Qualities that made for a great aircraft that don't show up in performance stats.

[Ascent]

Something about the spitfire you see in just about every pilot's accounts is that it was a joy to fly, like strapping on a pair of wings.

Surely the confidence it gave to new pilot's must be worth something even if it can't be quantified.

 

[Kevin J]

Something about the spitfire you see in just about every pilot's accounts is that it was a joy to fly, like strapping on a pair of wings.

Surely the confidence it gave to new pilot's must be worth something even if it can't be quantified.[/QUOTE
I think you'll find the Hurricane shot down more enemy aircraft than the Spitfire, it was more rugged, cheaper and easier to learn to fly. I wouldn't want a Spitfire until the marks Vc, VIII and IX/XVI came along

 

[Ascent]

I'm well aware of those facts yet, as has been discussed on this forum recently, spitfire pilot's in general survived longer.

The hurricane got more kills simply because there was more of them when the fighting was at its fiercest.

 

[XBe02Drvr]

I thought about the A6M as well. But, the combined construction of the fuselage/wing center section took it out of the running for ease of production.

I don't quite buy that. True, that one piece wing would have been awkward on a Henry Ford style moving production line, but that's not how the Japanese operated. They assembled each plane in place, craftsman style, as their working traditions dictated.
At GE we built Vulcan cannons the same way, as the plant (a WWII vintage Bell Aircraft facility, BTW) was not laid out that way. I trundled racks and bins of parts from the various machining areas to the assembly shops, where the guns were assembled on roll around work benches. I can't imagine the efficiencies of a production line being worth the cost and disruption of reconfiguring the entire plant.
Cheers,
Wes

 

[GregP]

Hi Michael Rauls, Regarding post #4, I supposed you are correct, kills-to-any-loss does tend to penalize the ground attackers. If they were ground attackers, then they had some tonnage of bombs delivered on target. We could arbitrarily look at the fighter with the best kill-to-whatever-loss record (I am looking only at USA planes because the data for other nation's planes is so hard to find) and we could look at the plane with the most bombs delivered on target, and come up with an equivalent kill-per-X-loss to tons-bombs-on-target equality ratio.

It's worth some thought. The kills part also penalizes planes that weren't assigned to active sectors, so maybe we could come up with an adjustment. I need to think on that one.

I appreciate the comments that make us all THINK!

 

[Vic Nighthorse]

The highest loss rate per sortie in the USAAF was the P-38 at 1.35%. The P-51 was at 1.18%, just under the P-38. The P-39 Airacobra, contrary to what you might believe, had a loss rate per sortie of only 0.35%! The P-47 Thunderbolt was the most complex fighter in the USAAF and flew more than twice as many sorties as any other fighter. It's loss rate per sorties was 0.73%, making flying one almost twice as safe as flying a P-51. The safest fighter in the USAAF was the P-39!

I found this fascinating but want to make sure I got it right. These numbers are for overall?

 

[pbehn]

I found this fascinating but want to make sure I got it right. These numbers are for overall?

Statistics are statistics there is always a story, the loss rate of the P51 climbed as it was used to attack airfields, I believe that even on escort missions most losses were to ground fire over the course of the war.

 

[Glider]

A6M2

I would add Hurricane which in 1939 was a formidable foe. My initial thought was Spitfire but it wasn't easy to build.

 

[jetcal1]

They assembled each plane in place, craftsman style, as their working traditions dictated.

(Let's preface this with, I know there were pilot shortages later. And, even if they doubled their production it would have been only a fraction of US production.)

That one piece setup hurt production, future redesign, and heavy maintenance/rebuild in the field. IMHO, if the airplane is not available to make it to the fight, its missing an important quality of greatness. I would rate the F4F higher than the A6M on the great airplane intangibles as it was more adaptable.

 

[Ivan1GFP]

Great post with some really surprising information. I like your idea about a kill to losses of all causes ratio as it takes into account how safe an aircraft was for its own pilots. Only thing is it seems like that ratio would skew against planes that did alot of ground attack work like the p47. Alot of extra losses there with little oportunity for kills. Maybe kills to all losses ratio on missions not ground attack? Although that may be impossible to sort out at this point.

I was thinking pretty much the same thing: What happens if the evaluation is between an aircraft which flies mostly ground attack missions and doesn't normally get any opportunity for aerial kills versus another that flies mostly escort and air superiority missions?
Oops. Just saw that this has been addressed to an extent.

