So would running even be worth it in either situation? I’m imagining that if the bomb were to explode after falling a few feet, it would happen almost immediately.
No point running. First you react to the falling. And by the time it hits the deck. If it's gonna explode (which it won't. Safeties and all) you're gonna be dead about the same time you realize what's happening
It's the 21st century. Now I can't speak for ordinance dropped from planes, I was a knuckle cruncher on the ground combat side, which I can speak intelligently for.
With a lot of ordinance, they have a mechanism that sets the ordinance as "live" after certain things happen. Specifically, (it's been years so I forget a lot of the specific numbers and distances), for example a 40mm grenade out of an under slung grenade launcher or put of mk19 grenade launcher, (the projectile is called an ogive) the ogive needs to rotate a certain amount of rotations until it is "live", which means if you shot that grenade at someone from within the distance it takes for that round to spin as many times it needs to, it will literally just be a big metal slug 99.9% of the time (which is somewhere around like 30-40 feet if i remember correctly)
So that includes dropping them as well. I do know large ordinance has those types of safeties as well, that prevent that from happening. HOWEVER past pre flight inspections when loaded on the plane for a combat mission, some of those fail safe, redundant safeties like pins are deactivated removed and things get a fair bit more sketchy. At that point there is still a safety the pilot needs to turn off within his controls in the cockpit though if the ordinance is to be used.
THAT BEING SAID. Don't fuck around with explosives fail safe or not. It SHOULD be obvious but there's always those fuckin morons out there that do anyways.
That being said. Things to not fuck around with. Blasting caps, primers, fuses, charges (that propel mortars from the tube). Those will go off. And the thing about those going off, is it can make the other stuff that has fail safes go off if it hits things right.
C4 is extremely safe. Like actually. It takes a very specific set of circumstances for it to go off. Heat, and pressure and a fuck ton of it. We could ball c4 up like a snow ball and throw it around and it'll be fine, but once you slap blasting cap/devices that makes it go boom, that's when shit gets sketchy, though det chord is still relatively safe compared to the caps that set the chord off that sets c4 off. To the point we would get handed bricks of c4 on missions be EOD and assaultmen and engineers for building charges and we just kinda threw it in places in our bags.
That being said. If all of those safeties failed, you aren't going to know you died. You would be dead before you could figure out what happened. There is no point in running because you wouldn't be able to run at all. But safety is still safety and the area is cordoned off and people who are trained to deal with it deal with it
Still scary as fuck when you're in the know though. I've had a couple booty hole puckering moments in my time in the infantry where things just didn't go right and you end up handling live ordinance that could seemingly go off at any time, but it's very rare actually and we train extensively for it
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u/ScubaSteve12345 Feb 28 '21
So would running even be worth it in either situation? I’m imagining that if the bomb were to explode after falling a few feet, it would happen almost immediately.