Elwyn wrote:
Does anyone have an idea of how much weight protective armor added to the various fighter aircraft that used it? How about bombers as well? Aside from the pilot armor, in what other areas was it usually found?
In a P-51 the Firewall, fwd bulkhead of the cockpit/aft end of the engine area, is 3/8" thick steel plate side to side and top to the wing at the botto. (The rest is S/S from bottom cowl to the top of the wing and also behind the oil tank) It is a part of the structure so you keep it even today for most A?C. Some racers use a thin sheet of S/S on alum plate to replace it.
So not all the armor is removed, however we don't have the plate behind the seat and a smaller one under the windscreen.
The one behind the seat is thicker from the top of the seat up and thinner for the remainder down to the bottom of it.
On the mk 18 Spitfire it is around 3/16 / 1/4" thick steel plate and attached to the seat back and bottom of the seat. You have to remove the seat for maint and its heavy. There is a small piece behind your head. They also had small pieces front and rear of ammo in the wing, at least in our wing, but don't know specifics for other Spit models.
How much it weighs/ed I would have to look up. Each type will vary and probably different models of the same type depending on turret type, ect.
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. From the broken lugs on it it looked like one of the side guns. Sadly, the Snowdonia National Park authority had the engines and some other big bits such as the top turret area removed by helicopter in the 1980s.