John Kunkel wrote:
Just watched another WWII dogfight movie scene where the control stick
shakes in unison with the firing guns.
Is this Hollywood or did the firing of the guns carry through to the
controls and cause stick shake as the movies depict?

Never felt the stick shake, at least in an irreversible-controls
A-4 Skyhawk... but the damn sights sure did! The fixed
pipper (adjustable only in elevation wrt aircraft boresight)
would jitter all over the shop.

FWIW, Robert S. Johnson (well, Martin Caidin in RSJ's name*)
claimed that on the occasion of his first kill, the noise of all 8 of
the Jug's fifties firing together scared (or at least startled) him to
the point that he let go of the trigger. Up 'til that point, he'd only
fired one at a time, at towed socks.

*note that Johnson left that part of the tale in when he revised
and re-released Thunderbolt!


Jeff