180 mph taken from a bit of googling, ballpark figure on upper end.
So this was really immediately after takeoff. My understanding of commercial airliners is they usually fly fairly parallel with the ground just after takeoff to pick up speed before ascending, so I would guess they hadn’t much altitude at all.
Anyway it’s a very interesting article, ty to poster! And it was an interesting question to think about.
AFAIK (what is not much on the military side), fighters are all optimized for performance, and not resilience. And fighters that work on improving the crew options focus on survivability instead of resilience because it tends to weight less.
It's more like if you make a plane resilient to bird strikes, you sacrifice a good chunk of performance - envelope, maneuverability, something.
Depending on how fast the plane is going, "good chunk" might be a hilarious understatement too. Hitting an object at 1000mph imparts 4x the damage compared to hitting an object at 500mph.
If you want to see an example of a durable military aircraft, look at the A-10:
Anyways, that's a military plane designed to get hit by... stuff... and as a result can take bird strikes. But its max speed is like 400mph and it would get absolutely wrecked by any serious opposition from fighters. The more resilient you make a plane to birds, the more vulnerable it is to missiles, per unit price. And missiles is kinda the point of the whole endeavor.
I heard that the Navy (historically, at least--don't know about today) placed a greater value than the Air Force on engine redundancy. Hence why we have both the twin engine F-18 (Navy) and the single engine F-16 (Air Force), even though functionally there's a lot of overlap between the two.
Sure, but then you also have the F22, F117, B2, A10, SR71, U2, and a bunch more I can’t think of right now.
Some helicopters have a single engine. Most have 2. They are still unreliable death machines, and arguably 2 engines makes the problem a bit worse (more moving parts). They are (sometimes) more tolerant of a single engine out, of course. But transmissions are often the weak spot with helicopters.
Single vs Dual has many factors, not just reliability.
A single engine failure on a SR71 (if I remember correctly) resulted in a airframe loss and ejection at relatively low speeds, and one at full speed would likely result in a complete crew loss on top of it - and it has dual engines. Think catastrophic near instant destruction.
Sometimes you just need more power than a single engine (with current tech) can provide in the space you have available, for instance.
Sometimes, like an A10, you really do want something that can take a massive beating and keep going.
A B52 can lose 2 engines with no issues, and theoretically up to 4 and still be controllable (depending on the distribution of the lost engines). But that isn’t because it needs reliability, but because it’s got 8 engines because it was designed to carry a metric shit ton of explosives, and it only had 60’s era tech jet engines.
Modern jets usually use 2 (much more powerful) engines for similar or even larger payloads.
They're designed around not getting hit at all, rather than being able to take hits. Stealth, stand-off weapons, sensor fusion and information displays all so the plane never gets put in a position to be hit.
That's not to say they don't defend in depth, one reason twin engine fighters are desired is because of engine redundancy after all, but a more "armored" plain is a slower, bulkier, easier to detect and easier to hit target. And you'll still likely get taken down in one hit.
And there's still not a lot you can do if your engine swallows a bird or two, especially if you only have one.
The military also has the expectation that not everyone is going to come home, unlike a civilian airliner where the safety margins are much wider.
That might be technically true, but the F35 and F16 are both single engine aircraft and IIRC constitute the bulk of at least the US air force’s combat aircraft.
B2, F117, B52, P9, F22, F14, F18, C130, C17, C5, CH47, AH-64, SR71, U2, A10, and on and on just to give some recent examples.
There are a few single engine aircraft roles (including the F104), but they are not and have never been the bulk of active serving aircraft. It isn’t just ‘technically’ true.
Be that as it may, the workhorse combat aircraft of most NATO air forces and the USAF itself is the F-16, a single-engine fighter, and its nominal replacement, the F-35 is also single engine. You can try to make your point by comparing those vs the numbers of F-15s, F/A-18s, F-Fs, Rafales, Eurofighters and so on in service vs the F-16 and F-35, but bringing C130s and C17s into it is irrelevant, those are not "combat aircraft".
edit: ah but they are "military aircraft", sure. fine.
They are a well-known nemesis of military planes, that fly faster and don't have redundancy to survive a hit.