P-47 vs P-51 in a dive

[Juha]

How much would the gravity-type carbs fit in to the turning/stall problem in turns on the early Spits?

IMHO in pure turning nothing because of in normal turning one pulls positive Gs and gravity-type cabs in Spits had problems only with negative Gs but in combination of different movements there might be situations were a/c was under neg Gs and so Spit would suffer momentary loss of power.

Juha

 

[CobberKane]

Not necessarily, note "...but the elevator forces are extraordinarily light and demand the gentlest touch...", so it was easy in the heat of the combat tighten the turn too much. In 1940 both sides had inexperience fighter pilots, both had suffered losses during the French Campaign, in fact 109 units more than Spit units because France had been mostly HUrri show. And regulars had plenty of experience on flying on both sides even if only Germans had significant combat experience.

Juha

Still, the assertion that the 109 was easier to fly to it's limits is a bit too revisionist for me. There are just too many descriptions from pilots of both sides who flew each aircraft. I can't quote verbatim but read a report from a German pilot who said of the spitfite 'that Spitfire was my real baby - never had I flown an aircraft like this...we were used to the 109 with its stall and landing...' and another who described both the Spit and Hurricanne as 'childishly easy to fly and land' . A video I have of a Canadian Spit pilot has him saying 'you could pull that spade stick back into your gut and the spitfire would just shudder around the turn - you had to kick it to make it go into a spin.' Grummans chief test pilot flew a seafire and said 'I had never felt so at home in an aircraft... I found myself laughing out loud....the hellcat and Corsair were work horses, the spitfire was a dashing Arabian stallion.'
The 109 easier to fly to its limits - really?

 

[riacrato]

"Easier to fly to its limits" doesn't equate to "easy to fly". Not that I necessarily agree, I know way too little about how both planes handled in the extreme. But e. g. the Fw 190 is generally considered easier to fly than the 109, but I would say it cannot be flown to its limits too easily: The stall is harsh and I think many pilots would be reluctant to pull it to the limit in a sharp turn.

 

[Shortround6]

The Early Spitfires were hard to fly to their limits because of the overly powerful elevators. This was changed on later models although I don't know if the "problem" was totally solved.

What is wanted on a fighter is good "control harmonization". In other words the amount of effort the pilot has to put into the controls ( or the distance they have to be moved) to get a certain amount of response in any axis of flight. A plane that needs much more effort to move the stick sideways to roll than it does to move forward or back to climb or dive (or tighten or loosen a turn) is going to take more work to fly smoothly. Or a plane that has a light stick but needs the rudder pedals kicked instead of pressed.

The other aspects of this is what happens if the limit's are reached and exceeded and also what kind of warnings there are. 109s had the slats deploy and then a bit later kind of mushed as it stalled. Spitfires are supposed to have done a fair amount as shuddering as they approached stall. P-39s supposedly gave very little warning.

And if you exceed the limit? how easy does the plane recover? if you relax the stick soon enough does the plane almost automatically recover or does one wing drop much more than the other and the plane tries to go into a spin?

Fear in the pilots mind over what MAY happen can be a real factor in how close he flies to the limit.

 

[GregP]

Hi riacrato,

I don't think I give the Fw 190 too little credit. I consider it a very good fighter, but far from a superplane.

I like the armament, the wide track landing gear, the wonderful ailerons, and the relatively easy to use auto mixture on the throttle (making it hard to fly formation, though ...). I don't like the wing loading or the relatively ineffective elevators comp[ared with other fighters. It was too heavy for its size and not very good in pitch. It began to lose performance at altitude (in the radial engine versions) and was decidedly not at its best above 20,000 feet.

The D model was preffy good and adressed some of the altitude issues, but was still not very good in pitch. The cockpit was claustrophobic ... I know, I sat in the one that used to be in Mesa, Arizona at Doug Champlin's fighter museum and is now in Paul Allen's colelction. I could almost not turn my head 90° and I didn't have a fight helmet on at the time!

I consider the Ta 152 a non-starter becasue so few were built and deployed. It was excellent at high altitude, but definitely lost some of the quick roll rate at lower altitude due to long, high-aspect ratio wings. I don't wish to debate the Ta-152 with anyone because it made as much combat impact as the P-51H did ... read that almost none. All the "what ifs" won't change that fact. It would never even have been deplpoyed due to being prototypes except teh war was rapidly being lost and they were desperate.

In total, the Fw 190 was a competent front line fighter mostly flown by veteran pilots, and it made a good partner for the Me 109. Together they were a great WWII fighter pair that flew and fought well. I would not call them the best since they did not accomplish the task of stopping the Allies in the air. They started the war with air superiority (at least the Me 109 did) and gradualy lost it as the war moved on. By 1945, neither plane could live for very long in an Allied sky. Whatever the circumstances, that does not spell "best" in my book, but I like both of the German fighters very much and have worked on the restoration of the Ha.1112 at the Musuem. From the firewall back it is pure Me 109G. Neat plane.

