Now, the pages from Morgan and Shacklady presented by Kurfurst as "evidence" that the Spitfire was inherently prone to breaking up.
Alas, putting them into quotation marks, or picking out a select few examples when I have already posted to whole text for everyone to read and make up their own mind would hardly succeed in dismissing the documented evidence.
We know that:
a, The
Spitfire II manual specifically warn about the low pitch stability of the aircraft and sensitive controls, which can easily lead to structural failure. That pretty much read to me as Spitfire was inherently prone to breaking up, as it was too easy to overload. It wasn't a structural strenght problem, it was a control characteristic problem.
b, We know from
Morgan and Shacklady, page 143 that this problem was already encountered in 1941, but the suggested fix, elevator inertia weights were not introduced to Mk Vs at the time,
c, We know that the problem of
unwanted tightening up the turn during pullout and consequent structural failures kept persisting into 1942, and lead to numerous total structural failures , evidenced by the 1942 report, and the inertia weights were looked into again.
d, We also know that the inertia weight/pitch instability problem was only half the story, as there were significant problems in co-existance due to
aileron instability and flutter, that also lead to structural failures.
e, We also know that there were
occasional problems with structural strenght later in the war, see the mention of buckling wings and U frames in fighter-bomber sorties, and signal of prohibition of diving attacks of Mark VIIIs in the Far East.
The evidence is numerous, convincing, and irrefutable I am afraid.
What was the point of reproducing these pages? There is nothing startling or new about any of this; the Spitfire was a mass-produced aircraft, subjected to operational wear and tear, not to mention production problems with wrong rivets etc.
Well the point is to provide verifiable, referenced evidence to the factors that contributed to the Spitfire's structural incidents that lead to loss of aircraft during flight to give the readers objective basis to form their opinion on. After all, thats the very purpose of this thread, to learn about the factors contributing to breaking up of 109s and Spitfires during the war.
IMHO there is a surprising amount of parallel between the time frame and cause of these accidents, despite what fanboys of a specific aircraft would like to tell people, that while the the 'other' fighter was riddled with problems unique only to it, 'his' fighter was utter perfection and completely free of any such defect. The evidence and detailed history of these aircraft show different.
After all, Spitfire fans posting in the thread appear to be
somewhat reluctant to share this information with others, being very busy trying to dismiss the evidence posted, and even engage in building CONTHEOs of forged manuals and such silly stuff.
The evidence is mounting and tend to show that the Spitfire had its share of problems on its own - some of them (sensitive pitch and instability) were inherent with the design itself, some of them were related to the rather infamously poor quality control at Supermarine. However, from the original question POV of which one is more likely to break up in a dive, it is irrevelant wheter it was a design defect or a production quality defect, the result was the same.
At this point, when evidence is a mountain and all attempts to dismiss every single manual, wartime report and the respected Spitfire Bible by Shacklady and Morgan that was shown have failed, Spitfire fans start to be extremely liberal, and there is suddenly talk of 'mass-production', 'operational wear and tear' and so on. Oddly enough, these causes didn't apply to the 109 a few pages before.