Plane used wings to store hidden bombs

Published 1:25 pm Thursday, July 25, 2013

The Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik has four compact bomb bay cells hidden in the wing between its main gear and fuselage. Each space is big enough to carry a 150 kg bomb. In normal operations, an IL-2 commonly carried 300 kg of explosives internally but could be overloaded to 600 kg for shorter missions. For bigger targets, a pair of heavy 220 and 250 kg bombs could also be carried on external racks that attached to the wing in between each wing’s dual cell bomb bay.