 

[Juha]

Still, the assertion that the 109 was easier to fly to it's limits is a bit too revisionist for me. There are just too many descriptions from pilots of both sides who flew each aircraft. I can't quote verbatim but read a report from a German pilot who said of the spitfite 'that Spitfire was my real baby - never had I flown an aircraft like this...we were used to the 109 with its stall and landing...' and another who described both the Spit and Hurricanne as 'childishly easy to fly and land' . A video I have of a Canadian Spit pilot has him saying 'you could pull that spade stick back into your gut and the spitfire would just shudder around the turn - you had to kick it to make it go into a spin.' Grummans chief test pilot flew a seafire and said 'I had never felt so at home in an aircraft... I found myself laughing out loud....the hellcat and Corsair were work horses, the spitfire was a dashing Arabian stallion.'
The 109 easier to fly to its limits - really?

Now nobody have said that 109 was easier to land than Spit or Hurri, it wasn't. 109 was more difficult in finals than at least Merlin Spits and clearly more difficult to handle during the ground run. But as the Finnish test pilot noted, because its heavy elevators and slats 109 was difficult plane to stall unintentionally. Spits up to somewhere in Mark V production had overly sensitive elevators so it was easy to stall it unintentionally, especially because its poor control harmony. Metal ailerons clearly helped with excessive aileron heaviness at high speeds but ailerons remained heavy at higher speeds. The overly light elevators were first cured with bob weights during Mk V production run after several wing failures, and later on Westland's Petter (Westland was contracted to built Mk Vs) first found out that fairly simple modification on elevators would cure the problem, so the cure would not affect production. Of course Supermarine staff would not accept solution from a chief designer of another firm, but after Petter had shown that the problem could be solved with fairly simple modification, they soon came out with their own cure, a small mod to elevators aerodynamic balance.

Both 109 and Spit had bening stall contrary to for ex. Fw 190

Juha

 

[CobberKane]

Now nobody have said that 109 was easier to land than Spit or Hurri, it wasn't. 109 was more difficult in finals than at least Merlin Spits and clearly more difficult to handle during the ground run. But as the Finnish test pilot noted, because its heavy elevators and slats 109 was difficult plane to stall unintentionally. Spits up to somewhere in Mark V production had overly sensitive elevators so it was easy to stall it unintentionally, especially because its poor control harmony. Metal ailerons clearly helped with excessive aileron heaviness at high speeds but ailerons remained heavy at higher speeds. The overly light elevators were first cured with bob weights during Mk V production run after several wing failures, and later on Westland's Petter (Westland was contracted to built Mk Vs) first found out that fairly simple modification on elevators would cure the problem, so the cure would not affect production. Of course Supermarine staff would not accept solution from a chief designer of another firm, but after Petter had shown that the problem could be solved with fairly simple modification, they soon came out with their own cure, a small mod to elevators aerodynamic balance.

Both 109 and Spit had bening stall contrary to for ex. Fw 190

Juha

Well, I went back over my readings and videos, etc and I think we are going to have to agree to disagree on this one. I just can't get past the preponderance of pilot accounts describing the 109 as a tricky beast to fly and the Spitfire as a dream. If you google the Discovery Channel documentary on Sptifire v 109 a pilot who currently flies restored examples of both says just that, and a former Luftwaffe pilot states that the 109 in the air needed to be treated 'like eggshells'. Interestingly, the documentary makers suggest that the 109 might even have been able to out-turn the spit, on paper at least, but in combat the aircraft's unforgiving characteristics meant no-one was prepared to push it that far.
About the only way i can make sense of your assertion that the 109 was easier to fly to its limits would be if you meant the german fighter behaved well right up to the point where it went out of control and spun into the deck, whereas the spitfire with its eliptical wing would shudder as it approached its limits (giving the pilot plenty of warning of the impending stall in the process) and surely recover far more easily afterwards.
As to which was the better aircraft, I guess that depends in you criteria. From a manufacturing and service angle, surely it was the 109; Cheaper to build and easier to service. In terms of performance and design stretch, the spitfire. The 109 really peaked with the F and early G models - the small airframe was just too limited in terms of the engine and armament increases it could cope with. In contrast the late model Spitfires were still as potent as anything in the air when the war ended - not bad for an aircraft that had first flown ten years earlier..

 

[Siegfried]

Well, I went back over my readings and videos, etc and I think we are going to have to agree to disagree on this one. I just can't get past the preponderance of pilot accounts describing the 109 as a tricky beast to fly and the Spitfire as a dream. If you google the Discovery Channel documentary on Sptifire v 109 a pilot who currently flies restored examples of both says just that, and a former Luftwaffe pilot states that the 109 in the air needed to be treated 'like eggshells'. Interestingly, the documentary makers suggest that the 109 might even have been able to out-turn the spit, on paper at least, but in combat the aircraft's unforgiving characteristics meant no-one was prepared to push it that far.
About the only way i can make sense of your assertion that the 109 was easier to fly to its limits would be if you meant the german fighter behaved well right up to the point where it went out of control and spun into the deck, whereas the spitfire with its eliptical wing would shudder as it approached its limits (giving the pilot plenty of warning of the impending stall in the process) and surely recover far more easily afterwards.
As to which was the better aircraft, I guess that depends in you criteria. From a manufacturing and service angle, surely it was the 109; Cheaper to build and easier to service. In terms of performance and design stretch, the spitfire. The 109 really peaked with the F and early G models - the small airframe was just too limited in terms of the engine and armament increases it could cope with. In contrast the late model Spitfires were still as potent as anything in the air when the war ended - not bad for an aircraft that had first flown ten years earlier..

