fw 190a5 flight model

[beginner]

in version 4.11.1, is ..at least fw 190 a5.. set in an historical real one in turning characteristics (compared to flugwerk videos from real fw a8 flights)
now turns like in reality. until version 4.10.1 was turning characteristics of fw very poor, unreal poor.

why it takes so long?? or i hope..next versions will again never make fw an airplane thats is designed only to fly straight.DD

[Whacker]

I am thoroughly and completely confused.

The answer is 42.

[IceFire]

What the I don't even.

I think that's a good response?

But seriously... I'm not sure if he's saying the FW190 doesn't turn well enough or if it turns too well.

[K_Freddie]

Remember that the Flugwerk FW is made of modern materials and is unloaded, making it much lighter than a wartime FW.

You can also complain about the P51s turning ability, and if you're looking for an aircraft that can turn like a Zero, you won't find it in the latter war aircraft.
The idea of combat fighting had changed from slow dogfights to high speed strike aircraft.
;)

[beginner]

i dont care what i complain, i care about little bit of realism.
think about, when they were designed in reality fw like here in 4.10.1, with turning capabilities like in 4.101. do you sure know..from basic logic, that test pilot will be complain, thats is not flyiable constructed because for that absurd turnig (or they wil call it..deadly stall airplane....but historicaly you dont find such a complains, opposite ..fw was an exelent plane)

so, it was little bit stupid to set this flyight model in the game.

but, in 4.11.1 looks like reality and its OK.

[Gaston]

Well since the FW-190A was an excellent aircraft, and did out-turn any mark of Spitfire, but at at low speeds and in prolonged sustained horizontal turns only, NOT at high speeds, I guess it finally dawned on the development team just how absurd their flight model was...

My guess is they still did not go far enough. But the straight-line comments I hear underline the absurd lengths to which they thought reality would slavishly follow their grade-school math...

And the FW-190A was crap at dive and zoom, and was never used that way... But I guess the're only so much reality simmers and sim-builders can take at one time...

Gaston

[CWMV]

Prove it, I mena its one thing to say "its this way!" but another to show data.
EDIT: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand I just responded to a necro thread. Go me.
But while Im here:
http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/fw190/ptr-1107.pdf
http://imageshack.us/a/img221/1775/190turncomparison.jpg

Sounds REALLY close to what we have in game really.

[lonewulf]

I tend to agree with "Beginner". I think the FM on the A series is at present poorly executed and has more in common with a free falling brick than the real world aircraft.

Despite such issues (eg a too great a tendency to stall, very poor acceleration and the complete absence of any sort of instantaneous turn), I don't agree that the 190 should in future be morphed into something that it was not (a turn fighter). One thing is sure, the FW 190 did not have a particularly good sustained turn rate when compared with the opposition. It was and shall always be, an energy fighter. If you want to dog-it-out with Spits down on the deck riding the edge of a stall with your flaps extended, well good luck. But no real world 190 pilot would ever consider such foolishness unless of course, he had no other option. All I can say is, you'd really want to be bloody confident that there were no other E/As in the vicinity because if there are, you'll very soon to be dead.

The real world 190 was very nimble with an exceptional roll-rate. This roll-rate issue is very important because although everyone seems to know and talk about it, few 190 flyers that I have seen actually take advantage of it. Roll rate is not about spinning the aircraft around on its axis as bad guys stand-off your six and shoot you full of holes. Roll rate is used as a means of very quickly changing the direction in which your aircraft is pointing. In essence after entering a sustained turn you quickly roll your aircraft through approx 180 degrees and pull the stick back towards you. If you do that and you are being chased by something like a Spit, you will find that he can't follow. If you're at altitude and he has a relatively low energy state you may even find that you manage to escape:grin:.

[IceFire]

I admit I'm super confused right now. I'm a big fan of the FW190 and first started flying it when it had a crippled FM in Forgotten Battles 1.0. For a long time it's never had a very good turn. The stall was fine IMHO as the FW190 was described in many tactical trials and evaluations as having a brutal stall (a fact that killed many pilots early on). I always felt the turn rate was a little low... Not as good as it should be. That was until 4.10 when the turn rate was improved... But it sounds like some think it was made worse? What?

It is much better now. I suspect it reaches near historical sustained turn rate values now (although I haven't tested).

[Gaston]

Prove it, I mena its one thing to say "its this way!" but another to show data.
EDIT: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand I just responded to a necro thread. Go me.
But while Im here:
http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/fw190/ptr-1107.pdf
http://imageshack.us/a/img221/1775/190turncomparison.jpg

Sounds REALLY close to what we have in game really.




It sure does...: The conclusion of these "Geniuses" was that: "In general [the FW-190] is an interceptor-type aircraft that is at a disadvantage against airplanes designed for the purpose of "in fighting""...

But these US Navy "Geniuses" were at least smart enough to recognize the FW-190A HATED high speed turning and high speed combat in general (putting them far ahead of all simmers since apparently), as was widely known to the Russians:

From the same US Navy report (identical to another one for an earlier FW variant):

"It [FW-190A-5] has a no-warning stall which tends to reduce its efficiency in combat against airplanes, which can force it to fly near the stalling speed"

My God! They actually figured out the FW-190 preferred low-speed fighting!

Yipeeeeeeeeeee!

That must have been a strain... Yet their conclusion is "excellent interceptor-type aircraft"... Hmmm...



But you are right: If THIS Russian evaluations:

http://www.lonesentry.com/articles/ttt/russian-combat-fw190.html



says "Being very stable and having a large range of speeds, the FW-190 will inevitably offer turning battle at a minimum speed." that apparent disagreement in the final outcome on how to use it can only be because the US NAVY has much more combat experience with the FW-190A, and knew how the FW-190A should be flown far better than those poor brain-washed Germans...

Of note is that the Russian found the FW-190A to be equal to their excellent Yak-7 in left turns, but the FW-190 is apparently easily beaten in right turns:

" Yak-7 will easily outturn a FW-190 in a right turn; both planes have equal turn rate in a left turn."

(This indicates flaps up for the FW-190A by the way: Clostermann reported that later in the war, around late '43 or early '44, appeared the novel use of flaps ("volet") on the FW-190A, which he described as significantly improving the turn performance. If turning was flaps down, the wing drop would be reversed and the aircraft would turn tighter to the right at low speeds, not the left)

http://luthier.stormloader.com/SFTacticsIII.htm

But the Russians claim the Yak-1 will outmaneuver it even better, though not specifying if that included the vertical plane (vertical maneuvers are of course very poor on the FW-190A)

You gotta love below how the "excellent interceptor" was used by those foolish Germans who knew nothing about flying their own aircrafts:

http://luthier.stormloader.com/SFTacticsIII.htm

"The following information about German tactics is derived from experience of our pilots that fought the FW-190.

Germans will position their fighters at different altitudes, especially when expecting to encounter our fighters. FW-190 will fly at 1,500-2,500 meters and Me-109G at 3,500-4,000 meters. They interact in the following manner:

FW-190 will attempt to close with our fighters hoping to get behind them and attack suddenly. If that maneuver is unsuccessful they will even attack head-on relying on their superb firepower. This will also break up our battle formations to allow Me-109Gs to attack our fighters as well. Me-109G will usually perform boom-n-zoom attacks using superior airspeed after their dive.

FW-190 will commit to the fight even if our battle formation is not broken, preferring left turning fights. There has been cases of such turning fights lasting quite a long time, with multiple planes from both sides involved in each engagement."

Gosh! That last bold quote couldn't be a clue that they held their own against "superior-turning" Russian fighters now could it?

Hey! That Me-109/FW-190 relationship sort of jives with this, thousands of miles away doesn't it?:

-Squadron Leader Alan Deere, (Osprey Spit MkV aces 1941-45, Ch. 3, p. 2: "Never had I seen the Hun stay and fight it out as these Focke-Wulf pilots were doing... In Me-109s the Hun tactic had always followed the same pattern- a quick pass and away, sound tactics against Spitfires and their SUPERIOR TURNING CIRCLE. Not so these 190 pilots: They were full of confidence... We lost eight to their one that day..."

But it must all be a coincidence you know...

But my favourite of all among all, has got to be my old RCAF friend John Weir, who obviously doesn't know anything about true wingloading performance, being just, you know, an experienced fighter pilot fighting for his life and all... (What the hell's that compared to being a glorious theoretically-correct simmer?):

http://www.vac-acc.gc.ca/remembers/s..._101/SF_101_03

"A Hurricane was built like a truck, it took a hell of a lot to knock it down. It was very manoeuvrable, much more manoeuvrable than a Spit, so you could, we could usually outturn a Messerschmitt. They'd, if they tried to turn with us they'd usually flip, go in, at least dive and they couldn't. A Spit was a higher wing loading..."

"The Hurricane was more manoeuvrable than the Spit and, and the Spit was probably, we (Hurricane pilots) could turn one way tighter than the Germans could on a, on a, on a Messerschmitt, but the Focke Wulf could turn the same as we could and, they kept on catching up, you know."


Obviously the poor man remembers wrongly what actually happened, and the congruence with all the others who had to face it in actual combat is just a vast world-wide collective hallucination...

Or maybe it was just magical "pilot experience", always there to throw everything into confusion: We all know that Germans in those days were mystical-oriented, and thus gained levitation powers with "pilot experience": That could be it you know...

If they had measured the wing-bending of theses things in flight, they would know what the actual wingload of these things is (Ie: What John Weir meant by "heavier Spitfire wingloading": Actual in-flight observation, not theory)...

But they only bent the wings on the ground and called it "knowledge"...

And yes, if they had done that, in-flight (recording in-flight continuous stress-gauge info, which would have been real tricky before the late 40s at least), they would have found out that, unlike jets, even at the same exact amount of Gs during a turn, an old warbird's wingload actually varies with power during the turn, as reported clearly by many WWII pilots, and used routinely as a "trick" by 8th AF P-51s, FW-190 pilots and some Me-109 pilots...

But what do these guys know...

Gaston

[theOden]

:smile:
Love your post Gaston, made my sunday breakfast haha

[JG301_HaJa]

+1 on that :D

[lonewulf]

Gaston, while I admire your revisionist zeal, your conclusions about the 190 are simply wrong.

Your analysis of the Al Deere incident is a case in point. There is no doubt that Al Deere was caught out by the 190s that day and in the resulting bloodbath lost a number of his squadron mates. However, it had nothing to do with 'turning circle'. On this occasion the 190s bounced his Mk Vs and then used their superior speed and climb to decimate the hapless formation. It is true that the attack was sustained in nature and that the pilots in the 190s demonstrated great confidence in their aircraft; but that was more to do with their ability to outperform the Spitfires (in everything BUT sustained turn) and to enter or break off the combat at will. The 109 Fs in use at this time were not in a position to do this, of course, as they had little or no performance margin over the Mk 5 and typically did not linger in combats with Spitfires for any longer than necessary. At this point is the war most of Germany's fighter force had been moved to the Eastern Front. With relatively few fighters left in France, the LW tried to offset their numerical inferiority in the west by strictly limiting the engagements between its fighter force and Fighter Command.

The advantage that the 190 had over the Spit soon to evaporate away with the introduction of the Mk 9.

[CWMV]

Ya I'm calling you info BS.
What the pilots say about their own and enemy aircraft ate of NO VALUE when discussing FM's.
Combat is a very emotionally charged event, and what you remember and what actually happened are two very, very different things. The fact that the body and mind are experiencing stressors unlike anything else in the annals of human experience make any recollection of combat events suspect from the get go.

Then there is the comparison to soviet fighters. You mean the same soviet fighters that are overmodeled in nearly every aspect? This has been accepted by a large percentage of the community since day 1. No point in the comparison.

Now compare them in a standardized test environment, against well known and documented competitors, and you get the best data. Hence the navy tests.
If it couldn't out turn a Corsair or Hellcat then it isn't much of a turn fighter.

So if you have something other than tests against air raft that we know are porked, or the recollections of old men, post it.

[Gaston]

Gaston, while I admire your revisionist zeal, your conclusions about the 190 are simply wrong.

Your analysis of the Al Deere incident is a case in point. There is no doubt that Al Deere was caught out by the 190s that day and in the resulting bloodbath lost a number of his squadron mates. However, it had nothing to do with 'turning circle'. On this occasion the 190s bounced his Mk Vs and then used their superior speed and climb to decimate the hapless formation. It is true that the attack was sustained in nature and that the pilots in the 190s demonstrated great confidence in their aircraft; but that was more to do with their ability to outperform the Spitfires (in everything BUT sustained turn) and to enter or break off the combat at will..

No doubt?

Where's your evidence that the battle that day happened the way you claim? Do you have other accounts of that particular day?

My bet is that you don't, and that you simply placate a meaning that is not present in a single word in there...

The fact that he contrasts "a quick pass and away" 109 tactics with "never before did the Hun stay and fight it out as these Focke-Wulf pilots were doing" illustrates clearly what he meant: STAYING means you don't build up speed but fight at low speeds. And that means mostly staying on the horizontal.

If you want to ignore that, then you are just reading what you want into it: He clearly states the Me-109 tactics were a contrast to the FWs, in perfect concordance with the Russian observation of how they always interacted in 1943 (up to Boddenplatte in January 1945: Read any of the "Boddenplatte" accounts as well)...

Remember Rall's quote: "The Me-109 a floret (straight and edgeless), the FW-190 a sabre (curved and used in curved motion)"

He also said: "Rechlin told us the FW-190A out-turned the Me-109F, however, I could out-turn it":

Like many Eastern Front Me-109 pilots, he was clinging to a false concept of how they compared: By dropping the throttle it was probably true he could reverse the tables... But then the 190 could do it also, if the pilot knew about the counter-intuitive "trick" of downthrottling permanently in sustained low speed turns...

Another 109 pilot thought the same wrongheaded thing, just like simmers today...:

Quote from an Oseau demise witness (Jagdwaffe, "Defence of the Reich 1944-45" Eric Forsyth, p.202): "Many times I told Oseau the FW-190A was better than the Bf-109G........ Each turn became tighter and his Bf-109 (Me-109G-6AS) lost speed, more so than his (P-51D) adversaries. He was probably shot down near the ground"

(Implying this would not have happened with the FW-190A. BTW, period tests have show the D-9 was a much inferior fighter in horizontal turns to the A, and indeed the D was not used in the same way)

Rechlin quote: "The FW-190A out-turns and out-rolls the Me-109 at any speed"

General US 8th Air Force fighter pilot opinion was that the FW-190A turned tighter than the Me-109. Just ask any veteran P-51 pilot the next time you see one...

Osprey "Duel" #39 "La-5/7 vs FW-190", Eastern Front 1942-45:

P.69 "Enemy FW-190A pilots never fight on the vertical plane.---The Messerschmitt posessed a greater speed and better maneuverability in a vertical fight"

P.65 Vladimir Orekov: "An experienced Fw-190A pilot practically never fights in the vertical plane"

Weirner Steiz: "The 190 was a much better aircraft than the 109: You could curve it"

I don't know, is there something like a trend here?

The advantage that the 190 had over the Spit soon to evaporate away with the introduction of the Mk 9.

You want side-by-side comparisons by pilot opinion of their own aircrafts?:

AFDU

Air Fighting Development Unit, R.A.F. Station DUXFORD

Report No 46 on Tactical Trials -SPITFIRE IX



From 26 April 1942

Manoeuvrability

20......... The Spitfire IX was compared with a Spitfire VC for turning circles and dog-fighting at heights between 15,000 and 30,000 feet. At 15,000 feet there was little to choose between the two aircraft although the superior speed and climb of the Spitfire IX enabled it to break off its attack by climbing away and then attacking in a dive. This manoeuvre was assisted by the negative 'G' carburettor, as it was possible to change rapidly from climb to dive without the engine cutting. At 30,000 feet there is still little to choose between the two aircraft in manoeurvrability, but the superiority in speed and climb of the Spitfire IX becomes outstanding."

--------------------------

So the Spit Mk IX doesn't out-turn the Spit Mk V, by the reckoning of its own pilots....

Furthermore, I have it directly from a mechanic at the "Planes of Fame" flying museum that the Spitfire Mk V they have been flying for decades always turns faster than the best the Spitfire Mk IX can do: Exactly what I would expect...

Despite those contradicting Russian turn times (17.5 to 18.8 sec, but all of these Russian figures don't seem very indicative of anything to me), there is no evidence the Spit Mk IX turns any faster than the Mk V, and considerable evidence to the contrary...

In the above AFDU quote, the emphasis is on Mk IX vertical performance, diving and zooming, and in actual combat the Spitfire Mk IX could do sharp high speed turns, but could not survive in close-in slow speed dogfighting, just as John Weir says, and if you've read actual combat accounts you will see the Spitfire IX always use dive and zoom, while the FW-190 always used horizontal turns...

The Mk V was such a poor turn-fighter in Russian hands they removed the outer guns to try to lighten it, but it had little effect:

Russian opinion of the Spitfire (Mk V): It is unsuitable for prolonged horizontal combat (meaning short unsustained horizontal combat is probably better), and it is excellent at combat on the vertical plane... In "Le Fana de l'Aviation" #496 p. 40: " Les premiers jours furent marqués par des échecs dus à une tactique de combat périmée dans le plan horizontal, alors que le Spitfire était particulièrement adapté au combat dans le plan vertical."

Translation: "The Spitfire failed in horizontal fighting, but was particularly adapted to vertical fighting"

In that same article, the Soviets even tried to remove the outer guns to improve the Spitfire's turn performance, to no avail...

Even the Spitfire Mk V was completely hopeless in prolonged low-speed turns against the FW-190A (just like John Weir says), and bear in mind it DOES turn faster than the Mk IX (same thing or even worse vs the Mk XIIs and XIVs):

http://img30.imageshack.us/img30/4716/jjohnsononfw190.jpg

Quote: "Opposite sides of an ever diminishing circle... I asked the Spitfire for all she had... It was just a matter of time and he would have me in his sights..."

Also, Johnny Johnson opines here the FW-190A turned better than the Me-109... Hey, this article was just after the war, and I wasn't there to wisper in his ear you know!