In being, easy to build, easy to fly. Has any country actually had a such a critter at the beginning of a war? The Hawker Hurricane is the closest thing I can think of. (I would also add easy to fix!)

If it is just easy to build and easy to fly, then many countries have had that kind of aeroplane. (Think Biplanes.) When one adds the quality of being competitive in performance, the field narrows.
Along with the Hurricane, would you consider the Ki 43 Hayabusa a candidate?

I agree with you that the A6M didn't qualify because of the great complexity in its construction.
I don't believe the on piece wing was the big killer. (The Brewster Buffalo also had that method of construction.)
Instead, I believe the issue was the extraordinary measures taken to reduce weight by drilling holes and removing material that was not absolutely required for the level of strength they were looking for.

- Ivan.

 

[eagledad]

Vic

I believe the loss rates (P-38, P-51 etc) are for the ETO/MTO only. As stated , stats are stats. The P-39 flew many missions where the chance of meeting any opponents was slim (Coastal patrols in North Africa for example). Thus many sorties, few losses and victories. The P-51 and P-38 flew longer missions and thus had more chances to be attacked and to attack. Add to the fact that many of the missions were deep into enemy airspace and it makes sense that their loss rates were greater.

Just my two cents.

Eagledad

 

[CORSNING]

Michael,
Thanks man for starting this thread. It has given me ideas of
what areas of performance to expand on in the future.

Greg,
Thank you man, as always, you have great input.

Kevin,
In your Post #28 you listed dive speed. That one is going
to be a rough one because maximum allowable indicated
changed with altitude.
Roll rate I have tried to list when given.
Turning circle is a delicate thing that changes with speed
and altitude. That is why I list turn times at 1,000 m. and
have put together a fair amount of turn times at 4,000 m.
also (for future postings).

Swampyankee mentioned dynamic behavior which if good,
is a big attribute as in the qualities of the Yak-3. The one
big performance feature that has not been mentioned yet
(at least I did not see it listed) is combat speed capabilities
of fighter aircraft.

Nikolay Gerasimovich Golodnikov in his interview describes it
best.
Combat Speed is a range of maximum possible speeds that
an aircraft can develop for the conduct of active maneuver
aerial battle, and at which all forms of maneuver attendant to
that battle can be executed.

Maximum combat speed is what made the Yak-3, P-51 and
many other high speed maneuvering aircraft so dangerous.
There is no way the Yak-3 could maneuver with an A6M2
at 200 mph. It did not have to. It could dance all over this
version of the Zero at the Mitsubishi's maximum speeds at
all altitudes up to 7,000 m.

 

[michael rauls]

Hi Michael Rauls, Regarding post #4, I supposed you are correct, kills-to-any-loss does tend to penalize the ground attackers. If they were ground attackers, then they had some tonnage of bombs delivered on target. We could arbitrarily look at the fighter with the best kill-to-whatever-loss record (I am looking only at USA planes because the data for other nation's planes is so hard to find) and we could look at the plane with the most bombs delivered on target, and come up with an equivalent kill-per-X-loss to tons-bombs-on-target equality ratio.

It's worth some thought. The kills part also penalizes planes that weren't assigned to active sectors, so maybe we could come up with an adjustment. I need to think on that one.

I appreciate the comments that make us all THINK!

If it is possible to remove missions where any bombs were delivered that would render( i think, posible im missing something here) a mostly air to air mission inventory from which a reasonably fair kills to losses to all causes could be extracted.
Don't know if existing records are detailed enough to allow this analysis but that's the most even parameters I can think of for comparison.

 

[jetcal1]

If it is just easy to build and easy to fly, then many countries have had that kind of aeroplane. (Think Biplanes.) When one adds the quality of being competitive in performance, the field narrows.
Along with the Hurricane, would you consider the Ki 43 Hayabusa a candidate?
- Ivan.

Don't know enough about the airplane.

 

[CORSNING]

If it is just easy to build and easy to fly, then many countries have had that kind of aeroplane. (Think Biplanes.) When one adds the quality of being competitive in performance, the field narrows.
Along with the Hurricane, would you consider the Ki 43 Hayabusa a candidate?
- Ivan.

Absolutely, the Ki 43-II could out accelerate (at low speeds), out roll and out turn the
A6M2 or A6M3. Its armament was light, but it had the ability to bring it to bear quicker.
The Ki 43-II climbed to 6,000 meters slightly quicker than the A6M2, but their overall
climb rates were about equal. The Zero had an edge in zoom climb.