Me 109 gave plenty of pre stall buffet coming from the tail. If it did stall into a high g turn it tended to mush through with Little tendency to flip or spin. The Me 109 probably had the most benign spin of any ww2 fighter. The Me 109 did not have a superior turning radius however could gain the upper hand if it had equal power which was not the case in 1943.

Do not conflate the stalling characteristics of an aircraft in landing config with it in a high g turn, they often have no relationship to each other. A spit in a high turn that did stall was prone to flip inverted, a 109 presumably due to slats and the long tail moment arm was not prone to this. Ideally one avoids a stall in the first place unless one is good enough to use it tactically.

 

[Juha]

Well, I went back over my readings and videos, etc and I think we are going to have to agree to disagree on this one. I just can't get past the preponderance of pilot accounts describing the 109 as a tricky beast to fly and the Spitfire as a dream. If you google the Discovery Channel documentary on Sptifire v 109 a pilot who currently flies restored examples of both says just that, and a former Luftwaffe pilot states that the 109 in the air needed to be treated 'like eggshells'. Interestingly, the documentary makers suggest that the 109 might even have been able to out-turn the spit, on paper at least, but in combat the aircraft's unforgiving characteristics meant no-one was prepared to push it that far.
About the only way i can make sense of your assertion that the 109 was easier to fly to its limits would be if you meant the german fighter behaved well right up to the point where it went out of control and spun into the deck, whereas the spitfire with its eliptical wing would shudder as it approached its limits (giving the pilot plenty of warning of the impending stall in the process) and surely recover far more easily afterwards.
As to which was the better aircraft, I guess that depends in you criteria. From a manufacturing and service angle, surely it was the 109; Cheaper to build and easier to service. In terms of performance and design stretch, the spitfire. The 109 really peaked with the F and early G models - the small airframe was just too limited in terms of the engine and armament increases it could cope with. In contrast the late model Spitfires were still as potent as anything in the air when the war ended - not bad for an aircraft that had first flown ten years earlier..

Well, besides the Finnish test pilot's evaluation and the FiAF pilots opinions, I based my opinion on 109 to the statements of several LW 109 pilots, Bär, Grislawski, Leykauf etc in several books. As I wrote, British noted the same thing as they evalueated 109E. And as I wrote earlier, 109 didn't spun easy, in fact one of demands in the specs for the new LW fighter on which it was designed was that the plane should be spinproof. That was one of the reasons why 109 had slats. Spit behavior got better after mods during Mk V production.

Juha

 

[GregP]

The Me 109 handled well at 120 - 280 mph. After that speed it started to get very stiff and lose maneuverability. At 400 mph, it took 4 seconds to roll from level to 45° and the pitch rate was worse. Add to that the fact that the Me 109 had no rudder trim, and you would QUICKLY tire of coordinated flight in a fast Me 109, making attack problematic on top of the non-maneuverability. Without coordinated flight, teh gunsight was tough to keep on target!

While the early Spitfires were also sluggish rollers at over 400 mph, the trait was cured in later models, and the Spitfire's pitch rate was always superior to the Me 109, if only by virtue of much lower wing loading.

I'd say the Me 109E and Spitfire I were even matched with each one having a slight siperiority at different aspects of air combat. History seems to agree with that evalulation.

The Me 109F was better but, by then, later Spitfire marks were also in service and they were well matched with opponerts and detractors for both planes in almost equal quantity.

By the time the Me 109G flew, the plane was WAY too heavy and the G was a real handful in turning fights due to very heavy wing loading and the preponderance of bumbps and bulges in strange places including the wing top surfaces. Nobody thought the Me 109G was a great dogfighter, including the Me 109G pilots.

Many people have written that ALL of the faults of the Me 109 could have been easily corrected, but never were. They are right; here we are in 2012, and the Me 109 faults STILL have not been corrected, even as an exercise. So the Me 109 will have to live with all its well-known faults.

Faults or not, I tend to like it a lot.

 

[SHOOTER]

I also like the Me-109 because it was smaller and hard to see and had a very good weapons fitment. CL engine mounted cannon.
Many here do not understand that very few combats involved maneuver as more than 90% of all kills were Vs targets that did not know they were under attack until it was way too late. ( If at all!)

 

[GregP]

Very true, Shooter, and you are right ... most people fail to realize that. The great dogfighters had to owkr hard only every once in awhile, but even a Ki-27 could shoot down a Hellcat if the Hellcat was caught asleep and unaware.