All weather?

[herman1rg]

So I have seen in various places that for instance the Supermarine Spitfire was not an "All Weather" fighter, now I'm not sure why this would be the case; what would be needed for it to be all weather? Or am I barking totally up the wrong tree.

Secondly what other WW2 fighters (if any) were considered all weather?

 

[Snautzer01]

Night fighter, in military aviation, a fighter aircraft with special sighting, sensing, and navigating equipment enabling it to function at night. Since the 1970s, most frontline fighters have had at least basic night-fighting capabilities and have been known as all-weather fighters.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/64481/what-is-an-all-weather-aircraft&ved=2ahUKEwjRtsyC9J-HAxWDygIHHUTlDNkQFnoECDwQAQ&usg=AOvVaw116bhcux12I__CHHEHES7t

 

[Shortround6]

There is a fair amount of confusion between all weather and night capable.
Spitfires and Hurricanes were supposed to be suitable for night flying/fighting. Or easily modified, Like glare shields blocking the exhaust flames from the pilots vision.
Now with no better vision or electronic aids than a Sopwith Camel from 1917 their chances of intercepting anything was extremely limited.
BUT, they did have blind flying instruments and they did have a couple of large flares in tubes to drop on strange air fields to help them land at night.
This assumes that there was enough vision to actually see a few hundred feet/yds and that the altimeter was correctly calibrated.

This is where night capable and all-weather began to separate. Just because you could fly (and land) at night when there was not too much cloud and/or some moon doesn't mean you could fly (or more importantly land) in crappy weather. Please note that early British night fighters had a rather limited ability to actually operate in bad weather. They tried sometimes but the accident rate was high. Commercial blind flying techniques/procedures of flying the beam also required a lit flare path marking the runway and in wartime that required a good degree of cooperation to light the field up quickly at the right time and to extinguish the lights quickly before some enemy intruder started dropping bombs.
As electronics and navigation equipment got better just flying in bad weather got easier. I thing some British night fighters got radar/radio altimeters fairly early on during WW II. At least that gave better warning after a several hour flight of getting close to ground that an Altimeters that had been adjusted hours earlier while a storm front came through.

In the 1950s most ALL weather fighters (as opposed to day fighters) were able to operate in bad weather conditions as the difference between night and bad weather had gotten a lot closer. Nobody was going to buy "night fighters" that needed moon light or stars after they spent all the money (and 2nd crewman) for the radar and communications gear needed for a radar guided intercept.

 

[GregP]

I wouldn't consider ANY WWII fighter without deicer boots as an all-weather aircraft.

At least in the ETO, icing was not at all uncommon, and the ability to deal with icing was paramount to be an all-weather aircraft.

That said, I'm not too sure any were actually all-weather aircraft. That didn't stop them from going up in what was often bad weather.