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More great stuff! I notice Bader's letter confirms that this was indeed Hauptmann Pringel's aircraft,even though he has mis-spelt the name slightly.I'm not sure he should have named him at all.
Thanks for posting this material.
I like Bader's last,rather cheeky,suggestion that (effectively) he should be given a chance of flying the aircraft
Steve
Great stuff Glider.
Of interest is the comment on wing failures. Never heard of this before, though the early Fs had rear fuselage failures.
As for the strength of the Bf-109's wing, it was atleast as strong as that of the Spitfire. So unless the Spitfire lost its wings a lot then Bf-109 didn't either. This fear of a catastrophic wing failure stemmed from experiences with the older Bf-108, and it was a well known problem. The Bf-109 featured a much stronger assembly however, and the wing was reportedly good to carry the Bf-109 at up to 12 G's, which is beyond what most of the airframe was capable of handling anyway.
The Bf-109 was also known to be quicker at high speed pullouts than most other a/c, P-51 pilots in a number of incidents finding themselves unable to pullout from high speed dives as quickly as the Bf-109.