Gray Stenborg, 23 September 1944 (Spitfire Mk XII): "On looking behind I saw a FW-190 coming up unto me. I went into a terribly steep turn to the left, but the FW-190 seemed quite able to stay behind me. He was firing at 150 yards-I thought "this was it"-when all of a sudden I saw an explosion near the cockpit of the FW-190, upon which it turned on its back."

S/L J. B. Prendergast of 414 Squadron recorded in his Combat Report for 2 May 1945 (Mk XIV vs FW-190A): "I saw my No. 2’s burst hitting the water--------The E/A being attacked by my No. 2 did a steep orbit and my No. 2 being unable to overtake it broke away."




Just for laugh, try finding ONE counter-example without steep high speed dives just before a single harsh 360° turn, or not above 20 000 ft....: Try counter-examples with multiple turns down low... Good luck!:-P

And there is a very easy way to prove me (and almost all WWII pilots) wrong: Show me in-flight wing-flexing strain gauge data that shows the wingloading really does match the "calculated" values... So far I have found only wing bending tests on the ground...

The reality is that for these old machines it was never done in-flight...

You guys are simply incapable of seeing there is virtually no first hand combat experience that things work the way theory (and thus simulations)says they do: I have hundreds of P-47 combat accounts where the P-47 at low altitude and low speeds reverses in horizontal turns a tailing Me-109 in 3-4 360°turns or less: A big fat ZERO the other way around: Just how many to ZERO would it take?

Can you find ONE example here of a Me-109 out-turning a P-47?:

http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/p-47/p-47-encounter-reports.html

In right side turns they were more equal: One account does show some P-47/Me-109 parity in late 1943 against probably a sleeker G-2 in a prolonged right hand diving spiral. The P-47 then wins in a left hand diving spiral...

I defy anyone to find in this link above (600+ P-47 combat accounts) a single 1944 account of a P-47 having the slightest trouble beating in any kind of sustained multiple 360 turns the Me-109G, or even taking more than five 360° turns to reverse a tailing 109...

Yes at very high speed there is one Me-109 that briefly beats the P-47 in turns at very high speeds: The Me-109's wings then immediately break off... Not low-speed I would think....

Read these accounts, and see the obvious nothing you are clinging to... I think a six year old could see the light...

Gaston

[lonewulf]

My information about the fight between No 403 Canadian Squadron and I and II/JG 26 on 2 June 1942 comes from Mick Spick's 1996 book entitled, Luftwaffe Fighter Aces

If that account is correct, Al Deere's squadron (he was a NZer of course, not a Canadian) was first attacked from the rear at high speed by a single staffel and, as the Canadians turned to engage, they were then attacked from above and through cloud by two more staffeln, and then again from above by the whole gruppe. In essence Al Deere was compelled to engage the first attack which was about to overtake his formation, and then when he turned, he was flattened by the 190's waiting above. Tactics, and the speed advantage of the 190, won the day for the Germans.

I used to be a bit like you in that I was always trying to reconcile the IL-2 190 with the historical record. The IL-2 190 just never seemed to be as good as I expected. In truth I think the 190 enjoyed a brief window of superiority in 1942 when it was fast enough to dominate the Mk5. I also think that in part, this happy time' has quite a bit to do with the German's ability to fight the war over France on their terms, and to engage Fighter Command when and if the circumstances were favourable. Once the speed and climb advantage of the 190 was equaled or exceeded by the Mk 9, the contest between the two aircraft was much more equal.

[Gaston]

My information about the fight between No 403 Canadian Squadron and I and II/JG 26 on 2 June 1942 comes from Mick Spick's 1996 book entitled, Luftwaffe Fighter Aces

If that account is correct, Al Deere's squadron (he was a NZer of course, not a Canadian) was first attacked from the rear at high speed by a single staffel and, as the Canadians turned to engage, they were then attacked from above and through cloud by two more staffeln, and then again from above by the whole gruppe. In essence Al Deere was compelled to engage the first attack which was about to overtake his formation, and then when he turned, he was flattened by the 190's waiting above. Tactics, and the speed advantage of the 190, won the day for the Germans.

I used to be a bit like you in that I was always trying to reconcile the IL-2 190 with the historical record.


Simply consider that the gross mistmatch of all flight sims with the historical record is not[/] the result of ignoring flight physics theory...

The mismatch comes from precisely the fact that [B]they all followed current flight physics to the letter (not a hard thing to do), and it simply illustrates perfectly how wrong our basic flight physics assumptions are for these types of aircrafts (which I believe have specific characteristics compared to jet fighters)...


Your account is very fragmentary for a fight that involved 8 British losses (which is quite a big fight, even in those days).

There is no difference in the tactics in your quote with what he describes being the tactics of the Me-109s (the whole point of my quote).

The whole point he makes is that he observed something different from the FW-190s that day, specifying that the difference was related to the fact that Me-109s usually feared the Spitfire's turning circle, and this is not apparent from the brief description you have: Ie, it is not the same aircrafts that hit them twice, but another group of FW-190s.

There is really not much of an element of "staying" in the fight in the more detailed account you have... In addition, the FW-190 didn't outclimb the Spitfire V by much, especially with its engine de-rated by the Luftwaffe at the time...

As an interesting side note, the same Al Deere reacted in this way when he was told the Spitfire had a superior turning radius to the FW-190A (from a captured example):

"Well turning doesn't win battles."

This is a rather cryptic statement which is commonly interpreted as meaning most "real world" fights involved diving and zooming, not turning...

However, contrary to the received wisdom, the reality of much WWII combat, if you read a large number of accounts, is that the wing-mounted guns have a convergence point, and thus are not even designed for dive and zoom attacks: They are designed for firing for some time at a target that is at a fixed distance: Wing guns are really optimized for turn fighting, because the location and convergence of the guns means you will have trouble placing enough rounds on a slower target if you are closing fast on it...

The only routine exception to this was the Pacific Theater where the Japanese fighters were fragile enough to make diving at them pay off, even with converging wing guns. With most other fighters, you had to pepper them a while to get them to go down (a fact poorly represented in sims I think), so turnfighting was the predominant rule, not the exception... Turnfighting was far more predominant in Western Europe, and grew more prominent still as the end of the war approached: This was because the opponents were similar in performance: For P-47s and P-51s the predominace of turn-fighting is on the order of 90%+ of all combats, this increasing towards the end...

Even the Eastern Front was mostly turn fighting, but more flexible in tactics, with many types having centralized armaments (Yaks, La-5s, P-39s, Me-109s), and the climbing performance being more unequal in favour of the Germans until mid-44.

The P-38 also had a centralized armament, and thus tried to use dive and zoom tactics as well, but the dominance of horizontal turnfighting in Western Europe, from late 1943 onwards, is generally a little appreciated fact of late WWII warfare...

The late war Spitfire, by the time the Mk IX came around, was by contrast almost exclusively used in dive and zoom attacks (in combat accounts): Its wing armament was not well-suited for that, but the velocity and destructiveness of the Hispano 20 mm seemed to obtain a lot instant explosions even on FW-190As, so it seemed to have compensated for the use of dive and zoom tactics.

Such tactics were helped on the Spitfire Mk IX by its world-beating climb rate (the +25 lb/80" Mk IX was the best piston-engined climber of WWII below 20 000 ft.), and its poor sustained low-speed turning performance (which still allowed a better unsustained speed radius at high speed after a dive)...

Consider that when Eric Brown reported he engaged a FW-190A by turning, while the FW dived and zoomed, and claimed this practice remained the war-wide character of both aircrafts for years, it is hardly an impressive account that either pilots were flying their machines at their best: They failed to even get a bead on each other...

A lot of early FW-190A combat accounts show the use of dive and zoom by the FW-190 (precisely in the period of supposed greatest FW-190 superiority): By late 1943 such accounts mostly disppear, because the more intuitively correct way to use the FW-190A (dive and zoom) turned out to be poorer despite the more favourable 1942 circumstances...

Osprey "Duel" #39 "La-5/7 vs FW-190", Eastern Front 1942-45:

P.69 "Enemy FW-190A pilots never fight on the vertical plane.---The Messerschmitt posessed a greater speed and better maneuverability in a vertical fight"

P.65 Vladimir Orekov: "An experienced Fw-190A pilot practically never fights in the vertical plane"


What is intuitively correct and self-evident rarely turns out that way in real life: That is why many WWII pilots will swear by things that are entirely false.

Yes the Spitfire could carve A- a tighter radius at high speeds than a FW-190A: But B- it never gained gradually on it in a slow turning fight: Not one instance of this I have unearthed so far...

There is physical reason why it happens in this counter-intuitive way, and I think it does relate to prop load leverages on the CL and whatnot: Things that have yet to be examined (I actually hope to do so one day). But the basic issue is that counter-intuitive complicated things do happen, and the easy-to-grasp intuitive stuff often turns out to have been sadly mistaken, no matter how widely believed it is or for how long.

Gaston

[lonewulf]

Odd, if Al Deere believed the 190 could stay with, or even out turn the Spit V, isn't it strange that he didn't tell his colleague so when the bloke tried to convince him that the Spit still had a few tricks up its sleeve. Fact is he didn't, did he. He didn't for instance say "Hey, hang on a minute there chum, actually the Spit won't out turn a 190". He just said "turning doesn't win battles". Now of course, that isn't strictly true in any case. If you're engaged by another fighter with less climb, dive and turn than you, chances are, he will be forced eventually to try and out-turn you and die in the process.

You mention Eric Brown. I've read his book Wings of the Luftwaffe several times and I don't remember him ever suggesting that the 190 was a 'turner' (I'm not suggesting you said he did by the way). He loved the aircraft as I recall but regarded it as an energy-fighter pure and simple. Don't you think it strange that if the 190 could out-perform the Spit in sustained turns that Eric Brown would have mentioned it? After all, the Spit was known for its ability to turn. If the 190 out-turned it, surely he would have mentioned it. After all, he flew examples of both aircraft many times.

Maybe I'm missing something here but as we both know, the 190 was evaluated by the RAF and other allied air forces on numerous occasions. The whole purpose of those evaluations was to test the capabilities of enemy aircraft against allied fighters so appropriate measures could be taken to counter their strengths. In all those reports, is there one that suggests the 190 could outperform the Spitfire in sustained turn? If there is, I certainly haven't seen it. However, those reports do mention the 190s advantages in speed and roll etc. Why would they remain silent on any turn advantage it might have if they happily identify its other advantages? These were secret reports after all so what was the problem? Why wouldn't this be mentioned? Or are we to believe these test pilots weren't very bright?

[JtD]

lonewulf, from experience I can tell you it is best to ignore Gaston. The forum has an ignore function, so you can let it ignore him for you.

[K_Freddie]

There's no smoke without a fire.
Gaston has some good points that a lot around here wish to ignore, as his hypothesis doesn't agree with the theorists (we were not there), or the indoctrinated (the P51 won the war) ;) so therefore he's 'shot down'.
:grin:

The obvious point he's making is that while the theoretical aeronautical formulae and calculations do play a role in the FMs, it's not the final say in the matter and there is a small percentage of unknown flight characteristics that are only known by the pilots themselves - some errant observations like canned flight tests, and others real. A trend is what one should look for, to get a fair idea.

an experienced pilot uses this small percentage to his advantage..
:)

[KG26_Alpha]

there's no smoke without a fire.
Gaston has some good points that a lot around here wish to ignore, as his hypothesis doesn't agree with the theorists (we were not there), or the indoctrinated (the p51 won the war) ;) so therefore he's 'shot down'.
:grin:

The obvious point he's making is that while the theoretical aeronautical formulae and calculations do play a role in the fms, it's not the final say in the matter and there is a small percentage of unknown flight characteristics that are only known by the pilots themselves - some errant observations like canned flight tests, and others real. A trend is what one should look for, to get a fair idea.

An experienced pilot uses this small percentage to his advantage..
:)

I don't usually ........... but ............

+1

As a mission builder from v1.0 days watching the game change with the patches and new updates,
its clear "game balance" has been a factor in the strange FM's DM's in the present configuration of IL2 1946.

If the game is capable of running real world data if so then let it have it, will the game be fun anymore with this data, I doubt it.

The strange wing pylon loadings and other bomb mg/cannon data etc found in the past in the SFS files bemused many but made sense for "game balancing".

Lets just say the FW190 in IL2 has been the most "adjusted" for FM & DM over the years,



Butcher Bird or Butchered Bird ?





.

[K_Freddie]

Maybe someone would put the 'real' numbers into the FMs and bring reality to the benign term Full Real. ;)

When IL2 came out the axis a/c were the underdogs and the allied superior. The challenge for me was to dedicate my time to the axis a/c an prove to myself that they can beat the allied ones - it was a challenge I enjoyed and for the most part, succeeded.

It the FM numbers were changed for the real, then it'll become a challenge for the Allied jockeys to enjoy. It will not make the game less attractive, but more so.

From most of my readings of WW2 DFs, all pilots crapped themselves on seeing opposition fighters, from then it was down to experience, tactics and FMs. Spitfires wear feared, FW190's simply made pilots sh1t themselves.
The distortion of allied superiority only occurred due to the greater numbers of a/c (and pilots) they had - as Stalin was noted for saying on the 'inferiority' of his a/c 'quantity has a quality of it's own'.

Here's one vote for a new game 'real' FM
:grin:

[K_Freddie]

Just some online thoughts..

With current FMs I find the FWs best turning ability between 325-400kph.
When a spit, tempest.. etc uses the vertical I don't follow, but stay level/horizontal and build up my speed, then flip vertical for a quick burst, then down again for speed.

There are times I cut throttle back and play around at stall speed as the allied aircraft do have major difficulty in this area - But I've always said this... and like Gaston I've been 'shot down' verbally for 'heresy'... but many allied a/c have died at this point :-P

you work it out ;)

[Gaston]

There's no smoke without a fire.
Gaston has some good points that a lot around here wish to ignore, as his hypothesis doesn't agree with the theorists (we were not there), or the indoctrinated (the P51 won the war) ;) so therefore he's 'shot down'.
:grin:

The obvious point he's making is that while the theoretical aeronautical formulae and calculations do play a role in the FMs, it's not the final say in the matter and there is a small percentage of unknown flight characteristics that are only known by the pilots themselves - some errant observations like canned flight tests, and others real. A trend is what one should look for, to get a fair idea.

an experienced pilot uses this small percentage to his advantage..
:)


I do agree most WWII fighter pilots could probably use effectively a 5% advantage in turning performace. Maybe even a lot less, but certainly their flying skill would not erase more than about a 5% advantage.

An often forgotten fact is that all fighter pilots were the very best available among the whole pool of available pilots...

A race car driver probably routinely uses up to less than a fraction of 1% below the actual limit of the car in a turn, on a machine where the "stall" has virtually no warning or "rumble" other than a precise sensation of lateral load he learns to recognize.

If you accept that you take the wingloading of a Spitfire at 140 lbs/square feet, and that of a FW-190A at 215 lbs/sq ft. or even 230 lbs/sq ft. (similar power in the engine), then, for a fighter pilot to mishandle such an advantage to the point of losing a low-speed sustained horizontal turn contest, you would have to assume that a pilot of the caliber of Johnny Johnson is so incompetent that he can lose a competitive edge of over 60%: About 12 times the outer edge of what is even remotely possible...

That is 1200 % over anything plausible.

Yet not only are there several (if not numerous) disparate account of this impossible thing happening (with, additionally, one credible witness stating the FW-190A's superiority in low speed turns was an iron-clad rule vs the Spitfire: John Weir), but there are actually no first person examples anywhere of the "theoretically" more plausible outcome ever occurring...

I have been asking litterally for years now for a low-speed low-altitude turning battle where the Spitfire defeated the FW-190A in a series of sustained horizontal turns: In years nothing has surfaced...

A few examples were provided (by one of the more honest online detractors of mine, since all the others have always provided zip), but these examples where all at very high altitudes or preceded by a massive dive (suggesting high speed on the part of both the Spitfire and its target), and in fairness to him he did accept these objections as valid...

So this monstrous 60% advantage in wingloading somehow escaped all first person narration in actual low-speed combat...

And in the years of reading combat accounts since, only the strongest endorsement ever of my position has so far surfaced: John Weir's unequivoval statement that the Spitfire was out-turned easily by the Hurricane, and the Hurricane in turn was slightly out-turned by the FW-190A...

For the opposite view?: A whole lot of nothing.

The enormity of the Spitfire's 60% wingload advantage is only equalled by the utter discretion from witnesses: And after several years of searching, you have to wonder when something agreeing with current flight physics is ever going to come up...

The mistake is not small: I estimate up to 40% of the actual wing bending during a turn (dive pull-outs don't count) of some these machines (particularly the Spitfire) is not even acknowledged as happening, and the cause is completely unknown even if it was known to happen (which it isn't)...

And it would be very easy to blow my assertion out of the water: All you have to do is provide in-flight strain gauge wing bending data in level turns for WWII fighter types.

Guess what: There isn't any: The strain gauge values were done on the ground...

I would be delighted to be proven wrong by such in-flight WWII data, but my bet is the detractors will come up short on hard data, like they do on everything else...

Gaston

[lonewulf]

An often forgotten fact is that all fighter pilots were the very best available among the whole pool of available pilots...

Yes, yes, that makes sense doesn't it. I mean, what would be more difficult to manage, a large bomber with 4 engines and a crew or 7 or 10 men or a little single seat fighter. Hmmm ... umm ... hold on a minute ...

[Janosch]

Maybe this Johnnie Johnson dude actually did encounter a more maneuverable P-36. Or maybe the Spits that supposedly turned worse than Fws had manufacturing defects.

Anyway, Fw has tons of fuel, guns and ammunition and the said high wingloading... of course it's going to turn worse than its opponents. I trust what TD has in the game now. There's no need to change the flight models: Fw has advantage in firepower, roll rate and dive (usually), let the Spits have advantage in everything else.

[IceFire]

If you want to have a proper argument about FW190 performance levels it's probably best to dig up some materials.

