I recently attended an Honor Flight event (WWII vets fly out to Washington D.C. to see the WWII memorial) and got into a conversation with a WWII pilot. He told me that he flew aircraft in the continental United States (I forget exactly where). He said his missions consisted of flying his up-armored aircraft at low altitude so that friendly anti-aircraft could use him as a training target.
I wanted desperately to believe him, but I haven't been able to verify this happened. Wikipedia suggests that unmanned Culver PQ-14s were used for this sort of training, but maybe that was later in the war.
Was a cranky old WWII vet pulling my leg here or is there a chance the U.S. actually shot at our own planes over our own soil for training purposes?
Crazy as it sounds, the old vet was correct. The US Army Air Force used up-armored P-63 King Cobras, that were painted orange and had lights on the wing tips. If a rookie pilot was getting any hits, the wing tips would light-up. This was used at bases where the pilots were under-going advanced training.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Bell_P-63E_Kingcobra_USAF.jpg is a photo of one at the US Air Force Museum, in Dayton Ohio.
Note, they only did this for friendly fighter planes shooting fifty caliber bullets. Anti-aircraft gun training was done by an obsolete aircraft, like a Brewster Buccaner dive-bomber or their marginally better Brewster Bermuda dive-bomber pulling a wind sock at the end of a fifty yard long cable. Anti-aircraft shells from a forty millimeter gun were to dangerous to shoot at a friendly aircraft during a training mission.
