Recent content by PAT303

Its the reason I get annoyed talking with people. All you hear is in the BoB the .303's should have been replaced by the Hispano and the bombers would have been blasted from the sky, people seem to forget that Spitfires were fitted with cannons but they were so heavy the planes struggled to...

The FW190 was the same, one foot over the line on the edge of it's performance envelope and it fell from the sky. There is a good interview with a red tail pilot and he said quite a few pilots went in when fully fueled, he said he flew as straight as a die until the weight burned off.

One thing about this photo, how are the hits so close together?, the attacking plane must have been very close with very little to no defection angle?

That pilot walked away with just a piece of shrapnel in his heal after performing a normal landing, I bet he was happy having armor.

And unlike the MkV, the FW190 would not have been as successful against the Spitfire MkIII if it had been produced. The MkIII was more than just a clipped winged Spit, with better roll rate, better climb and able to exceed 390mph it comfortably outperformed everything in the air in 1940, the...

Johnny Johnson on his MkIX, look at the overall finish with dents, scratches poor paint plus the cannon stub held on by tape, no redesign of the wing is going to make up for battle wear in regards to speed.

A lot is said about the radiators but a general clean up of the airframe made the biggest difference. Removing the cannon stubs, slim lining the cannon bulges, the retractable tail wheel and ejector exhausts improved the speed of all the models when implemented, the Seafire MkIII is a good...

It was Ricardo who decided that sleeve valves were the way forward with the then available fuel from memory, the 20mm in the 109E caused the forward bulkhead to fail which is why the FF/M's were put in the wings, the Fiesla had the bulkhead redesigned for the better 151/20 cannon. The Deltic had...

I personally think a major part of combat effectiveness is having total confidence in your aircraft. If you read pilot reports on the Spitfire and Hurricane as examples you will notice time and again how pilots talk fondly on how forgiving they are to fly and how they ''talk'' to the pilot when...

Bwaahhaaa, just realised what you meant, haha

Had the same thing happen to me, had my mum and dad in the car and a snake poked it's head out from under the seat between my legs, damn thing disappeared inside the car somewhere and after coaxing my mum back in we got home, never saw the snake again, no matter how much my dad and I looked zero...

As an Australian living in a country full of bitey things that is just piss funny.

Doesn't the 747 have DU in the tail for weight balance?

The spitfire's fabric covered ailerons were changed to metal pretty early on but that wasn't the fix, it just addressed the ballooning of the fabric surfaces, the fix was reprofiling of the ailerons which reduced the turbulence across their surface thus improving the airflow they controlled...