So I've started...with this:
http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/fw190/fw190a5.html

Appears to be based on original documents with the information translated on the page for easy reading. If the numbers in this example are correct then the speed of our FW190A-5 (standard boost) is dead on at sea level and at critical height. The climb rate as represented here is somewhat less than what the IL-2 version has in IL-2 compare suggesting it may infact be over modelled if this report is accurate. I think a closer look at the aircraft represented in the game and in the test are probably important too.

I also found this RAF report very interesting:
http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/fw190/Fw_190_Eng-47-1658-D.pdf

The notes remark about how excellent the FW190 manoeuvrability in the roll plane is but how the elevator tightens at speed (ours does not appear to) and how easy it is to stall the aircraft in tight turns and at stall speed. Interestingly they talk about 10 degrees of flaps to help tighten the turn. I've long since stopped using combat flaps on the FW190 in IL-2.. does anyone else?

You could argue that the RAF report is biased. It might be... is there a similar pilots notes comparison out there from a German source? I know the comments in my FW190A-5 Aces of the Eastern Front from Osprey have the same notes with one translation from somewhere (its not referenced which gives me pause) suggesting that FW190 pilots should employ the same tactics on the East Front as they are finding effective on the West Front - that is to say the high speed hit and zoom as a group tactic avoiding Spitfires or Yak's alike in the horizontal.

I took out a FW190A-5 and a A-8 online yesterday. It's good fun and with the improved turn rate in 4.11 it's even easier to draw a bead on a manoeuvring aircraft.

[IceFire]

I have been asking litterally for years now for a low-speed low-altitude turning battle where the Spitfire defeated the FW-190A in a series of sustained horizontal turns: In years nothing has surfaced...
Try this one. It took a bit of looking but I found it again: http://books.google.ca/books?id=HofAi9Cg0XMC&pg=PA24&lpg=PA24&dq=Typhoon+FW190+turn&source=bl&ots=QP1aDDImRD&sig=cfVBXLsAyxukOZkzfae9MfWGoUg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dWxoUMztBOKBywG2-4GgDA&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAjgK#v=onepage&q=Typhoon%20FW190%20turn&f=false

The action describes an early Typhoon Mark IB in a low level escort run with other Typhoons. In the battle a Typhoon and FW190 end up in a sea level turn fight and although descriptions of the battle is light... it illustrates that the FW190 and Typhoon had fairly similar turn rates. In this case the Typhoon pilot was still attempting to pull lead when the FW190 stalled with it's legendary wing drop and crashed in to the sea.

By all rights the RAF considers the Spitfire to be much more manoeuvrable in the horizontal than any model of Typhoon or Tempest. It's not a direct comparison (I'll have a look in some other books) but I remembered this story and I think it illustrates that the FW190s high wing loading, powerloading, and other aerodynamic features that make it such a great hunter do not provide for great turn rate at sea level. Particularly with an aircraft as heavy as the Typhoon was. So to lay it out. If a Spitfire is better in the horizontal than a Typhoon by a significant amount and the FW190 and Typhoon are roughly even (slight edge to the Typhoon?) then the Spitfire is going to be better in the horizontal. In my mind almost unquestioningly so given any number of battle accounts from either side on any front where the two clashed.

On a side note the FW190 is much more manoeuvrable than the Typhoon in all other regards. The Typhoon has a slight sea level edge in speed and a slightly better turn, however, it's roll response is one of the worst of the WWII fighters (note: The Tempest much improved on this with an excellent roll rate particularly in Series II models).

[Gaston]

I also found this RAF report very interesting:
http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/fw190/Fw_190_Eng-47-1658-D.pdf

The notes remark about how excellent the FW190 manoeuvrability in the roll plane is but how the elevator tightens at speed (ours does not appear to) and how easy it is to stall the aircraft in tight turns and at stall speed. Interestingly they talk about 10 degrees of flaps to help tighten the turn. I've long since stopped using combat flaps on the FW190 in IL-2.. does anyone else?

You could argue that the RAF report is biased. It might be... is there a similar pilots notes comparison out there from a German source? I know the comments in my FW190A-5 Aces of the Eastern Front from Osprey have the same notes with one translation from somewhere (its not referenced which gives me pause) suggesting that FW190 pilots should employ the same tactics on the East Front as they are finding effective on the West Front - that is to say the high speed hit and zoom as a group tactic avoiding Spitfires or Yak's alike in the horizontal.



From the German side there is no direct comparison with the Spitfire I am aware of, but the P-47D was recognized by KG 200, with a captured Razorback, as superior-turning to the Me-109G in low-speed sustained turns, while the same thing was not said of the FW-190A vs the P-47.

Also the P-51B was not described as out-turning the Me-109G by KG 200, while the P-47D definitely was. (source "On special missions" KG 200)

In combat the P-47D never took more than four-five 360° turns to gain the upper hand vs the Me-109G, while the FW-190A was always roughly equal to the P-47D, or slightly better, in early 1944, and for some reason the FW-190A grew much better in later 1944, the later Bubbletops P-47Ds being clearly inferior to the later FW-190As in sustained turns... All this agrees 100% with KG 200's evaluation.

Tests in Italy by the Allies show the FW-190A as slightly superior-turning to the Razorback P-47D below 250 MPH, and drastically inferior turning above 250 MPH.

FW-190A dive pull-out was also drastically inferior to the P-47D, the nose-up loss of altitude of the FW-190A ("mushing") on pull-out being described as a "tendency to black-out the pilot".:

http://img105.imageshack.us/img105/3950/pag20pl.jpg

The best FW-190A comparisons are all with the Me-109G or P-47D: Significant RAE comparisons with the Spitfire all refer to the Spitfire's tighter "radius", but to my mind, in those days, "radius" means an unsustained 6 G+ turn in which the Spitfire will undoubtedly be superior to the FW-190A: See the P-47 comparison which underlines the poor high speed turn performance of the FW-190A (confirmed by the abyssmal dive-pull-out "sinking" noted even by Eric Brown as well, making rather nonsensical his conclusion to use it in the vertical: Russian sources mention a 220 m (660 ft.) nose-up drop after levelling out from a 40° dive of 1200 m... One fifth of the short dive's momentum expended in brutal nose-up deceleration: Hence the "Tendency to black-out the pilot"...)

Note that the RAE found the P-51B with full drop tanks in place to vastly out-turn the Me-109G, while the same P-51B without drop tanks was considered only equal in turn rate to the FW-190A.

The RAE test thus make it abundantly clear the FW-190A was the better sustained turn fighter vs the Me-109G, but in my opinion the tests exaggerates the issue in disfavour of the Me-109G: This might have been due to a misunderstanding of the use of the leading edge slats, or of those slats being in poor condition.

Combat accounts show the Me-109G generally inferior to the P-51 in unsustained high G turns (5 G+), but the Me-109G is, despite this, more responsive initially when speed locks the controls in steep high speed dives (due to its advantage of a fully mobile tail trim which overcomes aerodynamic forces more efficiently for the initial pull-out in dives for instance)

In sustained turns, the P-51 is slightly better but they are fairly close. However sometimes on the deck, when they are forced into horizontal turns, they are very close to the point of a prolonged stalemate of 15-30 minutes (45 to 90 horizontal turns!). But this only before MW-50 was widely available, not so much after May of 1944.

The P-51 however will gain a marked sustained low-speed turn edge if it reduces its throttle, which has the -unrecognized by flight physics- effect of reducing its wingloading in low-speed sustained turns:

http://www.spitfireperformance.com/mustang/combat-reports/339-hanseman-24may44.jpg

But then the Me-109G here might not have done the same throttle reduction, and could have gained as much... (This throttle reduction trick was not widely accepted by pilots)

The FW-190A (also by downthrottling) was better than either at low altitude and low speeds, while being very poor in high speed unsustained turns, especially to the right(!).

The Me-109G's inferiority in turns vs the FW-190A is recognized correctly by the RAE, but to an excessive extent.

After the first few months of the FW-190A's introduction, I think we can go with Russian pilot opinions on the way it was handled: "Experienced FW-190 pilots never use the vertical"...

In any case if you take comparative evaluations and "evaluate" them, the best are by the Germans, as are also front-line Russian observations, the worst are by the US (except that absolutely superb P-47D/FW-190A Italy front-line evaluation -linked above- made by Front-Line US pilots, not test pilots: A real masterpiece of its kind), with the UK being somewhere in the middle, and using these (the first two being perfectly consistent), a clear hierarchy becomes apparent if you correlate with thousands of combat accounts:

Best low speed sustained turn rate on the late-war Western European Front (P-38 excluded): FW-190A/P-47D Razorback (needle-tip prop) are both at the top (P-47D higher speed/FW-190A lower speed), then the Hurricane, then further out the Spitfire, then last the Me-109G and P-51 close to each other.

Later in the war the Bubbletop P-47D seems to drop back quite noticeably, as seem to do the later Spitfires.

Gaston

[Gaston]

Try this one. It took a bit of looking but I found it again: http://books.google.ca/books?id=HofAi9Cg0XMC&pg=PA24&lpg=PA24&dq=Typhoon+FW190+turn&source=bl&ots=QP1aDDImRD&sig=cfVBXLsAyxukOZkzfae9MfWGoUg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dWxoUMztBOKBywG2-4GgDA&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAjgK#v=onepage&q=Typhoon%20FW190%20turn&f=false

The action describes an early Typhoon Mark IB in a low level escort run with other Typhoons. In the battle a Typhoon and FW190 end up in a sea level turn fight and although descriptions of the battle is light... it illustrates that the FW190 and Typhoon had fairly similar turn rates. In this case the Typhoon pilot was still attempting to pull lead when the FW190 stalled with it's legendary wing drop and crashed in to the sea.

By all rights the RAF considers the Spitfire to be much more manoeuvrable in the horizontal than any model of Typhoon or Tempest. It's not a direct comparison (I'll have a look in some other books) but I remembered this story and I think it illustrates that the FW190s high wing loading, powerloading, and other aerodynamic features that make it such a great hunter do not provide for great turn rate at sea level. Particularly with an aircraft as heavy as the Typhoon was. So to lay it out. If a Spitfire is better in the horizontal than a Typhoon by a significant amount and the FW190 and Typhoon are roughly even (slight edge to the Typhoon?) then the Spitfire is going to be better in the horizontal. In my mind almost unquestioningly so given any number of battle accounts from either side on any front where the two clashed.

On a side note the FW190 is much more manoeuvrable than the Typhoon in all other regards. The Typhoon has a slight sea level edge in speed and a slightly better turn, however, it's roll response is one of the worst of the WWII fighters (note: The Tempest much improved on this with an excellent roll rate particularly in Series II models).


This is a very interesting account, and I appreciate that this kind of comparison is sought and brought to light rather than the usual arguments.

Note I never said anything about the Typhoon: The Typhoon was the final development of the ... Hurricane(!) in the words of its designer.

I would not 100% assume the Typhoon is by necessity inferior in sustained turns to a Spitfire, given the clear superiority of the Hurricane to the Spitfire.

However in this account I would note two things: The FW-190As dived away from 10 000 ft. to sea level, and the Typhoon dived down in pursuit: They are above sustained turn speed throughout the turning engagement, and this is evidenced by the Typhoon pilot having "to lay off" because he was blacking out: Maximum sustained turn speed Gs are about 3.2/3.4 Gs in WWII, too low for the pilot to require a "relief" of this kind.

Another thing is that Eric Brown and many others have noted a "change in trim" on the FW-190A as speed decreased and the turn went from 230 knots to below 220 knots (or just around the 250 mph "change" in turn performance of the P-47D comparison): The change in trim is felt in the stick and can surprise the pilot (making him suddenly pull up into a stall as the stick "lightens") if he becomes nervous: Eric Brown even mentions this effect, but maybe, being a high hours test pilot, he underestimates its effect during the tension of a turning battle, saying it should not cause an accident).

I have read several Allied accounts of FW-190A pilots holding their own in a turn after a steep dive (vs P-47Ds), and then, as speed decreases below the 250 MPH treshold, suddenly nosing up and dropping a wing as the stick no longer requires as much pull-back to keep the turn, something which can be confusing (as noted by E. Brown).

For this and better turn performance reasons, one FW-190A ace describes dropping the throttle long before the merge (popping flaps as well), as a preparation for battle with P-51s, and never throttling back up, preferring always horizontal turning to go head-to head if the P-51s would (wisely) not turn with him...

Gaston

[IceFire]

From the German side there is no direct comparison with the Spitfire I am aware of, but the P-47D was recognized by KG 200, with a captured Razorback, as superior-turning to the Me-109G in low-speed sustained turns, while the same thing was not said of the FW-190A vs the P-47.

Also the P-51B was not described as out-turning the Me-109G by KG 200, while the P-47D definitely was. (source "On special missions" KG 200)

In combat the P-47D never took more than four-five 360° turns to gain the upper hand vs the Me-109G, while the FW-190A was always roughly equal to the P-47D, or slightly better, in early 1944, and for some reason the FW-190A grew much better in later 1944, the later Bubbletops P-47Ds being clearly inferior to the later FW-190As in sustained turns... All this agrees 100% with KG 200's evaluation.

Tests in Italy by the Allies show the FW-190A as slightly superior-turning to the Razorback P-47D below 250 MPH, and drastically inferior turning above 250 MPH.

FW-190A dive pull-out was also drastically inferior to the P-47D, the nose-up loss of altitude of the FW-190A ("mushing") on pull-out being described as a "tendency to black-out the pilot".:

http://img105.imageshack.us/img105/3950/pag20pl.jpg

The best FW-190A comparisons are all with the Me-109G or P-47D: Significant RAE comparisons with the Spitfire all refer to the Spitfire's tighter "radius", but to my mind, in those days, "radius" means an unsustained 6 G+ turn in which the Spitfire will undoubtedly be superior to the FW-190A: See the P-47 comparison which underlines the poor high speed turn performance of the FW-190A (confirmed by the abyssmal dive-pull-out "sinking" noted even by Eric Brown as well, making rather nonsensical his conclusion to use it in the vertical: Russian sources mention a 220 m (660 ft.) nose-up drop after levelling out from a 40° dive of 1200 m... One fifth of the short dive's momentum expended in brutal nose-up deceleration: Hence the "Tendency to black-out the pilot"...)

Note that the RAE found the P-51B with full drop tanks in place to vastly out-turn the Me-109G, while the same P-51B without drop tanks was considered only equal in turn rate to the FW-190A.

The RAE test thus make it abundantly clear the FW-190A was the better sustained turn fighter vs the Me-109G, but in my opinion the tests exaggerates the issue in disfavour of the Me-109G: This might have been due to a misunderstanding of the use of the leading edge slats, or of those slats being in poor condition.

Combat accounts show the Me-109G generally inferior to the P-51 in unsustained high G turns (5 G+), but the Me-109G is, despite this, more responsive initially when speed locks the controls in steep high speed dives (due to its advantage of a fully mobile tail trim which overcomes aerodynamic forces more efficiently for the initial pull-out in dives for instance)

In sustained turns, the P-51 is slightly better but they are fairly close. However sometimes on the deck, when they are forced into horizontal turns, they are very close to the point of a prolonged stalemate of 15-30 minutes (45 to 90 horizontal turns!). But this only before MW-50 was widely available, not so much after May of 1944.

The P-51 however will gain a marked sustained low-speed turn edge if it reduces its throttle, which has the -unrecognized by flight physics- effect of reducing its wingloading in low-speed sustained turns:

http://www.spitfireperformance.com/mustang/combat-reports/339-hanseman-24may44.jpg

But then the Me-109G here might not have done the same throttle reduction, and could have gained as much... (This throttle reduction trick was not widely accepted by pilots)

The FW-190A (also by downthrottling) was better than either at low altitude and low speeds, while being very poor in high speed unsustained turns, especially to the right(!).

The Me-109G's inferiority in turns vs the FW-190A is recognized correctly by the RAE, but to an excessive extent.

After the first few months of the FW-190A's introduction, I think we can go with Russian pilot opinions on the way it was handled: "Experienced FW-190 pilots never use the vertical"...

In any case if you take comparative evaluations and "evaluate" them, the best are by the Germans, as are also front-line Russian observations, the worst are by the US (except that absolutely superb P-47D/FW-190A Italy front-line evaluation -linked above- made by Front-Line US pilots, not test pilots: A real masterpiece of its kind), with the UK being somewhere in the middle, and using these (the first two being perfectly consistent), a clear hierarchy becomes apparent if you correlate with thousands of combat accounts:

Best low speed sustained turn rate on the late-war Western European Front (P-38 excluded): FW-190A/P-47D Razorback (needle-tip prop) are both at the top (P-47D higher speed/FW-190A lower speed), then the Hurricane, then further out the Spitfire, then last the Me-109G and P-51 close to each other.

Later in the war the Bubbletop P-47D seems to drop back quite noticeably, as seem to do the later Spitfires.

Gaston

I'd first like to ask why the German and Russian reports are better than the British and American ones?

Moving along... as far as sustained turn information goes what you've got seems to be contradicted by other sources although it does seem that the RAE tests for the Bf109 suggest a horrible turn rate in all related tests with a variety of different aircraft.

I would like to point this one out: http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/p-47/p-47c-afdu.html

All kinds of interesting statements about the P-47C versus other types. Unfortunately not a later model being used but best I can do right now.

Versus the Mustang Mark X (P-51B prototype)
"The rate of roll of the P-47 is considerably better than that of the Mustang, which cannot follow sudden changes in direction. In rate of turn, howeverm the two aircraft are practically identical."

Versus the Spitfire IX
"The rate of turn of the Spitfire is naturally superior to the heavier P-47 and in turning circles it was found that after four turns the Spitfire could get on the P-47’s tail and remain there with a chance of shooting with correct deflection."

And then this:

http://www.hawkertempest.se/TacticalTrials.htm

Comparing the Tempest Mark V (Series I, unboosted ailerons)

Versus the Typhoon:
"Very Similar. Any difference appears to be in favour of the Typhoon. This is too slight to alter combat tactics."

