Thoughts on fliers shooting groups.

Ohhh you just like half the rest of us who don’t want to be perfect! Lol

Slightest skirt deformation has been my favorite excuse for a flyer..........

With pellets, how can we expect perfection when 300-500 pellets have been scrunched into a tin for a trip halfway around the globe. With slugs, shooting bullets out of a complicated airgun with weird barrels is just asking for inconsistencies. I just live with a flier and hope it not the one shot at a long distance critter. 

I've always been wrong when I thought I found a reason for flyers. Record groups always have an element of luck, and the more you shoot, the luckier you will be.

Ed

I’ve had flyers with chronograph on but found no correlation with velocity

I like to keep my Arsenal of excuses well stocked because I can’t possibly be the cause of flyers!

While I'd love to say it's that particular pellet, 99% of the time I know it's going to be off the instant I pull the trigger, most of mine are a bad trigger pull, usually when I'm in a real good groove and start shooting too fast. 

When your trigger control reaches the level that you see every pellet strike, then you begin to realize how some of the flyers are your fault, and some are random, although some would argue that none are random, and they have a point. Maybe better said, some are beyond the shooter's control. I have found a good way to test your trigger control and concentration. Shoot a target that will be knocked down when hit, a bottle cap, empty .22 cartridge box, etc., at 25-30 yards. You should be able to see where you hit that target before it is knocked out of your field of vision. Sometime we aren't really paying attention, and don't know it. 

good follow thru is more important than many realize!

maybe you hit an insect in flight, or maybe you messed around and shot to fast lol ... the barrel was chilled from the previous shot and it tightened up on your pellet lol ..

Yep...more excuses than any one person can think of....we dont live in a perfect world and we as humans are far from perfect !! If anyone thinks they can perform the perfect shot each and every time, then you get a gold star and a big "atta boy"...

Been shootin for way to long so I know better and not afraid to admit it. As far as velocity goes, I highly doubt that velocity alone makes a flier. Can be a combination of many things, which one was it this time???

When I'm shooting my spring guns I've just accepted the fact that I'm going to get a flyer once in awhile so I don't worry about it. Sometimes I'm able to call it when I know I jerked the trigger and pulled the rifle off target. Other times it just happens even though the shot felt good.

I blame fliers on aliens and their antigravity drive spaceships that disrupt the flight of the pellet when they fly by and spy on me while I'm target shooting. Bunch of jerks they are laughing at me as they fly by and mess up that perfect group I had going.  

The environment has no guarantees

Most errant shots (not in expected group) shots are NOT really “fliers” in the statistical sense. Few shooters realize the true group size of their gun/ammo/shooting process, and instead tend to think the small, tight groups seen with five shots is the norm.

To realize the true capability of your shooting setup, set your sights so the shots fall somewhat away from the aimpoint of a target 25 to 30 yards distant and fire 100 carefully aimed shots (don’t chase shots). Compare the groupsize with typical five shot groupsize. The AREA of the 100 shot group is likely over six times the five shot one!

So realistically, ANY five shot group from the same gun/ammo/shooting conditions might have shots as wide apart at the worst seen in the 100 shot group at least once in awhile with NO fliers!

so whats a flier? Its one with a likely “assignable cause”, like:

Pellet from wrong model or caliber mixed in.

Trigger finger slip

fly landed on nose

pellet loaded backwards

earthquake

In other words, a likely event known to not be a normal part of the process. I knows its common to call most wide misses fliers, but this tends to make them seem normal or beyond the control of the shooter, whereas if the 100 shot test is done, its possible to either accept the true process spread or even `troubleshoot and refine then process to significantly improve the 100 shot ability.

Suppose you fire a shot to determine zero, and shoot at the first shot hitpoint, only to discover the next few shots are far from then first? Might be normal, so you need to fire more shots to establish a probable center based on averaging the shot pattern.

Slightest skirt deformation has been my favorite excuse for a flyer..........

Click to expand...

lol, me too!

i think the only way to know for sure whether it is you is to have some way of recording through the scope. i am lucky in that i already had something to do that for other rifles and night time hunting so i wasn't another dang thing i "had to buy" to support this hobby.

Therealld,

that was a deep post! Thank you.

Now I greatly enjoyed all the Murphys and aliens that are to blame for our "flyers" (and I think we might have missed an alien named Murphy, but he's usually hiding in a green mist...).



However, it seems like in AG (and most other activities) there is a lot of seat-of-the-pants conjecture and common-(but-wrong)-sense.



I was never good at math, and my career choices avoided it. But math has a way of sneaking up on you, in my case it caught up with me later in life.

Still not good at it, but from what little I understand reading in www.Ballistipedia.com our five-shot groups (if it's just one group) that we measure using the extreme spread of the two shots farthest apart are more educated guesswork than actual performance measurements.



Still trying to figure all this out. Lots to think about.

Matthias

I always shoot with a chrony. Occassionally, a "flier" corresponds to a lower velocity in my gun, but the correlation I'm discovering is that lower velocity fliers sound different in the gun which I'm currently attribiting to slight differences in hammer spring strike. Just last night I was shooting a card where one of the shots hit way lower than expected. The pellet wasn't obviously deformed in any way. The wind hadn't shifted. I had concentrated on the shot and follow through just as well as the others. The only noticeable differences were the crony reported the velocity as 20 fps slower than expected, the shot sounded "off", and the shot hit an inch lower than expected.

Interestingly, at 25m, the 20 fps drop in velocity should have made a negligible difference in the point of impact. I suspect the hammer spring strike was slightly different for that shot and the FX crony underestimated the drop in velcoity. Or it was aliens.

This N50 card had approximately 35 FPS of extreme spread. The state of tune and how it is achieved affects the vertical in surprising ways. Too lean or too fat at a particular pressure will cause unnecessary vertical that will not align with what a ballistic calculator says should happen based on velocity. Just right….and fairly large spreads can still produce very tight vertical. There is a lot more than just velocity that causes vertical. That’s a hard one for many to wrap their head around. 


Mike