Recent content by thunderbird

You can’t. All naturally aspirated engines produce more power the denser the air is. increasing altitude always lowers the intake manifold pressure, in a way similar to closing the throttle at a given altitude pressure. its like saying, how do i get a N/A engine to produce peak power at a fifty...

Course, one can’t double the size of a wing without also considering that the wing will now weigh more. And the landing gear, fuselage, will have to be beefed up which will also increase the vehicle weight, and now maybe you need more fuel to achieve the required payload and range, which adds...

Interesting enough the designer was an Italian communist named Bartini. Bartini moved to Russia before WWII, and worked for Yermayalev or maybe Ermayalev where he designed an inverted gull, twin engined diesel motors designated YER-2 or ER-2 bomber. The YER-2 was supposedly the first to drop...

Amazing the number if people who want Nazis to win WWII. Mindboggling.

Simple answer is every plane is different. And these two planes are very different from each other. Load paths are extremely different when there are two fuselages versus one. Loads on outboard wing panels might be similar, except the wing loading is changed, and the cutout for landing gear...

Not sure why anyone is looking for ways to improve Germany’s outcome in WWII. just saying ;-)

I believe all of difference in performance was due the difference paid to excrescence drag on the P-51, or the drag caused by details. At the beginning of the war, excrescence drag was around fifty percent of the base drag. Airplane performances were far worse than what was predicted by wind...

p-38s without turbos is just another name for slow, overweight and unmaneuverable target.

The simple answer is that combat often began when planes were hundreds to thousands of yards apart. Gun attacks began at over 100 yards, and identifying one plane from another from front or aft view was truly difficult. Red colors often stick out more than darker colors at distance, so any hint...

Center of gravity relative to the average wing chord is the primary design condition for whether a plane is flyable. Its a balancing act of equipment location, consumables location and wing location and is affected by many factors. Counterintuitively, the later Griffon spitfires had a longer...

Considering that combat often began when planes were thousands of feet apart, And closure speeds might be in hundreds of mph, especially in head on closures, and lighting unpredictable, identifying by markings was always problematic.

Its not Fatigue that is the biggest risk for our irreplaceable warplanes. Its stupid people that don't know that they don't know.

One wonders how well it would have flown. Designing canard controlled aircraft is a tricky problem. Too much control power from the canard and the plane stalls uncontrollably. Too little and one can’t get the wing to generate all of it’s lift. Get the center of gravity wrong would also...

The Ta152C also had the Db603 engine, but i’ve never seen any with a Db605.

high winged airplanes actually have lower interference drag and better span efficiency than low winged monoplanes. But along with shorter landing gear, i suspect better visibility for the pilot is another strong reason for low wing monoplanes, at least for those aircraft where the cockpit sits...