Versus the Spitfire XIV:
"The Spitfire XIV easily out-turns the Tempest. "

Versus the Mustang III:
"The Tempest is not quite as good as the Mustang III. "

Versus the FW190:
"There is very little difference in turning circles between the two aircraft. If anything a very slight advantage lies with the Tempest."

Versus the Bf109:
"The Tempest is slightly better, the Bf.109G being embarrassed by its slots opening near the stall. " <---- I honestly don't believe that the Bf109G would be worse than a Tempest, Typhoon, Mustang or FW190... but this is what is said here.

So by all of these tests it would suggest the Spitfire is easily the top contender in all turn rate comparisons beating everything tested against it. Then you have the Mustang and Thunderbolt which are on similar levels. Then you have the Tempest and Typhoon and FW190A which all seem to inhabit the same turn abilities. Then, for whatever reason, the Bf109G which seems to have the worst... which is counter to what I've read from a German pilot account:

This is from Osprey Aircraft of the Aces #6: FW190 Aces of the Russian Front by John Weal:

Hauptmann Heinz Lange:
"I first flew the Fw 190 on 8 November 1942 at Vyazma in the Soviet Union. I was absolutely thrilled. I flew every fighter version of it employed on the Eastern Front. Because of its smaller fuselage, visibility was somewhat better out of the Bf 109. I believe the Focke-Wulf was more manoeuvrable than the Messerschmidt - although the latter could make a tighter horizontal turn, if you mastered the Fw 190 you could pull a lot of Gs and do just about as well."

So at least one German pilot seems to think that the Bf109 was better in the horizontal. His point of comparison may be Bf109E or F series as he was with 3./JG 51 and with I./JG 54 previously according to the book.

I don't understand why wing loading is reduced when throttled down? Please explain.

[IceFire]

This is a very interesting account, and I appreciate that this kind of comparison is sought and brought to light rather than the usual arguments.

Note I never said anything about the Typhoon: The Typhoon was the final development of the ... Hurricane(!) in the words of its designer.

I would not 100% assume the Typhoon is by necessity inferior in sustained turns to a Spitfire, given the clear superiority of the Hurricane to the Spitfire.

However in this account I would note two things: The FW-190As dived away from 10 000 ft. to sea level, and the Typhoon dived down in pursuit: They are above sustained turn speed throughout the turning engagement, and this is evidenced by the Typhoon pilot having "to lay off" because he was blacking out: Maximum sustained turn speed Gs are about 3.2/3.4 Gs in WWII, too low for the pilot to require a "relief" of this kind.

Another thing is that Eric Brown and many others have noted a "change in trim" on the FW-190A as speed decreased and the turn went from 230 knots to below 220 knots (or just around the 250 mph "change" in turn performance of the P-47D comparison): The change in trim is felt in the stick and can surprise the pilot (making him suddenly pull up into a stall as the stick "lightens") if he becomes nervous: Eric Brown even mentions this effect, but maybe, being a high hours test pilot, he underestimates its effect during the tension of a turning battle, saying it should not cause an accident).

I have read several Allied accounts of FW-190A pilots holding their own in a turn after a steep dive (vs P-47Ds), and then, as speed decreases below the 250 MPH treshold, suddenly nosing up and dropping a wing as the stick no longer requires as much pull-back to keep the turn, something which can be confusing (as noted by E. Brown).

For this and better turn performance reasons, one FW-190A ace describes dropping the throttle long before the merge (popping flaps as well), as a preparation for battle with P-51s, and never throttling back up, preferring always horizontal turning to go head-to head if the P-51s would (wisely) not turn with him...

Gaston
No you did not reference the Typhoon, however, you were looking for some sort of comparison between the Spitfire and the FW190 at low altitude sustained turn rate.

The Typhoon may be the ultimate development of the Hurricane but they should not be confused as the same aircraft. The Typhoon is a totally new design and related to the Hurricane in the same way that the Wildcat was the forebear to the Hellcat and Bearcat. Superficially similar but always totally new designs.

Going by the Tempest tactical trials... if the Typhoon turns similarly to the Tempest and the Tempest turns similarly to the FW190 and the Spitfire out turns the Tempest then logic would then preclude that, on the basis of these tests, the Spitfire out turns all of the previously mentioned aircraft in sustained turns.

If we go by the P-47C trials then we can add some additional fuel to that fire in that the P-47C is out turned by the Spitfire as well (again, already quoted). Since your telling me that the P-47D is similar in turn to the FW190... we can then go by a basic point of comparison that the P-47C is probably better in the turn than the P-47D-25 as the D-25 has a wing loading of 58.3 lb/ft² and the P-47C has 43.3 lb/ft². I'm not sure if there was great variation between turn rates but the P-47C was a lighter aircraft with nearly as much power but no paddle prop (Not sure if that would have any effect on turn... climb yes). So the P-47C may slightly out turn the FW190 but is out turned by the Spitfire handily.

Not buying that the FW190 would in any way have a superior turn to the Spitfire. I would accept that the P-51B, P-47D, FW190, Typhoon, and Tempest have fairly similar overall turn rates.

Now bringing the IL-2 1946 4.11.1 experience to bear... I would say that the game shows us basically the same thing. The P-51B is closest to the FW190A-5 with the Tempest having maybe a slight edge and P-47 perhaps a slight disadvantage going by IL-2 Compare 4.11. Going by a more anecdotal route versus these planes online... I do use the throttle down method but mostly to contain my speed, prevent overshoot, and increase my turn abilities. I feel confident engaging a P-51 in a horizontal fight at any speed although I would of course prefer to have the energy advantage.

The only area that I have real difficulty with is the Bf109G versus FW190A. Why the reports of turn abilities vary so much between various testing and pilot reports I'm not sure. Others have speculated that RAE testing with the Bf109G may not have achieved full turn potential as they felt the slats opening in the turn were a negative event rather than something that may help with the turn. Perhaps they were malfunctioning. We'll probably never know.

[JtD]

IceFire, don't waste your time. You can bring up all sorts of evidence, and as soon as they don't fit the theory, they'll be ignored. For instance we have the Russian tests that give ~18s sustained turn time for the Spitfire vs. ~22s for the 190, but because they used black magic during these tests they are no valid argument.

[GreenHeart_54]

Sarcastic but convincing.

[K_Freddie]

Come admit it you lot...
Gaston's evidence is more convincing than yours !! :grin:

[Gaston]

I'd first like to ask why the German and Russian reports are better than the British and American ones?

Because German tests by stating the obvious: IE: the P-47 turns better than either the Me-109G or the similar performing P-51, they get something that matches the blindingly obvious from all air battles.

I defy you to find any WWII air battle anywhere where the Me-109G was even in the same league in low speed sustained turns vs the P-47: That very notion is laughable... This gives you an idea what the US tests a are worth when they claim: P-51 gets on a P-47's tail in four turns...

WWII Test pilot conclusions are generally laughable, with even one German one assuming as a matter of course that the Me-109G out-turns the FW-190A when comparing to a La-5. Laughable...

Bullets flying apparently inject a lot of objectivity into comparative flying...

Russian front-line observations are that: Observations of combat, so they rank far above what any test pilot says. And what do you know, the Russian's combat observations don't conclude the FW-190A is out-turned by the Me-109G...



Moving along... as far as sustained turn information goes what you've got seems to be contradicted by other sources although it does seem that the RAE tests for the Bf109 suggest a horrible turn rate in all related tests with a variety of different aircraft..

Well horrible if the P-51 was considered horrible by them too, which it wasn't, so the British conclusions here can be safely be considered as bunk as well... Which is why I don't worry at all to see Typhoons holding their own with FW-190As: Have you ever read any British tests concluding the Hurricane easily out-turns the Spitfire? No? Why not? It was completely and utterly true, and widely known among combat pilots...

Gosh, why the discretion about the Hurricane's sustained turn superiority over the Spitfire all of a sudden? Not iconic enough maybe? Or not fitting flight physic theories?

See why I'd rather ignore whatever test pilots in those days have to say?



I would like to point this one out: http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/p-47/p-47c-afdu.html

All kinds of interesting statements about the P-47C versus other types. Unfortunately not a later model being used but best I can do right now.

Versus the Mustang Mark X (P-51B prototype)
"The rate of roll of the P-47 is considerably better than that of the Mustang, which cannot follow sudden changes in direction. In rate of turn, howeverm the two aircraft are practically identical."



Well for the rate of roll it's bunk, since roll rate charts show little difference, though you hear about the P-47's roll reversal being good...

You know what to think of the consistency of test pilots when here they are equal, and then on later models the P-51 supposedly reverses a tailing P-47 in four turns...

Four turns... Think about it: Going from roughly equal to gaining 90° for each 360°...

Vs the Model 52 Zero the P-47 was also reversed in ONE 360° turn from a full 360° tailing position (.5 turn to .75 turn from the tested 180° opposite merge), P-51 nearly one full 360° turn from 180° opposite merge, (or a bit below 2 X 360 turns for a full 360° tailing reversal), and a full turn for the P-38 from 180° opposite merge, (or a full two 360° turns from a full 360° tailing position), making it the best "turner" of the 3...

Unsustained turns have nothing to do with sustained, so these results are meaningless for more closely matching European types, assuming they even got the hierarchy correct for sustained turns (gravely doubtful here since these may not even be sustained)...

Note I have no idea what the P-38 can do in turns. For Europe it is not important enough for me.

The P-47 coming dead last behind the P-51 is just a laughable conclusion when you've read any amount of P-47 combat reports, and compared them to a similar number of P-51 combat reports, as the Mike Williams site lets you do.

So what if its only 600-700 reports apiece: Do I have to take your whole blood to know what's in it?

I know all the reports that are contrarian to what I say, including the one vs the Zero: Either the late Bubbletop is really much worse than a Razorback, or it's typical test pilot nonsense you will find not a clue of in real battles.

I go with the real battles because after 17 years of looking at this, I noted they have one huge advantage over test pilots: They all say the same things, while those guys go all over the place...

Find me ONE P-47D out-turned in sustained low speed turns by a Me-109G...

Find me ONE FW-190A out-turned in sustained low speed/low altitude turns by any Mark of Spitfire...

See what I am getting at?





Versus the Spitfire IX
"The rate of turn of the Spitfire is naturally superior to the heavier P-47 and in turning circles it was found that after four turns the Spitfire could get on the P-47’s tail and remain there with a chance of shooting with correct deflection."



My advice to them is: Put bullets and cannon shells in those things, with orders to shoot, and see what happens with their theories...8-)



And then this:

http://www.hawkertempest.se/TacticalTrials.htm

Comparing the Tempest Mark V (Series I, unboosted ailerons)

Versus the Typhoon:
"Very Similar. Any difference appears to be in favour of the Typhoon. This is too slight to alter combat tactics."

Versus the Spitfire XIV:
"The Spitfire XIV easily out-turns the Tempest. "

Versus the Mustang III:
"The Tempest is not quite as good as the Mustang III. "

Versus the FW190:
"There is very little difference in turning circles between the two aircraft. If anything a very slight advantage lies with the Tempest."

Versus the Bf109:
"The Tempest is slightly better, the Bf.109G being embarrassed by its slots opening near the stall. " <---- I honestly don't believe that the Bf109G would be worse than a Tempest, Typhoon, Mustang or FW190... but this is what is said here.

So by all of these tests it would suggest the Spitfire is easily the top contender in all turn rate comparisons beating everything tested against it. Then you have the Mustang and Thunderbolt which are on similar levels. Then you have the Tempest and Typhoon and FW190A which all seem to inhabit the same turn abilities. Then, for whatever reason, the Bf109G which seems to have the worst... which is counter to what I've read from a German pilot account.



They also said the Spit Mk XIV generally out-rolled the P-51 Mustang, but then in the pilot notes of that specific test you can read:

"The Spitfire's ailerons were defective, but will be fixed in production..."

Hmmmm...

I estimate the actual Wartime top roll rate of a Mk V to be around 78-80°, reduced to 50° on the Mk IX/Mk XII, and a paltry 40-45° on the Mk XIV...

I know there are Mk Vs quoted at 100°+, but I think this could be helped by high altitudes, where on some types roll did get faster.

This Jives with a Supermarine factory pilot who said the Mk IXs was only 2/3rds as fast rolling as the Mk Vs, and the Mk XIVs worse still...

The peak roll speed on all Spits is also much lower being around 160-200 MPH, while on the P-51 at 90° it is closer to 300 MPH...

Don't rely on what the Spits can do today in airshows: They are much faster today because the aileron hinges have been completely re-done mechanically, and they have no guns or ammo...

So you can see how unlikely it is to say the Spit "generally" outrolls the P-51during wartime, especially with "defective" ailerons...

Just take what the period's test pilot say with a grain of salt is my motto: Every battle matters more to me than whatever they say...



This is from Osprey Aircraft of the Aces #6: FW190 Aces of the Russian Front by John Weal:

Hauptmann Heinz Lange:
"I first flew the Fw 190 on 8 November 1942 at Vyazma in the Soviet Union. I was absolutely thrilled. I flew every fighter version of it employed on the Eastern Front. Because of its smaller fuselage, visibility was somewhat better out of the Bf 109. I believe the Focke-Wulf was more manoeuvrable than the Messerschmidt - although the latter could make a tighter horizontal turn, if you mastered the Fw 190 you could pull a lot of Gs and do just about as well."

So at least one German pilot seems to think that the Bf109 was better in the horizontal. His point of comparison may be Bf109E or F series as he was with 3./JG 51 and with I./JG 54 previously according to the book.

I don't understand why wing loading is reduced when throttled down? Please explain.

Heinz Lange partly confirms what I say all along:

To understand him, you have to have prominent in your mind the distinction between high speed unsustained 6G + turns (In which no doubt the Me-109G can beat the FW-190A, despite its much heavier elevator controls: The lightness of the FW-190A's elevators not translating into actual turn or dive pull-out performance: Nose-up sinking, remember?), and sustained low-speed 3 Gs turns, which is what I am talking about:

"although the latter could make a tighter horizontal turn": IE: A tighter unsustained high G radius, "if you mastered the Fw 190 you could pull a lot of Gs and do just about as well." That is, in the long run, if you were patient in sustained turns, you would find them about equal (but not with the FW-190A's flaps down I'll bet, a trick that came later)...



I don't understand why wing loading is reduced when throttled down? Please explain.


One aircraft being better at high Gs will not necessarily be better at low Gs. This is because depending on aircraft types, the engine loads the wing with different proportions of leverages according to speed, which the geniuses of those days don't know about, since they never actually measured the wing bending in turning flight in those types of nose-pulled machines...

A long nose type with big wings may have nearly 50% of its lift caused by the engine alone, putting the wingloading higher than a short nose small wing type at 3 Gs (actual turn 3G on pilot), since the big wing type bends its wings nearly like 6 Gs when the smaller wing type only get one extra G from the engine's shorter nose, so 4Gs of wing bending for the same 3 Gs of turning...

But at 6 Gs the big wings regain the advantage, since they still get only an extra 3 G of engine-caused wing bending over the 6 Gs of actual turning, so 9 Gs of bending (they can typically take 13-14 Gs without deformation), while the small wing short nose type has now to take 6 Gs plus one: 7.

9 to 7 Gs of wing bending (at 6 Gs of actual turn) is a lot closer than 6 to 4 Gs of bending (at 3 Gs of actual turn)...

Now if the small wing short nose also happens to be a lot heavier, then 9 to 7 is close enough for the big wing to beat it easily, when it couldn't do so by a wide margin at a 6 to 4 Gs wing bending ratio in the lower sustainable 3 Gs...


I understand now how this leap from engine power to wingloading was done, but it is much more complicated than it first seemed to me when I realized this about ten years ago: The CL must shift in front of the CG to relieve the pilot from the forces of curving the prop's trajectory. The amount of this prop "turn curving" effort depending on the surface of the prop pulled below potential forward speed: The larger the surface, the larger the slanting of the thrust, the larger the slanting of the thrust the more lift is generated through the actual induced angle of attack: 7° is worth 20 000 lbs of extra lift?, add 6° of thrust slanting (13° total) and you could be close to 40 000 lbs of extra lift, but maybe all that extra force is now working only with a four inch "forward shifted" lever to lift the nose's 10 foot distant unwilling prop...

For all that extra lift to be there, in addition to the thrust angle slanting down, the airflow "void" above the wings must deform throughout the turn and increase in depth to lift things more up by the same amount, which is why wing bending measurements during turning flight would show if this is going on (this measuring never done in flight and in turns, AFAIK, on these types of WWII fighters)...

In theory the CL is always behind the CG for stability (but the prop now resisting you pulling back on it makes this moot for stability in a turn: The prop's resistance creates stability far more forward), but I think this is not true while turning: The airflow's void above the wing changes shape -in a curved turn's airflow- and moves the CL forward, which is why the pilot never feels like he is fighting, with his elevators, hundred of pounds of force on a prop that wants to go straight and not in a curve: The effort is taken over by the reversing direction of the "scissor action" when the CL shifts in front of the CG.

Otherwise, with, say, a tail as long as the nose, the elevator's action would be only a 1:1 lever to defeat what I think is about 100+ lbs of resitance per 1° of AoA increase at the prop (which does not like assymetrical incoming airflow, because it wants to go straight), or 700 lbs total at 7°: Beyond structural tail strenght almost...

The wing's lift is greater but operates with maybe a 30:1 lever agaisnt the prop on some types, depending how far the CL has moved forward and how long the nose is. (Exactly why the Dora can't compare to the Anton in sustained turns...)

All that "induced" extra lift would produce extra drag, but two objections come forward: Extra drag compared to what? Other nose prop types? No. To a similar size and wingloading jet, yes.

You will then find the jet out sustained-turning the prop aircraft despite the jet having a much lower climb rate and acceleration, which is exactly the case of a Vampire vs a Spitfire Mk XIV... Despite nearly identical wingloading, the Vampire gains in low-speed sustained turns to the tune of 90° to every 360° vs a Spit XIV... Four turns to reverse a tailing position, despite a far lower climb rate and acceleration...