 

[GregP]

Hi Vic, Yes. If you Google "Naval Combat Statistics, WWII" you can find a good pdf of the 1946 report. The tables are there and you only need dig into them to get all the naval data you can handle. But they do NOT save the same data as the USAAF did. I got some of the USAAF data from Ray Wagner's American Combat Planes. There are several tables in there that are worth the price of the book alone. That assumes Ray got the data right; I have yet to find better data. The only USAAF report on aerial victories of WWII I can find is Report 85. It is scanned in and the pages were done on a 9-dot-high line printer way back when they weren't all that good, making OCR almost impossible. So, while Report 85 is there, the format is useless in the extreme, which seems to be the way the government wants it.

The USAAF tracks air kills and ground kills, but only in the ETO as far as I can tell. The Navy lumps them together, but the kills are very much largely air-to-air since that's what they encountered, by far, the most. Still ... if they don't track that data (I think they DO ... they just won't publish it) they can't really break it out for you.

Would be VERY NICE to see the primary documents, but I have yet to see my first primary source except for Frank Olynyk. I have his book, but it is, again, in useless format for electronic analysis in Excel or similar application. I'd have to scan every page and pick through it. Still, I can look someone up by name and rank, etc. and have a good number pretty quickly.

The real issue is NOT being able to find the record for some unit. It is finding the records for every unit of every service in the war, and then making a coherent summary of same.

Cheers.

 

[Ivan1GFP]

Absolutely, the Ki 43-II could out accelerate (at low speeds), out roll and out turn the
A6M2 or A6M3. Its armament was light, but it had the ability to bring it to bear quicker.
The Ki 43-II climbed to 6,000 meters slightly quicker than the A6M2, but their overall
climb rates were about equal. The Zero had an edge in zoom climb.

The only problem with this idea is that at the beginning of the war, it would have been the Ki 43-I that was being produced and that was even slower and more lightly armed (and structurally weak).

 

[Kevin J]

I'm well aware of those facts yet, as has been discussed on this forum recently, spitfire pilot's in general survived longer.

The hurricane got more kills simply because there was more of them when the fighting was at its fiercest.

I think you'll find that the Soviets found far more use for them than their Spitfires in combat over the Eastern Front, they even had aces if you count their shared victories. It was in use in their VVS in 1942 and PVO until 1945, dates when our RAF Fighter Command considered them obsolete in 1942/43. It was the Spitfire that they didn't rate. Of course, we needed fast fighters to stop the German raids on our infrastructure and industry.

 

[fliger747]

Yes the harmonization of the controls is important to the pilots transition of input to exit as an envisioned maneuver. Typically stick force wise about 10 lbs pull per G was considered about optimum, breakout forces in the control systems and friction considered bad for precision. In the WWII era stability as a gun platform would be important for accurate shooting. And of course one had to be able to land the thing. A high number of Bf 109's were destroyed in landing accidents. The Seafire also didn't have a really successful career as a carrier aircraft due to landing issues. Roll rates, quite important to transitional maneuverability, different than sustained maneuverability.

I once read the Spitfire compared to a "light and fiery horse", wasn't till I owned such a beast that I fully understood what that meant. Just think and he would go within an inch of where you wanted... Just don't sneeze.

 

[tomo pauk]

I think you'll find that the Soviets found far more use for them than their Spitfires in combat over the Eastern Front, they even had aces if you count their shared victories. It was in use in their VVS in 1942 and PVO until 1945, dates when our RAF Fighter Command considered them obsolete in 1942/43. It was the Spitfire that they didn't rate. Of course, we needed fast fighters to stop the German raids on our infrastructure and industry.

Wow.
Soviets, as well as other people that used both Hurricanes and Spitfires rated the Spitfire as a better fighter. Stalin complained that WAllies were giving them Hurricanes and P-40s in abundance, but not Spitfires and P-39s. The latest being probably the most preferred Western type the Soviets used.
RAF was very much using Hurricanes in 1942, despite considering them obslolete. Not using Hurricanes in 1942 means RAF is using Gladiators and Mohawks. Similar is with Soviets - no Hurricanes in 1942 means they still use I-16s and I-153s in fighter units. Usage of Hurricane in PVO means one thing - it was relegated to the duties of glorified AAA, to kill bombers without a danger of encountering German fighters.
Other countries also needed fast fighters - duh.