Hi again Milosh,
Not sure what your points are above.
I said the Finns were fighting against a woefully undertrained foe and their sucess would seem to solidify that view. The Finnish Buffalos are not even a 10% sample of Buffalos, so they simply count for the quality of the Finns versus their opponents in my mind, and don't say anything about the Buffalo in general. Take any random 50+% sample and see what you get.
And the USN was fighting same type pilot skill as Finns but Japanese had more competitive aircraft in A6M. Further the AAF and USMC were fighting tough IJN pilots and equal a/c in 1943, then the Marines more or less ran out of targets as airfields were taken and Japanese consolidated to areas where only the Fleet could attack.
About the kil ratio, I specified in the US inventory when I mentioed the Hellcat.
For a real kill ratio, I would not take less than a sample of at least 40% of the total production. For the US numbers about the Corsair and Hellcat, we have 85+% of the population, so I believe their numbers are quite valid for drawing conclusion about the aircraft in general.
Horsepucky. Not to mention that Japanese published losses were far less than USN victory credits (and AAF VC's also). There is a lot of evidence that claims in the PTO did not undergo the same rigor as the ETO with respect to Encounter Reports, witness requirements and a Review Board to parse the claim vs evidence.
I personally care much more about the performance of the Messerschmitt Bf 109 as a type than I do small numbers of Bf 109's in Finnish or any other service. I'm one of the guys who wants a good cross section of the plane's missions on which to base an opinion of the aircraft as a whole, not some specific small sample. That probably comes from an engineering background that includes inferential statistics.
The same background that enabled to 'perform an aerodynamic study on a P-51 canopy in undergrad school as you claimed on the other forum? Or the same rigor as using your statistical sampling regarding the mud mission opponent for USMC versus Fleet defense for USN? or the 'assumption that USN Claims matched Japanese actual losses?
As to the Finns specifically, they certainly showed their training and skill level were head and shoulders better than their opponents. Good job, Finland! But their good performance with the Buffalo is so atypical of the type as to be almost an abberation that might well be due as much to badly-trained Soviet opposition as much as to the prowess of the Finns ... I don't know. The Finns certainly showed good pilot quality in any case.
Could there be a comparable analogy with F6F vs Val and A6M?
They made somewhere around 580 Buffalos, Take any random sample of any 300 of them and you can get an idea of the real potential of the Buffalo. Random means random, not "just the Fins" or even "include all the Finns." The big problem, at least to me, is really getting the data together, not anayzing it.
That IS a problem for everybody, so you should apply the same rigor here and understand that a/c and pilot combination in one theatre and time in the war isn't applicable to pilot skill dissimilarities and opponents in another?
That, of course, applies to the way I think. You are certainly entitled to feel otherwise and yours may well be a more popular view, and that's fine.
HIS view may be more fact based than yours based on the logic you have posed so far. You just slapped his analytical capabilities and trumped with your self perceptions of your own?
If you want to talk specific numbers, the US Navy's kill ratio versus enemy aircraft was compiled by flying 66,530 combat sorties. That is not sorties, that is COMBAT sorties and is a pretty darned good sample on which to based combat effectiveness. Lest you think the Corsair is getting the bad end, the US Navy flew 64,051 combat sorties in the Corsair over about the same time period, so their combat sorties are nearly identical, and the Hellcat comes out on top by a wide margin. It shot down more than twice as many enemy aircraft.
And because the F-86 had 'only' victory credits of 800 plus, it's clear that the F6F is better? Or conversely worse than Me 109 or FW 190?
So you can some to any conclusions you want and it doesn't change the fact that the Hellcat was a verifiably better performer in combat situations. Pilots of the two types in US service got exactly the same training. The one thing we CAN'T say is what percent of "combat sorties" involved no contact with enemy aircraft but were rather anti-ship or ground attack missions only.
If you are going to compare Combat effectiveness between the two, don't you think that might be an 'interesting datum' for the serious engineering analytical mind? Not to mention aforementioned differences in opponents skills?
As I stated above, give me a Hellcat any day. If I can have my choice, you certainly can, too. So give Milosh whatever mount he wants, and good luck to him. It's all fantasy anyway, so I'll assume we win the fight and celebrate with a good, cold beer after we land.