The other "masking" factor of the extra lift/drag of nose props in turns is that when the prop fights being made to curve in a turn, its thrust is not reduced but actually increased on the inside-turn part of the prop: It's increased inside-turn efficiency is actually what cause the thrust to slant in the first place. So an increase of prop efficiency on the inside-turn part of the prop disc (because of slower incoming air in that area) could mask some of the extra drag with extra thrust...

Mind you, the only pusher prop fighter to see front-line service was not that great a turner: Maybe the SAAB 21 had a balance problem that did not affect the Vampire... This does strike against the notion that a pusher prop should have enjoyed a "real" wingloading advantage... All sides tried and tried to make a pusher during WWII, but this was the only one to ever see some service...

That's my "proploading" theory anyway, and it does jive nicely with this doesn't it?:

http://www.spitfireperformance.com/m...an-24may44.jpg

Gaston

[|450|Leady]

Hey just to add a little fuel to the fire :-P:-P

Somewhere I've seen a link to the report Icefire refers to (or at least scanned pages) From memory I'm sure the 109G that was used in the test had gun pods fitted. Hence high wing loading and poor turn capability.

Cheers

Leady

(PS Gaston, how many times and on how many forums can you flog that poor dead horse of yours??)

[ElAurens]

*sniff* *sniff*

I smell an agenda in this thread, and it smells a lot like knackwurst.

Just sayin'.

[Glider]

So to sum up you agree that all the test reports, from all nations, disagree with you, but you insist that you are right.
Also you don't have any evidence but you don't hesitate to twist what a real pilot said to make it fit your fantasy in particular Hauptmann Heinz Lange.

And as for the one example

P/O J. Stewart (Rhodesian) of 64 Squadron recorded in his Combat Report for 30 July 1942:

I was flying as Blue 3 and during the engagement I saw 4 F.W. 190's flying below me in the opposite direction and attacking four of my squadron. I shouted a warning and stall-turned to port to attack the rear two F.W. 190's. They broke and turned with me but I could easily out-turn them and I got several bursts at the rear one.

That should do it

[Derda508]

Hi there,

well I do not think that anyone here wants to be convinced by arguments. But I would still like to share something that might be considered interesting for those who wonder about the differences between FM, test results and pilot accounts.
I always loved the FW 190 but, alas, this love is not really returned in IL2. I find it much harder to fly than other aircraft. In the beginning I used to blame the game, since all German fighter pilots I heard in interviews (Rall, Krupinsky etc.) agreed that the FW was "much easier to fly, and especially to land". Naturally these are highly subjective personal points of view, but most pilots seem to have felt the same. Now, why don´t we (or maybe just bad pilots like me) experience this in the game? A possible answer is given in the book "Feindberührung" by the late Julius Meimberg. I don´t know whether this brilliant book was translated into English, so here I try to present some relevant paragraphs (translating as good as I can). Meimberg was a fighter pilot from ´39 to ´45, flying in France, Africa, France again and during the last month of the war in Germany. He scored 59 confirmed kills. After being severely wounded in summer ´41 he returned to the channel front May 4th 1942, and was brought up to date by his commanding officer Walter Oesau:
"But there were good news as well, and they all had the same name: Focke-Wulf Fw 190. ... Immediately (after its introduction) kill scores went up considerably, especially against the British Spitfire V, which is inferior to the FW 190 in all respects, with the possible exception of turn-fights."
May 5th Meimberg for the first time tests his 190 in flight:
" I climb up to my workplace ... and slide into the seat, which allows an almost lying position: thus the pilot is better equipped to endure the impact of forces during aerial combat. The cabin is narrow as in the Messerschmitt, but you do not feel cramped. On both sides of the seat there are panels with switches for landing gear, flaps, trim, radio, oxygen supply and the electrical fuses. Nothing of all this is protruding annoyingly into the cockpit (as in the BF 109); everything is arranged in such a way that, given some routine, it can be felt and operated blindly. Coarse mechanical contraptions are completely absent. Were in the Messerschmitt you had to turn big wheels and small cranks, here you push a switch and everything is done by a servomotor. Trim, gear, flaps - all electric.
This airplane, you see it with every detail, was constructed by people who fly themselves and know what a fighter-pilot needs most: a clear head for the fight. In accordance with this special care was given to engine management. On the left side of the cockpit, were I am used to three different operating levers for power, mixture and prop pitch, there is only one. According to its position and the atmospheric conditions a so-called Kommandogerät is optimizing the engine management. This disburdens the pilot enormously. He can fully concentrate on flying, aiming and shooting. In the air as well the Focke-Wulf is pure joy. Controlling is smooth and harmonic; its roll-rate is breathtaking and it dives like a stone. ..."
To illustrate his point Meimberg, little later in the book, quotes the very same passage by Alan Deere that was referred to earlier in this thread, not least because it was an encounter of Deere´s 403rd squadron with Meimbergs own 3./JG 2.
Meimberg himself shot down six Spitfires with his FW 190 A-2, nine more from August to December 1942 flying a Bf 109 G-1.

Now, all the things he praises most about the Focke-Wulf that make it superior or "easier to fly" than the Messerschmitt (the feeling of being save and comfortable and the ergonomics of the controls) is not and cannot be modelled in our beloved flight sim. Such a pity! But that´s what we have got.

(@ ElAurens: no idea if Meimberg liked Knackwurst, such as I do. But neither of us is or was a Nazi ... while Hitler was a vegetarian).

[jermin]

This forum is hijacked by self-appointed experts who don't even know how to do reasoning correctly. Don't try to argue with them, otherwise your post will be deleted eventually.

My whole squadron (Flying German fighters) has stopped supporting the newly released patches which severely porked the already undermodeled German planes and will stay on UP3 from now on.

I'm afraid Oleg need to do something to stop his game being tinkered by some unprofessional bigots any longer.

[ElAurens]

Oh, please don't think I am calling anyone a Nazi.

Not my intention at all sir.

I've just seen this tactic used over and over again in the 10 years I've been involved with the IL2 series.

There are folks that fly for both sides that are so wrapped up in their aircraft that any way to get an edge is OK with them. It's been like this since the dawn of online combat flight simulation.

[Janosch]

My whole squadron (Flying German fighters) has stopped supporting the newly released patches which severely porked the already undermodeled German planes and will stay on UP3 from now on.


That's funny, since there's no shred of professionalism or accuracy to be found in UP3.

[Derda508]

@ ElAurens

No sweat :)

I know what you mean.

[fruitbat]

This forum is hijacked by luftwhiners who don't even know how to do reasoning correctly. Don't try to argue with them, otherwise your post will be deleted eventually.

My whole squadron (Flying German fighters) has stopped supporting the newly released patches which severely porked the already undermodeled German planes and will stay on UP3 from now on.

I'm afraid Oleg need to do something to stop his game being tinkered by some unprofessional bigots any longer.

congratulations for joke post of the thread.

impressive, considering some of the other contenders.

[IceFire]

IceFire, don't waste your time. You can bring up all sorts of evidence, and as soon as they don't fit the theory, they'll be ignored. For instance we have the Russian tests that give ~18s sustained turn time for the Spitfire vs. ~22s for the 190, but because they used black magic during these tests they are no valid argument.

It is frustrating... definitely.

[Codex]

Wow.

Well I find Gaston's points refreshing.

The process for any debate is to back up your argument with facts. The trouble is facts can often be interpreted many ways.

It would be interesting to see if we can get any flight data of the currently restored FWs

[Pursuivant]

Yes, yes, that makes sense doesn't it. I mean, what would be more difficult to manage, a large bomber with 4 engines and a crew or 7 or 10 men or a little single seat fighter. Hmmm ... umm ... hold on a minute ...

I think it's fairer to say that fighter pilots were selected for certain attributes - notably aggressiveness, aerobatic skill and g-tolerances - from the pool of available pilots.

There are plenty of examples of WW2 era pilots who started off in fighters and then ended up in other sorts of planes (notably, many AVG members), as well as pilots who started off flying attack planes or bombers and who switched to fighters.

[Gaston]

Wow.

Well I find Gaston's points refreshing.

The process for any debate is to back up your argument with facts. The trouble is facts can often be interpreted many ways.

It would be interesting to see if we can get any flight data of the currently restored FWs

Current newly built FW-190A-8Ns are said to be mid-way in turn rates between a P-51D and Yak-3 with VK-107... This might be when ballasted to similar combat weights, or if not then maybe similarly underweight for all...

This would be without flaps, downthrottling or without the P-51's coarse pitch at low speed "trick", so the actual ultimate performance could be more or less radically separated... The order seems about right... The FW-190A's upper cowl shape is very different on the Ns than on the the real thing (no tapering), so aerodynamically they are not the same, and the FW-190A-8Ns also don't always use correct props...

Gaston

[Gaston]

So to sum up you agree that all the test reports, from all nations, disagree with you, but you insist that you are right.
Also you don't have any evidence but you don't hesitate to twist what a real pilot said to make it fit your fantasy in particular Hauptmann Heinz Lange.

And as for the one example

P/O J. Stewart (Rhodesian) of 64 Squadron recorded in his Combat Report for 30 July 1942:

I was flying as Blue 3 and during the engagement I saw 4 F.W. 190's flying below me in the opposite direction and attacking four of my squadron. I shouted a warning and stall-turned to port to attack the rear two F.W. 190's. They broke and turned with me but I could easily out-turn them and I got several bursts at the rear one.

That should do it


Well KG 200 did do tests and they did say "The P-47D out-turns our Bf-109G", but you do choose to ignore them don't you?

Or maybe I misunderstood your position, and you actually understand the Me-109G is ridiculously out-turned by the P-47D?:cool:

You also choose to ignore what all combat reports are saying, including your own quote:

"I was flying as Blue 3 and during the engagement I saw 4 F.W. 190's flying below me"

Well, if you want to make sure it is not high speed, you better exclude diving from the equation don't you?

On top of that we don't know how far below, or how fast they were going...:

"in the opposite direction and attacking four of my squadron."

"Attacking" and "opposite direction" implies they are neither slow nor, more importantly, turning...

Maybe "Stall-turned" confused you: It does not mean that the turning was close to level flying speed stall, but it could instead very well be close to a 350-400 MPH 6 G "stall-turn"... In fact unsustained speed maximum rate turns are typically "stall-turns"...

Finally: "They broke and turned with me but I could easily out-turn them and I got several bursts at the rear one."

Well "several" burst is good for your argument, but still there is no suggestion of low speed or multiple level turns is there?

In fact, "broke and turned with me", combined with "attacking" and "opposite direction", pretty much implies they were previously going fairly straight, which in turn suggests fairly fast...

But maybe you don't quite get the distinction I make between high G turning performance and low-G sustained turning performance? Well, consider that just because it's all the same for our "sophisticated" current flight physics (assuming similar needed stick effort per G at high speeds), it doesn't mean it's all the same for my theory...

But since you don't accept, not even momentarily for the sake of an argument apparently, the basics of my theory, that explains the unconvincing example you chose...

Hey, have you heard of the multiple turns level fight by Johnny Johnson? "Opposite side of an ever diminishing circle"?: That's more like the ticket...

"It was only a matter of time", and one will come up...

Gaston

[Gaston]

IceFire, don't waste your time. You can bring up all sorts of evidence, and as soon as they don't fit the theory, they'll be ignored. For instance we have the Russian tests that give ~18s sustained turn time for the Spitfire vs. ~22s for the 190, but because they used black magic during these tests they are no valid argument.

Well they also quoted the Spitfire Mk IX at a best turn rate of 17.5 seconds, while the best for a Spitfire Mk V is 18.8 sec...

Apparently "Planes of Fame" thinks the reverse is more plausible. It's only a 1.3 second implausibility mind you, but then they come up with the P-47D: 27 seconds best turn time... Bf-109G: 22 seconds...

So what did KG 200 mean when they said "The P-47D out-turns our Bf-109G?" ("On Special Missions: KG 200")

That was with an underpowered needle-tip prop P-47D Razorback by the way: Same exact thing as the Russians had...

If they can get it wrong by more than FIVE whole seconds, then why could the FW-190A not just as easily be at 18 seconds?

In the real world, the Front-Line Russians found the Spitfire Mk V so inadequate for turn-fighting they changed their tactics to dive and zoom just for its benefit, and they even tried to remove its outer guns to help it turn, to no avail... (Source: Le Fana de l'Aviation #496 p.40.) The Spitfire Mk IX was in fact no better for turns and probably slightly worse...

So what I am asking you is to cite here your reasons for choosing the Russian test values over the KG 200 evaluation conclusion:

Insert reasons here: _________________________________________

Mind you all 600 P-47D combat reports here are completely on the German side, with no exceptions...: http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/p-47/p-47-encounter-reports.html

Insert Reasons for ignoring them here:___________________________.



My reason for ignoring the Russian turn rate values is they have no counterparts in real life combat for the heavier types... Ever. And that shows an apparent bias that is understandable, but still a bias. Mystery of mysteries, the bias completely disapears when bullets are flying...

Gaston

[Glider]

Oh DearWell KG 200 did do tests and they did say "The P-47D out-turns our Bf-109G", but you do choose to ignore them don't you?

Or maybe I misunderstood your position, and you actually understand the Me-109G is ridiculously out-turned by the P-47D?:cool:
I wasn't talking about the P47



You also choose to ignore what all combat reports are saying, including your own quote:
I ignored nothing, you asked for an example I gave you one. You are the one ignoring the test reports, test pilots and so on.


"I was flying as Blue 3 and during the engagement I saw 4 F.W. 190's flying below me"

Well, if you want to make sure it is not high speed, you better exclude diving from the equation don't you?

On top of that we don't know how far below, or how fast they were going...:

"in the opposite direction and attacking four of my squadron."

"Attacking" and "opposite direction" implies they are neither slow nor, more importantly, turning...
I give you credit for recognising that one side was attacking.


Maybe "Stall-turned" confused you: It does not mean that the turning was close to level flying speed stall, but it could instead very well be close to a 350-400 MPH 6 G "stall-turn"... In fact unsustained speed maximum rate turns are typically "stall-turns"...
I know what a stall turn is. In brief you put the nose of the aircraft up to kill speed and then I used to turn the glider using the rudder before the speed drops to a level where you lose control authority. I have done these a number of times and it has absolutely nothing to do with speed or high G. If you have been to an air show you will have seen a tail slide which is an extension of this where the aircraft lets the speed drop to zero and slides back before turning.

If you believe for a moment that quote In fact unsustained speed maximum rate turns are typically "stall-turns" it proves beyond any doubt your level of understanding on this subject

The important part is that the speed is lost


Finally: "They broke and turned with me but I could easily out-turn them and I got several bursts at the rear one."

Well "several" burst is good for your argument, but still there is no suggestion of low speed or multiple level turns is there?
As covered by my pevious statement it has everything to do with low speed. Also note that the 190 turned with him, so the 190 must have been going slowly or he would have overshot. Also note several bursts, not one or two, which means that this went on for some time.
In fact, "broke and turned with me", combined with "attacking" and "opposite direction", pretty much implies they were previously going fairly straight, which in turn suggests fairly fast...
All this proves is that you have no idea about the manoeuver you are talking about. It is about losing speed, which turned into a turning fight and the 190 was lucky to get away with it


But maybe you don't quite get the distinction I make between high G turning performance and low-G sustained turning performance? Well, consider that just because it's all the same for our "sophisticated" current flight physics (assuming similar needed stick effort per G at high speeds), it doesn't mean it's all the same for my theory...
Oh I do



But since you don't accept, not even momentarily for the sake of an argument apparently, the basics of my theory, that explains the unconvincing example you chose...
Just a small reminder, you asked for one example and I supplied it. Now I recognise that you may not like your challange being taken up but be fair, you did ask for it and it is a good example.


Hey, have you heard of the multiple turns level fight by Johnny Johnson? "Opposite side of an ever diminishing circle"?: That's more like the ticket...
Yes I have, the Johnny Johnson in a Mk V who was up against the 190 which was a much better aircraft almost certainly being flown by a very experienced pilot and it was JJ who was the lucky one.

[lonewulf]

I think it's fairer to say that fighter pilots were selected for certain attributes - notably aggressiveness, aerobatic skill and g-tolerances - from the pool of available pilots.

There are plenty of examples of WW2 era pilots who started off in fighters and then ended up in other sorts of planes (notably, many AVG members), as well as pilots who started off flying attack planes or bombers and who switched to fighters.

Yes, I agree that some people did transfer between Commands; sure. However, I think it nonsense to suggest that fighter pilots were carefully selected because they somehow demonstrated an aggressiveness, or offensive spirit found lacking in other, less plucky pilots. Just how this offensive spirit would be demonstrated in training I'm not really sure. Perhaps they selected cadets who got into fights down the pub or who were caught 'raking' opposition players during inter-squadron rugger matches. Not sure. Anyway, when you think about it, isn't it more likely that pilots with demonstrable leadership skills and technical ability would be assigned to the more arduous and complex responsibility to be found in aircraft with more than one engine. Do you for example believe that the Dams Raid would have been more successful if fighter pilots had been drafted in to fly the operation?

[Igo kyu]

Yes, I agree that some people did transfer between Commands; sure. However, I think it nonsense to suggest that fighter pilots were carefully selected because they somehow demonstrated an aggressiveness, or offensive spirit found lacking in other, less plucky pilots. Just how this offensive spirit would be demonstrated in training I'm not really sure.
I have always understood that for the RAF basic training was for all pilots, and the ones who didn't do so well in that became bomber pilots or even transport pilots.

Bomber pilots were needed, as were coastal patrol pilots etc, but my feeling was always that they were second class citizens compared to the fighter pilots.

That's probably from comics when I was a kid I suppose, but I am sure I've never heard of bomber pilots as elite above fighter pilots.

[Glider]

Re the selection the best pilots went to Bomber command and then Coastal Command. Fighter Command generally had the worst pilots.

