• Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    This happened in 1957. You might think the plane caught up with its own bullets, but what actually happened was the pilot fired a 4-second burst from the 20mm cannon during a test flight, then climbed at high speed and dove back down faster than the speed of sound (i.e. “faster than a apeeding bullet”), where he passed through the cloud of his own rounds which had decelerated due to air friction. So it wasn’t a defect in the plane, it was really a random accident nobody had thought about because planes traditionally weren’t fast enough to perform a maneuver that would make such a thing possible.

    edit: story on wikipedia