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An aerial bomb is a type of Explosive weapon or incendiary weapon intended to travel through the air on a predictable trajectory. Engineers usually develop such bombs to be dropped from an aircraft.
The use of aerial bombs is termed aerial bombing.
As with other types of , aerial bombs aim to kill and injure people or to destroy materiel through the projection of one or more of blast, fragmentation, radiation or fire outwards from the point of detonation.
The first bombs dropped from a heavier-than-air aircraft were grenades or grenade-like devices. Historically, the first use was by Giulio Gavotti on 1 November 1911, during the Italo-Turkish War.: "Bombs were dropped in small numbers from aeroplanes too, though this was an awkward business, since the aviator had somehow to steer the machine while gripping the bomb between his knees and using his free hand to insert the fuse, before aiming it at the troops below."
In 1912, during the First Balkan War, Bulgarian Air Force Aviator Hristo Toprakchiev suggested the use of aircraft to drop "bombs" (called in the Bulgarian army at this time) on Turkish positions. Captain Simeon Petrov developed the idea and created several by adapting different types of grenades and increasing their payload. Who was the first to use an aircraft as a bomber? (in Bulgarian; photographs of 1912 Bulgarian air-dropped bombs)
On 16 October 1912, observer Prodan Tarakchiev dropped two of those bombs on the Turkish railway station of Karaağaç (near the besieged Edirne) from an Albatros F.2 aircraft piloted by Radul Milkov, for the first time in this campaign. A Brief History of Air Force Scientific and Technical Intelligence I.Borislavov, R.Kirilov: The Bulgarian Aircraft, Vol.I: From Bleriot to Messerschmitt. Litera Prima, Sofia, 1996 (in Bulgarian)
During the Mexican Revolution, US inventor Lester P. Barlow convinced General Pancho Villa of the insurgent Villista forces to purchase a plane from which bombs were dropped on trains carrying on Federal Army. Although the bombs were weak, they launched Barlow's career as an explosives inventor.
As part of The Blitz Nazi-Germany's Coventry Blitz set a benchmark for destruction that caused Joseph Goebbels to later use the term coventriert ("coventried") to describe similar levels of destruction of enemy cities.
While a single raid of the Coventry Blitz killed almost 600 people, later allied raids using conventional aerial bombs each killed up to tens of thousands of people, with the bombing of Dresden and the bombing of Hamburg as notable examples.
The final stages of World War Two saw the most lethal air raid in history, the bombing of Tokyo where possibly 100,000 or more were killed primarily by incendiary bombs. The majority of these incendiary bombs were the E-46 cluster bomb which released 38 M-69 oil-based incendiary bombs at an altitude of .
The end of World War Two was brought about with the aerial, atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed between 150,000 and 246,000 people and which remain the only use of nuclear weapons in an armed conflict.
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