Originally posted by BaDkaRmA158Th
Take a .30 or larger round to any part of your body, your flying days are over.
Not to mention the agonizing pain, the bone chilling wind coming from the now riddled cockpit, the numbness from loss of blood.
It is possible to survive head wounds and manage to land safely.
Saburo Sakai managed to fly hundreds of miles back to his base, and even flew combat missions after he recovered.
"Sakai-san next brought out the leather pilot’s helmet and white, silk scarf that he had worn the day he shot my father down. While this had quite an emotional impact on not only myself, my wife, and our three sons, who were with us on this most fascinating of evenings, what he related to us next was even more intriguing. For this was the helmet and scarf that he had also worn several months later, on the day that he took two bullets in the head in combat over Guadalcanal, after which he flew the four hours it took to return to his home base in Rabaul. It was quite clear where the bullets had entered his head, one of them having ricocheted off the metal rim of his goggles, the second having torn through the leather of the helmet near the temple. The idea that he could have survived these wounds, much less continued to fly for four hours after that, was all but inconceivable.
"When he showed us the scarf, the first thing that we noticed was that it was quite tattered, but in a relatively symmetrical and clean-cut way. The damage, rather than being the result of the ravages of time, had occurred in one brief and traumatic encounter. The explanation was quite simple. His canopy had been blown away in the same attack that had caused his wounds; but this proved a blessing of sorts in that it kept a steady rush of air blowing into the cockpit, helping him maintain consciousness. However, his wounds were so severe that, more than once, in order to shock himself into fuller consciousness, he had to aggravate the pain by striking his open wounds. In spite of this, he several times passed out, only to be awakened by the reinforced strength of the wind rushing into his cockpit as his plane plummeted straight down toward the sea below. All this while his scarf was whipping violently in the steady stream of wind that was blowing through the open cockpit."
From:
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/cc/stevens.html
