airplanes) so the Korwald total of around 77 (as I count) is low by around 10 planes, if you include safe return but writeoff due to air combat damage, and the difference isn't made up by simple tea leaf reading of vague entries in Korwald, a few MiG losses in there weren't actually, a few to other causes were or probably were MiG losses, and a few are omitted altogether (wheels down landing later written off).

Joe