[K_Freddie]

Now you've put the cat among the pigeons.. :grin:

But before you claim that... we need formulae, test reports (false or otherwise), combat reports and or tracks ;)

[K_Freddie]

I know what a stall turn is. In brief you put the nose of the aircraft up to kill speed and then I used to turn the glider using the rudder before the speed drops to a level where you lose control authority. I have done these a number of times and it has absolutely nothing to do with speed or high G.

I've always maintained that slow speed turning is best done with full elevator and only rudder. The ME109 and FW190 are best suited for this as they are the more stable low speed platforms, compared to the allied a/c.

Depending where and how you execute these moves they can have a high-G component if the move is sustained long enough. Remember that this is powered flight whereas in a glider you will slow down such as to make G forces much less effective.
;)

[Glider]

People often mistake a glider which clearly goes slower in level flight than a powered aircraft with corresponding low G forces.

I was taught advanced aerobatics in a Fox glider which I was told had a higher performance/stress limits than a Cessna areobat. Most gliders at least match most private aircraft and in a climb depending of course on conditions, easily exceed the average. When in the Navy one of our gliding club members won a bet against an F4 crew as to which could get to 2,000ft from a standing start, which on a winch launch he achieved in 30 seconds. Air tows are for wimps.

I suspect you knew this, but there may be some people on the forum with limited experience in a glider. My advice to one and all is go to a gliding club and have a few trial flights, but it comes with a health warning. Its very, very addictive.

Re the best way to turn, in a glider you always, always use all the controls. If you don't the secondary control effects will turn you inside out. At 18 I was young to take up people on air experience flights and sometimes experienced PPL pilots would look at me, think they knew it better and not listen to what I was saying. All I used to do was take them up, which normally shook them up and then ask them to make a turn. Almost always we ended up doing the most alarming things in the sky at which point I would take control back and after that, they listened.

I did have a few flights with a friend in a Cherokee and didn't like it at all. I eventually left the rudder well alone and flew using the elevators and the ailerons. In the Hunter you used all the controls and that was a pretty agile aircraft, so I tend to be in its best to use all the tools available to you. The designers put them in for a reason

As to the best way who knows but it probably differs by aircraft. One thing though, the best fighters were those which are considered to be borderline unstable. To be too stable is a disadvantage and modern fighters are of course designed to be unstable and its only computers that keep them in the air.

[K_Freddie]

My son is close to CPL.. and of course he gets upset when i explain to him how to fly on the edge.
I mean, really, I'm only an experienced parent who knows sweet f-all :rolleyes: BUT.. he is an excellent pilot. Must have the same attitude like the old man ??

One must consider that in a glider you do not have to worry about any engine and it's side effects, but at the same time you're more experienced at the finer points of flying with regard to non-powered flight(or pure flight), which is something that should be taught at PPL level on powered a/c.

Maybe PPLs should start with gliding :) after all .. the Luftwaffe aces all started here !!

Edt: there have been some raised eyebrows here, when I've mentioned cross-the-controls to get the best turn performance out of a FW .. i just laugh away.

[K_Freddie]

... the best fighters were those which are considered to be borderline unstable. To be too stable is a disadvantage and modern fighters are of course designed to be unstable and its only computers that keep them in the air.
Computer systems.... only as good as the goons that program them.
NEVER rely on any computer/system... always have an EXIT 'procedure'
Always keep a copy of your financials offline or more importantly, on paper.
:)

[Glider]

I agree about learning in a Glider for most if only because in the UK you have to learn how to spin in a number of different scenarios before you go solo. A PPL doesn't get taught how to spin which I always thought was risky.
Your confidence increases as you are taught how to land out and when you go cross country, you can be certain that sooner or later you end up having to find a field or whatever to land in. On average landed out once a year.

I also have a strong belief that as Gliders often fly in close proximity to each other the pilots learn how to keep a better lookout. A small but often ignored point.

PS you are never too old. Our club had one man who went solo aged 84.

[HarryKlein]

In the real world, the Front-Line Russians found the Spitfire Mk V so inadequate for turn-fighting they changed their tactics to dive and zoom just for its benefit, and they even tried to remove its outer guns to help it turn, to no avail... (Source: Le Fana de l'Aviation #496 p.40.) The Spitfire Mk IX was in fact no better for turns and probably slightly worse...
Gaston

It's not what the article says.
Learn to read and stop interpreting

[Glider]

Gaston seems to have gone quiet

[K_Freddie]

From one of those articles...
If a frontal attack of an FW-190 should fail the pilot usually attempts to change the attacks into a turning engagement. Being very stable and having a large range of speeds, the FW-190 will inevitably offer turning battle at a minimum speed. Our Lavochkin-5 may freely take up the challenge, if the pilot uses the elevator tabs correctly. By using your foot to hold the plane from falling into a tail spin you can turn the La-5 at an exceedingly low speed, thus keeping the FW from getting on your tail.

With interpretations one should look at what is not said... the bold section is very telling and looks like a Freudian slip in context.
I would think that if the LA5 could out turn the FW190 at this point it would be explicitly mentioned.. but not being mentioned it is possible that the two a/c (in good hands) matched each other turn for turn, and no further.
Now extending from this.. how did the LA5 match against the spitfire in such a situation.... or any other a/c

Gaston may have something.. ;)

[Gaston]

It's not what the article says.
Learn to read and stop interpreting


First of all, I did not say in my post that the Mk IX being slower turning than the Mk V was part of the quote: I do note the Mk V in the real world is generally considered to out-turn the Mk IX though... Ask people who flew or still fly both Marks...

Is French your native language? Tough luck: It is mine...:

" Dans la journée du 29 avril, le régiment effectua 28 sorties pour escorter des bombardiers et des avions d'attaque au sol et 23 en protection de troupes, avec quatre combats aériens. Les premiers jours furent marqués par des échecs dus à une tactique de combat périmée dans le plan horizontal (l'I-16 était remarquablement agile en virage N.D.L.R), alors que le Spitfire était particulièrement adapté au combat dans le plan vertical."

-On April 29th the regiment completed 28 sorties to escort bombers and ground attack aircrafts and 23 to protect ground troops, with four air battles occuring. The first few days were marked by failures due to the use of "outdated" (my use of quotation marks) horizontal combat tactics (My note: horizontal combat was never considered outdated in all of WWII, except for the Allies in the Pacific: It covers about 95%+ of all Western air battle in 1944) while the Spitfire was particularly well-adapted to fighting in the vertical plane.


Second quotation : "A basse et moyenne altitude, la version VB était surclassé par les chasseurs allemands et soviétiques de son époque. Pour tenter d'améliorer la maniabilité et la vitesse, les Soviétiques l’allégèrent en retirant les quatre mitrailleuses ainsi que leurs munitions, ne laissant que les canons. Cette variante fut évalué par le centre d'essais des VVS au cours de l'été de 1943. Apparemment ce ne fut pas concluant, car il n'y eu pas d'instructions pour généraliser la modification."

Translation: "At low and medium altitude, the Mark VB was outperformed by German and Soviet fighters of its time. To try to improve its maneuverability and its speed (?!?: My note: They couldn't have expected much speed increase from that now could they? Obviously this was more about maneuvering), the Soviets lightened it by removing the four machineguns and their ammunition. This variant was evaluated by the VVS test center during the Summer of 1943. Apparently it was not a success, as there was no instruction to standardize the modification"

If you think my translations are inaccurate, you seriously need to learn to read French...

If the turn rate was really satisfactory to the Soviets compared to their own types, why would they change tactics to the vertical for this type alone? And why did they try to lighten it, at no improvement in drag or speed, if not obviously to improve its maneuverability? If the Spitfire really turned with around 17-18 sec turn times (TsAGI), which is every bit as good as the best of their fighters, why did they consider it unsuitable for their ususal turning tactics?

If you want to cling to the pipe dream that the Mk V was any worse turning than a Mk IX, then just keep on dreaming...

Except against slow-turning types like the P-51 or the Me-109G, turning tactics with the Spitfire were simply not very competitive, this worsening with the Mk IX, which is why the Mk IX is always used in dive and zoom tactics (followed by the occasional harsh high G high speed unsustained turn, its performance for which was on the other hand quite good), and this almost without exception: The vertical was what it excelled at...

Gaston

[Gaston]

From one of those articles...


With interpretations one should look at what is not said... the bold section is very telling and looks like a Freudian slip in context.
I would think that if the LA5 could out turn the FW190 at this point it would be explicitly mentioned.. but not being mentioned it is possible that the two a/c (in good hands) matched each other turn for turn, and no further.
Now extending from this.. how did the LA5 match against the spitfire in such a situation.... or any other a/c

Gaston may have something.. ;)


Very good point. I never make any claims about German aircrafts vs the Russians types, or even vs the P-38 or Tempest/Typhoon, because the amount of combat reports is so much smaller than what I have read vs other US/British types.

A lot of Russian quotes are very indicative though: "Experienced FW-190A pilots never fight on the vertical plane"

"There are reports of turning battle with the FW-190A lasting quite some time"

"FW-190A will inevitably offer turning battle at minimum speed"

If it was so poorly suited and unsuccessful in the horizontal, wouldn't you think it would have been used in other ways?

On the other hand, the only fighter type I have ever heard the Me-109G engaging more or less successfully in a turning battle was the P-51, and even then it is barely as a close equal... The Fs and G-2 could sometimes match Spitfires as well, and that is not a good sign for the Spitfire...

I did hear from Steinhoff that the Me-109G's climbing spiral was superior to other fighter types, but this appeared to be useful only against some mid-war Russian fighters, and usually specifically when flying the G-2... A climbing spiral is a rare case in an air battle in any case...

I see still no contestation that KG 200 did say the P-47D needle-tip Razorack did out-turn their Me-109G as a general statement that is always (grossly) demonstrated in real-life combat reports (as in, quite a bit over 90° of gain per 360° of horizontal turning), and this in all circumstances (including left-hand climbing spirals)...

Does that mean we finally have a consensus on that?:)

Gaston

[IceFire]

First of all, I did not say in my post that the Mk IX being slower turning than the Mk V was part of the quote: I do note the Mk V in the real world is generally considered to out-turn the Mk IX though... Ask people who flew or still fly both Marks...

Is French your native language? Tough luck: It is mine...:

" Dans la journée du 29 avril, le régiment effectua 28 sorties pour escorter des bombardiers et des avions d'attaque au sol et 23 en protection de troupes, avec quatre combats aériens. Les premiers jours furent marqués par des échecs dus à une tactique de combat périmée dans le plan horizontal (l'I-16 était remarquablement agile en virage N.D.L.R), alors que le Spitfire était particulièrement adapté au combat dans le plan vertical."

-On April 29th the regiment completed 28 sorties to escort bombers and ground attack aircrafts and 23 to protect ground troops, with four air battles occuring. The first few days were marked by failures due to the use of "outdated" (my use of quotation marks) horizontal combat tactics (My note: horizontal combat was never considered outdated in all of WWII, except for the Allies in the Pacific: It covers about 95%+ of all Western air battle in 1944) while the Spitfire was particularly well-adapted to fighting in the vertical plane.


Second quotation : "A basse et moyenne altitude, la version VB était surclassé par les chasseurs allemands et soviétiques de son époque. Pour tenter d'améliorer la maniabilité et la vitesse, les Soviétiques l’allégèrent en retirant les quatre mitrailleuses ainsi que leurs munitions, ne laissant que les canons. Cette variante fut évalué par le centre d'essais des VVS au cours de l'été de 1943. Apparemment ce ne fut pas concluant, car il n'y eu pas d'instructions pour généraliser la modification."

Translation: "At low and medium altitude, the Mark VB was outperformed by German and Soviet fighters of its time. To try to improve its maneuverability and its speed (?!?: My note: They couldn't have expected much speed increase from that now could they? Obviously this was more about maneuvering), the Soviets lightened it by removing the four machineguns and their ammunition. This variant was evaluated by the VVS test center during the Summer of 1943. Apparently it was not a success, as there was no instruction to standardize the modification"

If you think my translations are inaccurate, you seriously need to learn to read French...

If the turn rate was really satisfactory to the Soviets compared to their own types, why would they change tactics to the vertical for this type alone? And why did they try to lighten it, at no improvement in drag or speed, if not obviously to improve its maneuverability? If the Spitfire really turned with around 17-18 sec turn times (TsAGI), which is every bit as good as the best of their fighters, why did they consider it unsuitable for their ususal turning tactics?

If you want to cling to the pipe dream that the Mk V was any worse turning than a Mk IX, then just keep on dreaming...

Except against slow-turning types like the P-51 or the Me-109G, turning tactics with the Spitfire were simply not very competitive, this worsening with the Mk IX, which is why the Mk IX is always used in dive and zoom tactics (followed by the occasional harsh high G high speed unsustained turn, its performance for which was on the other hand quite good), and this almost without exception: The vertical was what it excelled at...

Gaston

The Russians were never really happy with the Spitfires they got. They found the Merlin to be exceedingly troublesome and it had difficulty with the fine dust conditions that were found in the Kuban area. The British found similar situations when operating in Normandy (thus requiring new filters to be fitted). I really don't think the Russians were ever able to get the most out of their Spitfires but as with all fighters during WWII they seemed to be focused on getting the most out of the aircraft by removing unnecessary equipment. Indeed, removing the machine guns may have been an effort to improve maneuverability by increasing the roll rate. Compared to contemporary Russian fighters, particularly the Yak, the Spitfire is quite slow in the roll.

I'm not discounting the report but as with any historical reports it does have to be placed in full context. Indeed, when they first received Spitfires in early 1943 they were operating with one hand behind their back...

We studied the new equipment diligently, but were unable to acquire any practical mastery of the Spitfire in the air because we did not have any instructions on techniques of piloting this airplane. Neither the technical staff nor the regiment instructors knew its most basic flight and tactical data.
http://lend-lease.airforce.ru/english/articles/spit/index.htm

Here's an interesting account with the Russians doing test combat near the front.


Captain Sapozhnikov, a pilot of 57th GIAP, flew the Spitfire, and Captain Aleksandr Pokryshkin, commander of 1st Squadron, 16th GIAP, flew the Airacobra. A factory test pilot flew the LaGG. Here is how Pokryshkin describes this aerial combat in his memoirs:

The conditions for the battle were complicated: our “enemies” were to fly toward Sapozhnikov and me on unknown azimuths. Thus, even before the start of the fight in high-speed turns, they had favorable positions. But the bosses had decided, and we did not argue with them. We had to find a way out in the course of the fight.
The leadership arrived. I flew in the first pair. I gained the established altitude and by rocking my wings gave the command to initiate the fight in horizontal maneuvers. I energetically put my aircraft into a turning climb and, allowing the LaGG to approach to a dangerous distance, executed a sudden roll with decrease in altitude. The LaGG-3 passed by above me and I immediately set up on his tail and got him in my sight. No matter what way the LaGG turned, I kept him in my sight. Several minutes went by and the result was obvious.
Then we examined how the LaGG would handle itself in vertical maneuvers. I threw my aircraft into a steep dive and, having gained velocity, departed into a zoom. At the apex I placed my airplane on its wing. The LaGG was making a combat turn below me. It was relatively easy for me to catch him in the tail and fix him in my sight, parrying all attempts of this ‘enemy’ to avoid my attack.
Sapozhnikov also won his fight in turning and climbing, but fought to a draw in vertical maneuvers. After coming out of a dive, the LaGG-3 stayed close to me in a high-speed pass over the airfield, but the Spitfire, which had weaker diving capabilities, fell significantly behind us.
http://lend-lease.airforce.ru/english/articles/spit/index.htm

Versus the LaGG it seems the Spitfire had no trouble turning with it. Not that the LaGG was exceptional in the turn but further places in context that the Russians were experimenting with the Spitfires capabilities when they did receive it. Note these are front line pilots.

Now here's the most interesting piece that pretty much goes against the stuff you translated:

One of the most important sources by which one can judge the combat employment of the Spitfires is the testimonials of the pilots themselves about this aircraft. There is hardly a better person to characterize this equipment than a pilot who had to fight in it. Although during Soviet times it was customary to remain silent or curse aviation equipment delivered by Lend-lease, the memoirs of Anatoliy Ivanov, a pilot of 57th GIAP, contain the following description of this aircraft:

The Spitfire was a simple aircraft that permitted significant mistakes in the techniques of piloting. The I-16 was much more demanding. The Spitfire had a radio, not a great radio, but a radio nonetheless. The singular superiority of the Spitfire was the fact that it was very light and, because of its thrust-to-weight ratio, was a good climber. This supported reliable vertical maneuver. However the greatest deficiency was the fact that the weapons were spread out along the wings. The distance between the cannons was approximately four meters. During an attack on the enemy from close range, their lethality was greatly diminished.

Over the short period of time the regiment’s pilots fought in the British aircraft, they managed to overcome the fact that the Spitfire lagged behind the German Bf-109 and especially the Fw-190 fighters in such an important characteristic for a fighter as diving capabilities. The principal explanation for this was the lightness of its construction—the aircraft simply was unable to amass sufficient energy. Therefore “to exit an engagement in a Spitfire by diving was a fatal error, because this aircraft was light and a poor diver. A Messerschmitt could rapidly catch and shoot it down.”

The regiment’s pilots considered the conduct of battles in the horizontal plane to be the optimum method of contesting with German fighters. Despite the fact that, as already noted above, because of its lightness the Spitfire was a quick climber, the pilots of 57th GIAP recommended engaging the Messers and Fokkers in turning battles. Ivanov emphasizes that it was necessary to draw the enemy into a right turn, “because the Messerschmitt’s propeller rotated to the left, and the airplane executed right turns with greater difficulty than left turns.” For this reason, the regiment’s pilots mastered the execution of deep right turns in the Spitfire. In Ivanov’s opinion, this training was no accident, and many enemy fighters were destroyed using this particular method.
http://lend-lease.airforce.ru/english/articles/spit/index.htm

It does seem that drawing into a right turn seemed to be emphasized by the pilots here but that horizontal fighting was recommend method by the pilots of this Russian Guards unit.

Now would you like to move the goalpost out further? :)

[lonewulf]

I think there are two issues that should be noted in relation to the performance of Spitfire aircraft transferred to the Soviets during the War.

