Possibly the Worst Aviation "History" Video I've Encountered

[GrauGeist]

I'm not particularly fond of (for lack of a better term) meme historians. Unfortunately, I just don't have the patience to get out there on YouTube and call these guys out but I still have some of my books from my childhood including a big one called The Encyclopedia of 20th Century Air Warfare.


I think these guys prefer to be contrarian rather than informative or acting in good faith when it comes to how they present their content as I said a while back. Or (if you're familiar with reddit) they're just your average r/noncredibledefense browser with a YouTube channel and a mic.

Which is why this thread happened:

History according to random people...

I know this subject has come up in the past over various topics, but sometimes you have to just stop and say "what the...?" This day and age, with social media and interactive news sites, there is always public input on everything from raising kittens to the space program. Often times, the...

ww2aircraft.net

Any tool can create a YouTube channel and present their spin.

The worst offendera are the War thunder types, who get a notion and run with it...

 

[ARTESH]

Which is why this thread happened:

History according to random people...

I know this subject has come up in the past over various topics, but sometimes you have to just stop and say "what the...?" This day and age, with social media and interactive news sites, there is always public input on everything from raising kittens to the space program. Often times, the...

ww2aircraft.net

Any tool can create a YouTube channel and present their spin.

The worst offendera are the War thunder types, who get a notion and run with it...

I feel what you mean, but, TBH, there are few good channels that use different games to explain history or other sciences.

 

[wuzak]

I know the Lancaster and B-24 were faster, just not at 35000 ft.

I think that they were faster during operations, not necessarily when flying alone.

 

[GrauGeist]

The B-17 was faster at 30,000ft. because the Lanc and B-24 couldn't reach that altitude.

 

[drgondog]

Data says that the only thing the Germans were MORE worried about than the B-17 was the Mosquito.

So going by the German opinion, it was the second most worrying Allied aircraft for them of the whole war.

So probably not very crap.

View attachment 727394

Calum - what is the legend/scale?

 

[Deleted member 68059]

Calum - what is the legend/scale?

It is quite literally the number of times the keyword is mentioned anywhere at all in the German (RLM) Air Ministry meeting records. The
hits for keywords under each bar were all added together. So all the matches for B17, B-17, Fortress were summed.

These comprise about 71 volumes (formerly on microfilm) which is about 15.1 million words.

Aspects to keep in mind are that most of the records are 1942 to late 1944 and that perhaps 30% of it is so bad in quality the OCR doesn't work.

So I had to try tricks to find keywords, for example the longer the word the probability of finding a match degrade dramatically, so instead of
searching for "Mustang" you try again with one less letter and so on. "Musta" is long enough to avoid improper matches but short enough to
sidestep many of the OCR errors.

If you copy paste the text you`ll usually find it will be something like:

"Mu$tang"

and when the OCR errors get very bad it just all turrns into dingbats font.

I suppose the principle here is that statistically, probably all keywords will be equally affected by these errors so the proportion
of mentions relative to other aircraft is probably not that innacurate.

 

[Low Battery]

I summarize this entire video with the following:

"The B-17 wasnt a lancaster so it was shit"