Structural weight of early U.S. fighters compared to Spitfire Mk1 and Bf-109,

Spindash64 said:

I think it's better to think of it not as "military flying is supposed to be dangerous", and more that "when someone is shooting at you, being able to run away before they can shoot you is armor in itself". Making an aircraft safer and easier to fly, even before considering structural strength often involves sacrifices being made to performance. For example, strongm dihedral makes a plane very resistant to rolling, which makes it very stable… and also makes it very resistant to the pilot trying to start a rolling maneuver.

The tradeoff when trying to shave a few pounds is "how many pilots we risk dying in an accident who wouldn't have before, vs how many pilots survive the mission who wouldn't have before"

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Unfortunate it seems to have been mental attitude.
yes they tried to make planes stronger.
But look at the criminally dismal record of planes like the Gloster Meteor in the late 40s and early 50s. let alone planes flying in the 1920s.
A total of 890 Meteors were lost in RAF service (145 of these crashes occurring in 1953 alone), resulting in the deaths of 450 pilots.

Crash 145 Cessna 172s in one year let alone even 14 twin engine airliners and look at the government investigations, regulations and uproar.

Military personnel are going to get injured or die in training, but the goal is to reduce the numbers as much as possible. Not brush it aside with excuse that military training is dangerous and they knew that when they signed up so we (the military) don't have to fix anything.

It is not macho to die because they couldn't be bothered to figure out that the canopy could not be opened at certain speeds or attitudes.

Military aircraft should be able to fly and fight within certain limits without the plane breaking in flight, Problems should be noted in the manuals, and vary according to type of planes and or missions. Bombers should not be flown in steel dives and such.

Not to mention that even though early jets like the Meteor was capable of the same ranges as piston engined fighters, when flow at full power combined with higher speeds, endurance went down the crapper. Most of the Meteors that were lost was due to being run out of fuel in flight from what I remember.

I wonder if that's yet another reason the Meteors weren't allowed to fly over Europe

I seem to remember something about the plane being difficult to fly on one engine and they kept modifying the training.
Like training for 'engine outs". rough throttle handling could cause a flame out and they practiced making the an engine flame out and restarting.
They also practiced shutting down one engine and flying at low speed and then restarting.
Later on they cut out the intentional rough throttle handling and just throttled back on one engine when practicing low speed handling so they didn't have to try to re-light the engine.
It was always the same engine as they did not have duplicate accessories (pumps etc)
One account claims they lost more pilots practicing for "engine outs" than they lost in actual "engine out" incidents.
How many they saved with the training I don't know but but this is a pretty scary statistic.
minimum single engine speed was 165kts.

Many of the pilots had gone through advanced training in Spitfires and the transition may have been a steep curve?

There were so many accidents in the early jet age that it is unbelievable by todays standards. The worst period for the US was 1954. Between the USAF, USN, and USMC, there were over 400 accidents in June 1954. That's right - over 400 accidents in 1 month.

BarnOwlLover said:

Not to mention that even though early jets like the Meteor was capable of the same ranges as piston engined fighters, when flow at full power combined with higher speeds, endurance went down the crapper. Most of the Meteors that were lost was due to being run out of fuel in flight from what I remember.

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Piston engines on full power also consume a lot of fuel.