Firstly, all or most of the Mk Vs that went to Russia were well and truly second hand. The machines were essentially considered obsolete in terms of the WTO when dispatched. In 1943, even if they had all been brand new (which they most certainly were not), they would have struggled with the latest Luftwaffe types.

Secondly, despite the actual condition of the Spitfires sent to the Soviet Union, any official statements and reports prepared during the Soviet era, (about Spitfires or anything else for that matter) must be treated with tremendous scepticism. The simple truth is that any comments that were made by individuals (any individual at all) that could be interpreted as defeatist or in some way critical of the soviet system or the products of soviet industry, could and would get you killed or would be otherwise career threatening. No one in their right mind would be associated with such statements, whether he or she had penned them or not. If you knew what was good for you during this time of intense fear and paranoia, you most certainly didn't go around praising the war equipment of a foreign power, not even an allied foreign power.

[K_Freddie]

Firstly, all or most of the Mk Vs that went to Russia were well and truly second hand. The machines were essentially considered obsolete in terms of the WTO when dispatched. In 1943, even if they had all been brand new (which they most certainly were not), they would have struggled with the latest Luftwaffe types.
The outdated 'slower' machine would (should) be better turners in any case.


Secondly, despite the actual condition of the Spitfires sent to the Soviet Union, any official statements and reports prepared during the Soviet era, (about Spitfires or anything else for that matter) must be treated with tremendous scepticism. The simple truth is that any comments that were made by individuals (any individual at all) that could be interpreted as defeatist or in some way critical of the soviet system or the products of soviet industry, could and would get you killed or would be otherwise career threatening. No one in their right mind would be associated with such statements, whether he or she had penned them or not. If you knew what was good for you during this time of intense fear and paranoia, you most certainly didn't go around praising the war equipment of a foreign power, not even an allied foreign power.
You just might have shot Icefire's argument down, Note that with that Russian LA5/FW190 report.. it was never mentioned that the FW could out-turn the LA5.. (the reporter might have been shot) More importantly what was left out, was that the LA5 couldn't out-turn the FW190.

[K_Freddie]

With that spitfire conversion.. bringing in the Lagg3 brings in a new set of parameters.Things to note:

1) both spit pilots won their 'combats' with a combination of horizontal and vertical moves
2) Sapozhnikov did a zoom-climb to beat the Lagg3 in the second test

Although and indicator that the Spit could outfly the Lagg3 under circumstances, this is no indication of slow turn performances that Gaston is talking about.

Guess whats wrong with this statement ...:)
“because the Messerschmitt’s propeller rotated to the left, and the airplane executed right turns with greater difficulty than left turns..."

I found this interesting
It has the capability to adjust the pedals in flight, which gives the pilot the possibility to freely execute pedal control in flight. As a rule, the pilot is able to adjust the aircraft so that if he momentarily loses consciousness, the aircraft will independently re-establish a normal attitude.
I don't think this is in the game.

[IceFire]

With that spitfire conversion.. bringing in the Lagg3 brings in a new set of parameters.Things to note:

1) both spit pilots won their 'combats' with a combination of horizontal and vertical moves
2) Sapozhnikov did a zoom-climb to beat the Lagg3 in the second test

Although and indicator that the Spit could outfly the Lagg3 under circumstances, this is no indication of slow turn performances that Gaston is talking about.

Guess whats wrong with this statement ...:)


I found this interesting

I don't think this is in the game.

Interesting stuff eh? :) Much less black and white than some would have believe but this is why first hand accounts are so fascinating. We just have to accept that there is historical background required to interpret the comments.

[IceFire]

The outdated 'slower' machine would (should) be better turners in any case.


You just might have shot Icefire's argument down, Note that with that Russian LA5/FW190 report.. it was never mentioned that the FW could out-turn the LA5.. (the reporter might have been shot) More importantly what was left out, was that the LA5 couldn't out-turn the FW190.

I was trying to find that report again and I wasn't able to dig it up. Have the link handy? There is that Russian patriotism thing that gets trotted out a fair bit and I suspect some of it's true but there were pilots who quite liked their lend lease aircraft. Pokryshkin spoke highly of the P-39. I guess that didn't set off enough alarm bells for his Political Officer :) He quite liked the La-7 after that so maybe that equalled out somewhere in the grand scheme of things. I suspect that the Russian pilots liked their aircraft despite whatever official proclamations were in place and kept their comments largely to themselves until much later.

The interesting thing about the La-5 is that because it was initially a LaGG-3 with a new engine the aircraft went through stages of development where it was initially just a retrofit and then it became it's own model, shedding weight in the process. The early La-5 was a slower turner than the refined 1944 La-5FN (22 seconds is quoted in places... similar to FW190). In-game I suspect that the weight for the La-5 reflects the later model series while the La-5F reflects the early F model and the FN reflects a very late model FN.

That's a very long way of saying that depending on the La-5 model tested the FW190 and La-5 might have a very similar turn time. We'd have to look very closely at what they tested to see what sort of information we can glean from it.

[Gaston]

Thanks for the link about Eastern Front Spitfires!

"During this period the regiment’s pilots (57th-Spitfires) destroyed 41 enemy aircraft in 44 combats.

Thus, the 16th GIAP flying P-39 Airacobras destroyed 40 aircraft in 41 engagements. For the 42d GIAP in Yaks, 49 aircraft are counted in 56 engagements.


For example, the 57th GIAP (Spitfire Mk Vs) is credited with 21 victories as confirmed by ground forces and the vectoring station; 16th GIAP (P-39) is credited with 13 downed aircraft; 42d GIAP (Yak-1)—27 enemy aircraft.


There were unrecoverable losses in this period: in 57th GIAP (Spitfires)—13 aircraft and 8 dead pilots; in 16th GIAP (P-39)—9 aircraft and 6 pilots; and in 42d GIAP (Yak-1)—8 aircraft were destroyed and 5 pilots did not return."


In general the Spitfires achieved the second highest amount of confirmed kills over the month of May 1943 for the 3 types, but had by far the highest losses, and this over a smaller amount of sorties.

The Russians seem to insist a lot that the "spread out" British armament was less effective, but in my opinion that is questionnable, especially in view of their Spitfire's good results in kills: Each of the two Hispanos was probably noticeably deadlier than the single hub mounted Russian 20 mm, and the fact that one would be off-center did not change the fact that the british gun was excellent and would produce fast kills.

Sustaining turns is more of a defensive maneuver than an offensive maneuver, and the much higher Spitfire losses certainly don't point towards a superiority in turns...

I remember reading the following sustained radiuses for the following types: Me-109E: 850 feet, Spitfire Mk I: 1050 feet, Hurricane 800 feet. The source is too distant to recall but I know from this that the two complicated Me-109E/Spitfire Mk I "Doghouse" charts (often offered in rebuttal to this) is certainly all calculated data... The radiuses above are probably the real thing, as flown...

I really doubt in sustained turns the Spitfire had any sort of large superiority over much of anything else but the later Me-109Gs and P-51s...

It does seem in the linked LaGG-3 fly-off that it had horizontal turn parity with the LaGG-3, but not that it out-turned it: He puts his sight on it by rolling under it during a spiral climb...

The La-5 was widely known as hugely better than the LaGG-3 (regardless of what TsAGI turn times say), and, as K_Freddie points out, it was not conclusively said that even that out-turned the FW-190A...

As for the 57's pilots conclusion that they have to use the Spitfire in horizontal turn:

"The regiment’s pilots considered the conduct of battles in the horizontal plane to be the optimum method of contesting with German fighters. Despite the fact that, as already noted above, because of its lightness the Spitfire was a quick climber, the pilots of 57th GIAP recommended engaging the Messers and Fokkers in turning battles."

Well if that is so, why did they later have to change their tactics to the vertical to be more effective, why was the Spitfire tested with outer guns removed, and why did they suffer such disproportionate losses?

In any case, the recommendation of horizontal turn-fighting made sense in the early 1943 period, when the majority of the opposition on the Eastern Front was probably still the Me-109G.

I'll grant you it is contradicting, but not quite as convincing as several combat accounts citing gradual gains in sustained turns...

Gaston

[Glider]

-On April 29th the regiment completed 28 sorties to escort bombers and ground attack aircrafts and 23 to protect ground troops, with four air battles occuring. The first few days were marked by failures due to the use of "outdated" (my use of quotation marks) horizontal combat tactics (My note: horizontal combat was never considered outdated in all of WWII, except for the Allies in the Pacific: It covers about 95%+ of all Western air battle in 1944) while the Spitfire was particularly well-adapted to fighting in the vertical plane.
Wrong
Horizontal combat was not the norm in the real world and to say it covered 95% of combats is a farce. Also it was in many ways outdated. Turning is mainly a defensive tactic and fighters are designed to attack, most combats were in and out and a high proportion of pilots who were shot down never knew what hit them. Height in combat is a vital advantage and the Spit was good in both climb and turn.
You can of course support the 95% comment?

Translation: "At low and medium altitude, the Mark VB was outperformed by German and Soviet fighters of its time. To try to improve its maneuverability and its speed (?!?: My note: They couldn't have expected much speed increase from that now could they? Obviously this was more about maneuvering), the Soviets lightened it by removing the four machineguns and their ammunition. This variant was evaluated by the VVS test center during the Summer of 1943. Apparently it was not a success, as there was no instruction to standardize the modification"
Nothing unexpected here the Mk V was outclassed by the Fw190 and the 109G

If the turn rate was really satisfactory to the Soviets compared to their own types, why would they change tactics to the vertical for this type alone? And why did they try to lighten it, at no improvement in drag or speed, if not obviously to improve its maneuverability? If the Spitfire really turned with around 17-18 sec turn times (TsAGI), which is every bit as good as the best of their fighters, why did they consider it unsuitable for their ususal turning tactics?
The Russians didn't consider the Spit unsuitable for turning combat as proved by your own words which I will quote later


Except against slow-turning types like the P-51 or the Me-109G, turning tactics with the Spitfire were simply not very competitive, this worsening with the Mk IX, which is why the Mk IX is always used in dive and zoom tactics (followed by the occasional harsh high G high speed unsustained turn, its performance for which was on the other hand quite good), and this almost without exception: The vertical was what it excelled at...

As mentioned before this is wrong the SPit was good at the turn and the climb.

Your Russian quote
The regiment’s pilots considered the conduct of battles in the horizontal plane to be the optimum method of contesting with German fighters. Despite the fact that, as already noted above, because of its lightness the Spitfire was a quick climber, the pilots of 57th GIAP recommended engaging the Messers and Fokkers in turning battles. Ivanov emphasizes that it was necessary to draw the enemy into a right turn, “because the Messerschmitt’s propeller rotated to the left, and the airplane executed right turns with greater difficulty than left turns.” For this reason, the regiment’s pilots mastered the execution of deep right turns in the Spitfire. In Ivanov’s opinion, this training was no accident, and many enemy fighters were destroyed using this particular method.

Which you translated as
It does seem that drawing into a right turn seemed to be emphasized by the pilots here but that horizontal fighting was recommend method by the pilots of this Russian Guards unit.

I am sure you meant to say
It does seem that drawing into a right turn seemed to be emphasized by the pilots here and horizontal fighting was recommend method by the pilots of this Russian Guards unit.
Because Horizontal is left and right
So to sum up the Russians also recognised that the Spit was good in a turn and shot down many enemy aircraft using that tactic.

[K_Freddie]

Err Glider

Ivanov emphasizes that it was necessary to draw the enemy into a right turn, “because the Messerschmitt’s propeller rotated to the left, and the airplane executed right turns with greater difficulty than left turns.” For this reason, the regiment’s pilots mastered the execution of deep right turns in the Spitfire. In Ivanov’s opinion, this training was no accident, and many enemy fighters were destroyed using this particular method.

The Me109 prop rotates to the right - clockwise unless Oleg has completely stuffed it up, which simply means :-
1)At high speed
Left turns are faster than right - that's if you don't down throttle and if you do this, you turn faster in the right turn !!

2)At low speeds
Right turns are tighter and more controllable (same as the FW190)

So where has the dis-information penetrated... ?? ;)

[Glider]

Err Glider


The Me109 prop rotates to the right - clockwise unless Oleg has completely stuffed it up, which simply means :-
1)At high speed
Left turns are faster than right - that's if you don't down throttle and if you do this you turn faster in the right turn !!

2)At low speeds
Right turns are tighter and more controllable (same as the FW190)

So where has the dis-information penetrated... ?? ;)

Those were not my words, they were the ones from the Russian source quoted by Gaston

My point was to point out that the Russians liked to use the turn ability of the SPitfire and clarify Gastons statement. RAF pilots were happy to go left or right.

[K_Freddie]

I am just pointing out the error in the 'document', which does not seem to come from a pilots POV. Pilots can be dimwits, but to get the prop-rotation wrong, is from a pongo/groundhog/political commissar. ;)
And... yes I read that doc, and have highlighted this error elsewhere!

[K_Freddie]

I think what really is lacking is a serious counter-argument (with circumstantial evidence/docs) to gaston's story.
His 'evidence' is purely documentary and he is definitely well read on the topic, but he provides a really convincing argument that no one here can really refute (it's like religion)

What I can say, IL2 gamewise, is that Oleg's modelling does come close to what Gaston's hypothesis - In a FW190 I can outturn a spit in a right turn at stall speed - I have done it online many a time..

When I get my pedals working again.. you're all dead meat :!:

[IceFire]

I am just pointing out the error in the 'document', which does not seem to come from a pilots POV. Pilots can be dimwits, but to get the prop-rotation wrong, is from a pongo/groundhog/political commissar. ;)
And... yes I read that doc, and have highlighted this error elsewhere!

The part that is missing is exactly when the pilots were consulted on this. Since left/right is a 50/50 thing it's easy enough for the pilot to remember that they were always catching 109s in a left or right handed turn but mixing up the direction. Plausible.

[IceFire]

I think what really is lacking is a serious counter-argument (with circumstantial evidence/docs) to gaston's story.
His 'evidence' is purely documentary and he is definitely well read on the topic, but he provides a really convincing argument that no one here can really refute (it's like religion)

What I can say, IL2 gamewise, is that Oleg's modelling does come close to what Gaston's hypothesis - In a FW190 I can outturn a spit in a right turn at stall speed - I have done it online many a time..

When I get my pedals working again.. you're all dead meat :!:
Unless I'm missing something, Gaston is arguing against IL-2s modelling of the situation. Previously the FW190 was a much more difficult aircraft to turn. With 4.11 it's turn rate was increased and it's easier to extract a better turn at all speeds.

Gaston has provided as much argument as there has been counter argument IMHO. Choices have been made to accept some of the information and there is a degree of interpretation required but I think IL-2 is essentially right at this point (although it's never perfect) and I haven't seen anything damning that suggests otherwise.

What kind of pedals and whats wrong with them or just not plugged in yet? :)

[K_Freddie]

With 4.11 it's turn rate was increased and it's easier to extract a better turn at all speeds.

??? - I'm trying not to laugh

What kind of pedals and whats wrong with them or just not plugged in yet? :)
My pedals :)

[IceFire]

??? - I'm trying not to laugh

Totally serious... load up IL-2 Compare from 4.07 and 4.11 and check.

FW190A-5 in 4.07:

Best turn speed: 370kph
Turn time at best turn speed: 24+ seconds

Turn time at 280kph: 33 seconds
Turn time at 420kph: 25+ seconds

In 4.11:

Best turn speed: 310kph
Turn time at best turn speed: 23 seconds

Turn time at 280kph: 26+ seconds
Turn time at 420kph: 27+ seconds

So you can see the turn parameters are different and largely better. There is a slightly slower turn rate at the higher speeds but it's a 2 second difference while at lower speeds there is a 7 second advantage. Overall the chart shows a wider spread in 4.11 meaning there is a better overall turn rate for the FW190 across the speed range than there was previously.

It also works seat of the pants... which is why I checked in the first place.

[Jam656es]

I'm not sure if he's saying the FW190 doesn't turn well enough or if it turns too well.
http://www.rdox.info/01.jpghttp://www.rdox.info/02.jpghttp://www.rdox.info/8.jpghttp://www.rdox.info/9.jpg
http://www.rdox.info/0.jpg

[Robo.]

I'm not sure if he's saying the FW190 doesn't turn well enough or if it turns too well.


He is saying that it is turning better than it used to prior to the FM overhaul. And he is right.

[Glider]

I think what really is lacking is a serious counter-argument (with circumstantial evidence/docs) to gaston's story.
His 'evidence' is purely documentary and he is definitely well read on the topic, but he provides a really convincing argument that no one here can really refute (it's like religion)



Are you seriously saying that there is no evidence that the Spit turns better than the Fw190?

[K_Freddie]

...at low speed, just above the stall. This is where Gaston is making his point.

Everyone is going 'No ways, it can out turn them as all the flight comparison tests have been done' - I'm also yet to see an official WW2 low speed turning comparison. That Russian report might be the closest that we'll ever get..
:)

BTW .. online the one time I had a Spit, probably a IX, on my tail when I slowed down to full flaps and 50-100ft above the ground. I went into a gentle right bank and he followed, I then threw it into a full hard RH turn at full throttle and right rudder. The Spit couldn't follow - maybe the pilot or maybe the FMs might be correct.

[JtD]

The Spitfire stall speed is lower and therefore it turns better at low speed. In fact it can still turn at speeds at which the Fw 190 can't even fly straight any more.

[Mustang]

my 2 cents
About maneuverability and turn rate ..

PLEASE Do not think about "HISTORICAL DATA" and turn rate and dont think about the mathematics and measures..
Think about the pilot!
and think about what you do not know

In the stick P-51D, measures 48 lbs in a 3g pull. Up to 86 Lbs at
5g's.
The P-47D, OTOH, requires just 16 lbs at 3g and 27 lbs at 5g's.
The testers state that the Mustang was a true "two hander".


The turn rate is less important for a dogfight..

Look at other things ..

[K_Freddie]

You have a good point.. it probably made the difference which is not mentioned in combat reports

Radial-vs-Inline which can have a marked effect on turning ability.. ignored also (and mentioned in some report which I forget) is the FW190 ability to hang by it's prop... which looks like a Radial characteristic.

:)

[ElAurens]

Another example I can come up with on the radial vs. inline comparo is the P36 vs. P40.

The Army Air Corps P36 C had 1200bhp with 100 act fuel, whereas the P40s that replaced it only had 1000bhp.

The P 40 was faster in level flight, but, the P 36 could out turn it (from pilot accounts), and the P 36 was significantly faster in the climb. (3 to 4 minutes faster to 20,000ft. depending on model of P 40).

[Mustang]

Sorry for my off topic

Turn Rate... "the golden rule of IL2" ??
close to misconception

Many things are not pure mathematics
One plane turns better ... but if the pilot must do a huge force in the stick at 5 g´s.
The pilot will be with broken arms and breathless in two minutes.
Will be very difficult aim and shoot to other plane, or do a good dogfight.

A plane maybe can turn worse, but if it's light on the stick in two minutes that pilot easy win the combat.


Another misconception

The "power" of the engine , "other golden rule of IL2" ??... 1+1=2 ??

Many times we say this engine has
1000 HP
2000 HP
2500 HP
or
1.000.000 Horse power

Another thing is not purely 1+1=2

About.....
The design of the propeller??

How many horsepower the prop will give to you gripping the air?
How many power is output to the air by the prop, for each horse power increment ??

Put in the same plane a new engine with 500 HP more and the prop maybe give you only 100 Hp more.. is no direct mathematical
Only a small part of that 500hp will be going to thrust of the plane.

Maybe a plane with engine with 1600 HP, performs better than other plane with 1900 hp engine ..the aerodynamics, the propeller .. many many Things..

Is 1950 hp engine in Turkish plane better than 1600 HP engine in indian plane?.. mmm.. depends on each plane
How many HP are exploited by each plane and prop?


Not everything goes directly to the thrust of the plane.
If you use a prop .. not is the same as using a jet.


.

[Glider]

...at low speed, just above the stall. This is where Gaston is making his point.
The problem here is that its only Gastons point. No one else of any nation including the Luftwaffe agree with him. No pilot, no test result, no one, its only Gastons point.


Everyone is going 'No ways, it can out turn them as all the flight comparison tests have been done' - I'm also yet to see an official WW2 low speed turning comparison. That Russian report might be the closest that we'll ever get..
:)
Any continious turn will develop into a slow speed turn as the aircraft bleed energy


BTW .. online the one time I had a Spit, probably a IX, on my tail when I slowed down to full flaps and 50-100ft above the ground. I went into a gentle right bank and he followed, I then threw it into a full hard RH turn at full throttle and right rudder. The Spit couldn't follow - maybe the pilot or maybe the FMs might be correct.
Interestingly you did the one thing that I would expect to work. One area that the 190 had a clear and significant advantage over the Spit is in its roll rate. By suddenly increasing your turn the SPit would find it difficult to keep up. You would be well into your turn while he is still trying to get into a position to begin to turn. You may want to try reversing your turn in a barrel roll by barrel rolling to the right, going over 270 degrees and then turn in the opposite direction to the one the Spit would expect.
In all these cases you would gain a few precious seconds and possibly get the drop on him.

[K_Freddie]

Actually there was not much rolling to do.. I think it's more about the torque effect (not the prop-wash) of the inline vs the radial. I vaguely remember in one documentary that a P51 pilot mentioned that if you wall the merlin throttle it could flip the aircraft over while still on the ground, he over-emphasized gentle throttle application - such was the power of inline torque effects.

The game merlin gets very touchy at slow speeds where as the DB801 is quite tame and easier to control. I've seen many an unsuspecting Spit pilot plough into the ground behind me... ;)

It is controllable, but seemingly not at the FW190s turn rate at stall speeds.
:cool:

[JtD]

K_Freddie, please - BMW801. Do not insult the 801. ;)

[ElAurens]

Meh, it's just a copy of a Pratt and Whitney anyway...


:o

[Gaston]

The Spitfire stall speed is lower and therefore it turns better at low speed. In fact it can still turn at speeds at which the Fw 190 can't even fly straight any more.

Well my theory, assuming you understand it, explains perfectly well why stalling speed is unrelated to the maximum low-speed sustained turn rate (which is not found by trying to turn near the straight-line stall speed: The maximum sustainable turn rate is quite a bit above that in all aircrafts)...

It seems stalling speed is unrelated to low-speed sustained turns (which is why the Ki-100 performs so dramatically better than the Ki-84 in sustained turns), just like high speed dive pull-outs are unrelated to low-speed turning, but on the other hand high speed dive pull-out performance does correlate with stall speed quite well. It should; the prop disc load is reduced in the dive by faster incoming air, reducing its influence, and, like the straight-line stall, there is is no slower incoming air in the top prop disc portion to create an assymetrical load...

The FW-190A has exactly the pathetic dive pull-out performance that one would expect for its stall speed, which also correlates well with its high wingloading.

The FW-190A is the only fighter for which Eric Brown states "Killing speed by sinking imposes a Tactical restriction when pulling out from low-level dives".

It is also the only fighter for which I have ever read: "Will fall another 220 m after leveling out from a 40° dive of 1200 m"... In other words, falling hundreds of feet nose level or nose up, causing a huge vertical deceleration and thus "a tendency to black-out the pilot" (P-47 front-line test)...

It also happens to have one of the highest stall speeds of all WWII single engine day fighters...: 120 MPH...

High speed horizontal unsustained 6G turns are slightly less correlated with stall speed, but still correlates very well because higher Gs "drown out" the effects of the prop's assymetrical load in turns, in the case of the FW-190A emphasizing its heavier airframe weight proportionately to an unchanging or reducing prop load effect (faster speeds mean more air hitting the front of the blades, thus reducing the blade load)...

To the left, the FW-190A's high speed turn is acceptable, but still poor in high speed/High G left turns, but its turn performance is truly abyssmal in high speed/high G right turns. The assymetrical wing drop and prop rotation high speed spiral has a bigger effect at high speeds.

At high speed the FW-190A is thus barely acceptable in hard left turns, but often snaps out entirely in hard right turns.

That this high speed's poor turn/dive pull-out performance is so clearly consistent with the FW-190A's high wingloading does not explain why at low speeds its sustained turn performance is so much better, at least if you ignore my theory.

Also, if you ignore my theory, there is no explanation why the the FW-190D has a much poorer sustained turn performance, or why laying off the throttle will improve wingloading, in a curve, but not in a straight line stall. (In a dive pull-out, the faster incoming air has the effect of reducing the prop load, and thus the comparative effect of the pull-out's curve compared to a "real" curve from a horizontal turn)

Gaston

P.S.

The FW-190A's flaps, when down, reverse the effect of the prop spiral airflow at low speeds, probably because being closer to the prop they have more effect than the impact on the more distant tailplanes, and their location has a different leverage on the airframe.

Also at low speeds, in the effort of maintaining speed in a turn, the engine torque has more effect compared to the airflow, and acts opposite the prop's airflow spiral rotation, not with it.

Unlike at high speeds, at low speeds the FW-190A's turn stall assymetry is thus less, given the lesser prop spiral airflow influence at low speeds.

G.

[Gaston]

Wrong
Horizontal combat was not the norm in the real world and to say it covered 95% of combats is a farce. Also it was in many ways outdated. Turning is mainly a defensive tactic and fighters are designed to attack, most combats were in and out and a high proportion of pilots who were shot down never knew what hit them.

I know that is the claim of Eric Hartmann for his victims, but, in fact, if one reads often and a lot about aerial combat, one is always immediately struck how well aware of their environment even Me-109G pilots were, despite the supposedly poor visibility of this aircraft: Hardly ever in these accounts is the victim unaware of the attacker...:

http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/p-47/p-47-encounter-reports.html
http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/mustang/combat-reports.html

Furthermore, in the above 1200+ combat accounts, I can recall exactly one account that I remember specifically involving a P-47 dive and zooming his target (unsuccessfully, but at least helping him evade this FW-190A that was badly out-turning him, achieving this by zooming above it from low altitude)...

I know you haven't read them, because if you had you would know how absurd is your notion that the Me-109G can turn with the P-47D...

As for the Spitfire, given that current theory gives it a 50-60% wingloading advantage over the FW-190A, you have to wonder where are all these combat accounts displaying this advantage at low speeds... (And why only examples and statements to the contrary have surfaced, aside the TsAGI numbers).

For the Spitfire, a lot of diving at target, and never any sustained turning...

You ask for evidence but evidently you won't read it...

Gaston

[Glider]

Actually there was not much rolling to do.. I think it's more about the torque effect (not the prop-wash) of the inline vs the radial. I vaguely remember in one documentary that a P51 pilot mentioned that if you wall the merlin throttle it could flip the aircraft over while still on the ground, he over-emphasized gentle throttle application - such was the power of inline torque effects.

The game merlin gets very touchy at slow speeds where as the DB801 is quite tame and easier to control. I've seen many an unsuspecting Spit pilot plough into the ground behind me... ;)

It is controllable, but seemingly not at the FW190s turn rate at stall speeds.
:cool:

I certainly could be wrong here but there is no difference in the torque in a WW2 figher with a radial engine compared to a WW2 inline powered engine and because of this had no impact on turn.
There was in WW1 because on a WW1 radial engine was normally a rotary engine where the prop was fixed to the engine and the engine went round.

[Glider]

I know that is the claim of Eric Hartmann for his victims, but, in fact, if one reads often and a lot about aerial combat, one is always immediately struck how well aware of their environment even Me-109G pilots were, despite the supposedly poor visibility of this aircraft: Hardly ever in these accounts is the victim unaware of the attacker...:

http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/p-47/p-47-encounter-reports.html
http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/mustang/combat-reports.html

Furthermore, in the above 1200+ combat accounts, I can recall exactly one account that I remember specifically involving a P-47 dive and zooming his target (unsuccessfully, but at least helping him evade this FW-190A that was badly out-turning him, achieving this by zooming above it from low altitude)...

I know you haven't read them, because if you had you would know how absurd is your notion that the Me-109G can turn with the P-47D...

As for the Spitfire, given that current theory gives it a 50-60% wingloading advantage over the FW-190A, you have to wonder where are all these combat accounts displaying this advantage at low speeds... (And why only examples and statements to the contrary have surfaced, aside the TsAGI numbers).

For the Spitfire, a lot of diving at target, and never any sustained turning...

You ask for evidence but evidently you won't read it...

Gaston

Actually I have read them, as proven by the example I found previously and I am not afraid to use them to prove my point.

I have a challange for you. Pick any combat, from any of the lists you like, be it a Spitfire, P47, P51 whatever, totally your choice. And we will analyse the ten combats either side of the one you picked and see how many of those involved involved a turning horizontal combat.

I repeat the choice of aircraft, list and combat is totally yours. I don't think I can be fairer than that.
Lets see if you are willing to use those combat reports to prove your point

Its Totally your choice

PS while you are at it can you find an example of the P47 not being able to turn with the Fw 190, that might help prove your point.

PPS Looking at the P47 list of combats, look at the fourth on the list key points, I dived onto him, closed to 50 yards, broke over him and climbed into the sun. It took me about 4 mins to find an example http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/p-47/er/4-beeson-14jan44.jpg

[Glider]

It seems stalling speed is unrelated to low-speed sustained turns (which is why the Ki-100 performs so dramatically better than the Ki-84 in sustained turns), just like high speed dive pull-outs are unrelated to low-speed turning, but on the other hand high speed dive pull-out performance does correlate with stall speed quite well. It should; the prop disc load is reduced in the dive by faster incoming air, reducing its influence, and, like the straight-line stall, there is is no slower incoming air in the top prop disc portion to create an assymetrical load...

The FW-190A has exactly the pathetic dive pull-out performance that one would expect for its stall speed, which also correlates well with its high wingloading.

The FW-190A is the only fighter for which Eric Brown states "Killing speed by sinking imposes a Tactical restriction when pulling out from low-level dives".

The Fw 190 may well have been the only example Eric Brown comments on about the sink involved in pulling out resulting in a tactical restriction. However it wasn't the only aircraft that had a tactical restriction becasue of height loss when pulling out of a dive.

The P51, Spitfire and P47 all had restrictions on pulling out when attacking ground forces. The only exception seems to be the Hurricane which in the Far East were allowed to pull out at tree top height as they for practical purposes didn't mush (the normal word for it)

[K_Freddie]

I certainly could be wrong here but there is no difference in the torque in a WW2 figher with a radial engine compared to a WW2 inline powered engine and because of this had no impact on turn.
There was in WW1 because on a WW1 radial engine was normally a rotary engine where the prop was fixed to the engine and the engine went round.
Not being an expert in mechanical engineering, but having some insight after all the years.. I can only imagine that the Merlin's torque is applied over a few feet of engine length, whereas the BMW801 (sorry JTD :grin: ) torque is applied within a few inches of length.

This I would think and experienced, if Oleg has modeled it right, caused the FW to screw/hang on the nose... maybe similar to the Camel or Fokker DR1 from WW1, whereas the merlin just pulled the plane over due to it's application of torque over a longer length, making it difficult to control if you walled the throttle

[K_Freddie]

.... for practical purposes didn't mush (the normal word for it)
Yes.. he is aware of the term ;)

[Glider]

I suspect it had more to do with the design of the prop. Those on the Spitfire were a lot larger than those on the Fw190. The forces and lift generated by the prop would be magnified on the Spitfire as they were further away from the Fuselage.

I admit to pushing my theory here as these issues are not a real problem in Gliders.

[K_Freddie]

Sorry, I'm talking about about the longitudinal length of the camshaft along the length the the engine, which is longer in the Merlin compared to the BMW801.

But, yes I notice that the Spit props were longer and thinner.. but this is beyond my current knowledge. :)

Maybe Gaston's mechanical adversary (cannot remember his forum AKA) will chip in here..?

[JtD]

Torque is simply a result of power divided by propeller rpm. The Fw had a prop reduction gear ratio of 1:1.85 = 0.54 with engine rpm 2700, the Spitfire IX a ratio of 0.477 with engine rpm of 3000. This puts the prop at 1458rpm on the Fw, and 1431rpm on the Spitfire. Engine power output of the Fw is higher at low altitude, but somewhat lower at medium and high altitude, and, given the very similar rpm, torque is going to be the same.

However, torque isn't the real problem, the gyro effect of the spinning prop disc is a bigger one. Torque is something you can trim your aircraft for and then can pretty much forget about, but gyro effects are something you'll notice every time you maneuver the aircraft.

To estimate the gyro effects, you'd need prop speed, diameter and weight, which I don't know where to look up from the top of my head, so I'll skip this one, but I doubt there'll be a huge difference.

One of the relative strengths of the Fw compared to the Spitfire were the very well balanced controls, which made handling easier and smoother. This is also a feature that definitely is present in game.

[Glider]

Personally I am waiting for Gaston to take up my challenge.

[Gaston]

Personally I am waiting for Gaston to take up my challenge.

If you have read all the 600 P-47 combat accounts and still don't know the P-47 badly out-turns the Me-109G in all circumstances, then there isn't much point in providing any evidence is it?

I have for years presented all of you out there with the challenge to find one combat example of the Me-109G out-turning the P-47, in any circumstance, but especially at low speeds, and still nothing has come up...

If you don't see that P-47 turning fights outnumber the one dive and zoom example you provided (indeed correctly) by a ratio of about ten or twenty to one, I wonder what is the point in debating the issue further: There are 600 P-47 combat accounts here, and so far you have provided one dive and zoom example and I have provided one more: I have read them all and there isn't a large number of those compared to P-47 turnfighting...

P-47 turnfighting also outnumbers P-51 turnfighting, and especially P-51 turnfighting at medium-low speed turning when decided within less than five-ten 360°s. Within one unsustained 360° at high speeds, the P-51 does excel occasionally at very high Gs.

However I will break it down into the actual numbers and ratios for those 600 combat reports when I have the time.

Gaston

[Glider]

Didn't think you would take up the challange.

Just to avoid any confusion this is the challenge

I have a challange for you. Pick any combat, from any of the lists you like, be it a Spitfire, P47, P51 whatever, totally your choice. And we will analyse the ten combats either side of the one you picked and see how many of those involved involved a turning horizontal combat.

I repeat the choice of aircraft, list and combat is totally yours. I don't think I can be fairer than that.
Lets see if you are willing to use those combat reports to prove your point

This in relation to your 95% of all combats involved turning combats

I have already disproved your statement about the Slow turning Spitfire combat, you will remember your statement that nearly all high speed turns are stall turns. I also disproved your statement about P47's not fighting in the vertical, remember that you only found one example and it took me four minutes to find another.

So right now your batting average is less than good.
I am confident that I can disprove your statement about 95% of air combat being sustained turns thats what the challange is about.

Why don't you provide the examples. So you can start with the 10-20 examples of a P47 fighting in turning fights.

PS another fire and climb example http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/p-47/er/361-rames-29april44.jpg
PPS another one http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/p-47/er/361-kruzel-29april44.jpg
PPPS And another one http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/p-47/er/361-hastin-30jan44.jpg
PPPPS Guess what http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/p-47/er/361-cole-8april44.jpg

edit Re the P47 turning compapred to the Me109. I have always believed that this differs with speed. At the slower speeds the 109 would have the advantage, at higher speeds the P47 (and P51) gain the advantage. This is down to the simple fact that the 109 control forces become very difficult at speed, a fact reported in a number of pilot statements and generally supported by the combat reports

[K_Freddie]

The P47 was great at altitude and speed, as much as it was good for ground attack, it excelled at high altitudes as well... according to one vet :grin:

If battles were high and if it had speed the P47 could win easily, but as soon as it slowed down, it was a sitting duck. In fact nearly all allied a/c were ducks at low speed, with exception maybe of the spit.
The axis planes seemed to be easier to handle at low to medium speeds.

[Glider]

I totally agree with you. