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Is it possible for a plane to be able to pierce a plane in the air? These planes is ejected from another plane which acts as a fuel hub for the other planes. These little planes are small, yet has an extremely strong and sharp tip and a fast engine. These planes work by ejecting themselves from the fuel hub, then flying at high speeds before finally impacting a plane and going through it before coming out from the other side and go back to the fuel hub for a quick refuel.

These planes are like rockets, unmanned, fast and meant to hit a target, except that it's not supposed to explode.

Are these kind of planes possible?

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  • $\begingroup$ If they do not explode, won't they simply make a hole? That will not not necessarily bring a plane down. I know that kinetic impactors have been used against submarines in WWII, but then a submarine with a hole in it will sink. A plane, not so much. $\endgroup$
    – Eike Pierstorff
    Oct 19, 2022 at 15:53
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    $\begingroup$ It's called a 'bullet', not a 'plane'. $\endgroup$
    – Justin Thyme the Second
    Oct 19, 2022 at 16:24
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    $\begingroup$ Be sure to look up Northrop XP-79 "Flying Ram" -- wasn't carried on a flying carrier, didn't have aerial refueling (but would have by 1960), and was piloted, but was originally built for ramming attacks. $\endgroup$
    – Zeiss Ikon
    Oct 19, 2022 at 17:02
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    $\begingroup$ I suggest you go through the wing of the other plane rather than the fuselage. It might be easier and less damaging to your airobullet. $\endgroup$
    – Daron
    Oct 19, 2022 at 17:10
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    $\begingroup$ Do you mean for them to pierce entirely through the victim plane and then keep going? The pierce and then get stuck and crash together? Or something else? $\endgroup$
    – Xavon_Wrentaile
    Oct 20, 2022 at 11:42

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Only if these planes are propelled like rockets, in the sense that they don't have an inlet for taking in air for their engines.

This is because in case of an impact, any debris ending in the turbine would wreak havoc on it, and you want the plane to survive the impact.

And the impact itself rules out the use of a propeller...

You just need to reinforce the plane to withstand the impact and possibly make the wings retractable during the impact itself.

Of course this will add weight, but having a rocket pushing it and not having to worry too much about taking off and landing might allow you to play with the suspension of disbelief.

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    $\begingroup$ This answer comes as close as possible. Bullets are always badly damaged by impact. Granted, they're also usually made of soft lead. But in strict reality the "rocket plane" couldn't pierce another metal object without sustaining considerable damage, even if it was built as this answer describes. $\endgroup$
    – Jaime Bellmyer
    Oct 20, 2022 at 15:01
  • $\begingroup$ The extra re-enforcement would also add a lot of weight. $\endgroup$
    – Jason_c_o
    Oct 21, 2022 at 16:59
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I quote this movie a lot on this site...

"Can you launch an ICBM horizontally?"

"Sure, why would you want to?" (The Hunt for Red October)

Obviously it's possible to build a plane that can pierce another plane because bullets and missiles can do it. Just build your plane like a bullet or a missile. It does require something that's counter-intuitive for a practical plane: the fuselage and skin must be strong enough to handle the impact (you said they weren't to explode). That means more weight, which makes the plane less efficient.

But, sure, it's trivial to make a plane that can pierce another plane.

Why would you want to? Bullets and missiles are both cheaper and more efficient.

To be fair, don't let efficiency and Real World common sense stop you. If you want planes that can pierce other plans, do it. Cool stories are rarely about common sense, which is useful for engineering but boring for stories.

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    $\begingroup$ Why would you want to? Because it's cool, and that's a good enough reason! $\endgroup$
    – kaya3
    Oct 20, 2022 at 7:36
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    $\begingroup$ Bullets and missiles tend to not be re-useable, so building a plane like one isnt a real solution. $\endgroup$
    – Demigan
    Oct 20, 2022 at 13:01
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    $\begingroup$ bullets and missiles aren't reusable because making them so is inefficient and ineffective. If it's important to you that you can reuse bullets/missiles, that's doable. $\endgroup$
    – fectin
    Oct 20, 2022 at 17:18
  • $\begingroup$ @Demigan That's a false statement. It's like saying you can't make a race car out of a stock car simply because it didn't begin life as a formula racer. Or were you expecting me to provide a patentable solution? The point of my answer is that the question is trivial and meeting suspension of disbelief easy based on everyday things that we already know solve half the problem. $\endgroup$
    – JBH
    Oct 21, 2022 at 3:15
  • $\begingroup$ @jbh its not a false statement? You even admit that you only have half an answer. The question isnt about just piercing another aircraft, but also about returning. $\endgroup$
    – Demigan
    Oct 21, 2022 at 4:13
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Definite maybe. Here's what you're up against.

First, terminology. If it's unmanned, then it isn't really a plane: it's a cruise missile, or at minimum a drone. This significantly changes the formula because you don't need to stay within the 10G that a human can survive. Also, you don't need all the stuff like chairs and windows, which gives you a lot more weight to apply to structural reinforcement. Cruise missiles without an explosive payload are sometimes called knife missiles, especially when they're human-scaled.

Let's make this easy and presume that your flying machine is basically a rocket behind an aerodynamically shaped cannonball. As L.Dutch points out, you'll need to retract any flight surfaces if you want to keep 'em.

The ability to penetrate is based on which part of the plane you hit. If you impact the cargo fuselage, then you can probably be in and out without an issue. This presumes that the craft you're running into is much larger than your penetrator craft. If you hit the other jet's engine, you're paste. If you hit a wing full of fuel, an explosion could be worse than hitting an engine. If you go through the cockpit, there are a lot of heavy objects in there that will hit you just as hard as you're hitting them.

Another problem that you'll run into is partial impacts. If you glance off the other plane, you're going to need some fancy rocket work to correct your course before you spin into the ground. I think that modern AIs can handle that, though.

Head-on impacts will be problematic because you'll be passing through the cockpit. You'd want to target wings and fins if possible, but that makes glancing blows more likely.

Coming in from the side depends on the speed differential. At high speed differentials, the fuselage of the target plane may actually put up less resistance than the air you're pushing through. You'll need to make a last-instant correction so that your missile is pointing at the correct angle, otherwise passing through them could easily rip you in half. Also, you're gonna need some serious AI reaction speeds to actually hit anything.

Coming up from behind will be tough. Yes, your missile might be able to fly 200mph faster than the plane it's chasing. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to crawl up their tailpipe. In this case, it may make the most sense to pull in your flight surfaces and plow into their wings at a low relative speed. Enough to rip them off, but not enough to put torsional stress on your ship.

So, overall, a fun concept, but it would require super-human reaction speed to make proper use of it.

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There is the case of a private flight leaving from some place South America going north. It encountered and sliced the wing of a South going commercial aircraft. The private flight was on the wrong flight level and both using GPS for navigation which was why they were so close. The damaged commercial aircraft lost control, no survivors. The private aircraft continued on not knowing what exactly happened and landed at planned destination

Military aircraft are generally going to be stronger, and have active scanners to be more situationally aware. Would thus attempt to dodge where possible. Making them a harder target to hit and pierce.

Most militaries pierce enemy aircraft with high explosive containing mostly wingless aircraft known as missiles or rockets via shrapnel. A non exploding variant is very possible, just not as effective.

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    $\begingroup$ Last paragraph is not quite correct. While it is possible for air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles to contact a target aircraft, the reason they are packed with high explosive is because they are designed to detonate in proximity and send splinters through the target aircraft. $\endgroup$
    – KerrAvon2055
    Oct 19, 2022 at 20:19
  • $\begingroup$ @KerrAvon2055 I agree that I should be more explicit that it is the shrapnel of the missile the does the piercing. I'll make an edit $\endgroup$
    – Gault Drakkor
    Oct 19, 2022 at 21:53
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@Zeis-Icon has already mentioned the failed experimental "flying ram" Northrop XP-79. Since aircraft are typically quite fragile, it may be enough to punch and damage the tail, instead of piercing the wing or the fuselage. There are also reports of WWII RAF fighters chasing and "nudging" the German V1 "flying bomb" rockets, forcing them off course: https://www.forces.net/heritage/wwii/how-spitfire-pilots-really-rammed-v1-bomb-out-sky

These attempts make some sense because ammo and guns are heavy. If you could achieve similar result with a reinforced wing (or a pike or some articulated appendage), it would be worthwile. Anime flying robots often carry swords for that effect.

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Not while using any real world materials

You will find the rare story of an aircraft surviving after a very indirect impact with another aircraft, but the only reason any of these aircraft would survive is if the hit was very indirect (like wing to wing) such that there is not anything vital along the line of cleavage or if the surviving plane had enough material to ablate along the line of impact to disintegrate the entire cross-section of the other.

Most fighter jets produced within the past few decades have had top speeds between mach-1.5 (~1850kph) and mach-2.8 (~3460kph). You can reduce these numbers from further calculations a bit if you are planning for an interceptor specifically made for taking out slow planes or helicopters. Top speeds are most often used during a combat approach, so we should sample these values, and not cruising speeds for this answer because they fall in the range of likely impact speeds. Air-to-air missiles need higher speeds than the aircraft they need to catch up with; so, most modern air-to-air missiles have speeds between mach-2.5 (~3090kph) and mach-5 (~6180kph). This means that you should expect a combined impact speed of up to mach-7.8 (9630kph); though a I suspect a mach-2 to mach-3 impact would be more commonplace.

To fully understand just how energetic of an impact this is, consider what happens to a car, a vehicle designed to survive a crash, when it hits another car at 100kph. This creates an impact energy of ~770 J/kg which is enough to turn both vehicles into burning crumpled messes and according to various sources has somewhere between a 90-100% certainty of death per occupant. To fully understand how much worse an air-to-air impact is, remember that energy=mass*velocity^2 ;so, as velocity increases, impact energy goes up exponentially; so, at our previously stated velocities, you are looking at an average impact energy of about ~735,000 J/kg with the potential of ~7,156,000 J/kg on a head-to-head impact. That is 4-5 orders of magnitude more energy to mass than a car moving at Highway speeds which should alone answer your question.

But to even see it it's theoretically possible, bullet manufactures have spent a long time identifying what materials melt, deform, and shatter the least at highspeed impacts in order to make the best armor penetrating weapons. The current leader in this particular material science arms race is the tungsten-carbide sabot. Even large anti-tank tungsten-carbide sabots begin to deform after penetrating just a few mm of steel... and that survivability will go way down once you try adding navigation equipment, sensors, propulsion, etc. So, while I might believe that a tungstite carbide armored drone missle might pernitrate the mostly hallow wing or tailfin of a fighter and come out the other side in working order, the second it nicks something of any significant mass like an engine, cockpit, or even a structural beam, it's odds of surviving the impact go way down. Sure, it will still come out the other side... but as a spray of molten metal, not as an in-tact interceptor.

Unless you use a ram shield: AKA, the Sci-fi Answer

Since there is no conceivable way to survive the kinetic forces of the impact, your best recourse is to make up a non-kinetic one. In some settings, aircraft have nuclear powered shields that can obliterate/absorb arbitrarily high amounts of mass/energy. In these settings, the offense/defense contest is between weapons able to level a city block and energy shields made to stop them.

So, if a shielded fighter were to ram a significantly less shielded other fighter, then the shield itself could cut through the other fighter without actually making any physical contact with it. For this to work though, it's probably safe to assume that you need contesting forces of significantly different tech levels since a the shield of a small portable ram fighter would need to be able to outperform the shield of the larger aircraft it means to ram through.

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    $\begingroup$ Essentially everything in your first three paragraphs is incorrect. $\endgroup$
    – fectin
    Oct 20, 2022 at 17:20
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    $\begingroup$ @fectin Opps, I ran into some conversion issues using kph when I should have used mps. I also sampled a larger range of aircraft and a2a missiles to try to get more accurate with those numbers as well. The outcome is still the same, just not by such a large margin. $\endgroup$
    – Nosajimiki
    Oct 20, 2022 at 19:14
  • $\begingroup$ Military aircraft often survive having large chunks ripped off. The top speeds of most military aircraft are significantly below Mach 1.5. Top speeds are not most often used during maneuvers. The missile speeds may be right; but they support a design which has a very light weight and limited burn. Car crashes at 100kph rarely reduce cars to "burning, crumpled messes". The total kinetic energy is irrelevant, only the amount converted. $\endgroup$
    – fectin
    Oct 23, 2022 at 2:51
  • $\begingroup$ @fectin Engineering is about worse case scenarios, not best case scenarios. When the goal is a reusable impactor, you cant assume it will be going through a soft wing at low speeds. You need to figure out what it needs to survive reliably. Saying military aircraft can survive with a big hole in it only makes the point that a reusable drone that puts a hole in a wing is inadequate. You need something that can pierce the engines, cockpits, or other denser and indispensable parts. $\endgroup$
    – Nosajimiki
    Oct 24, 2022 at 14:22
  • $\begingroup$ As for kinetic energy, it matters if there is enough material in your path, which there will be when hitting a vital part of the plane. As for the car wreck part. You are mistaken. Cars survive highway accidents because it is very normal to engage breaks before you run into something so actual impacts tend to be much slower. But when you look at wrecks where the driver fell asleep at the wheel for example and the actual impact is as 100kph, cars are always totaled, and human survival rate is ~5% $\endgroup$
    – Nosajimiki
    Oct 24, 2022 at 14:35

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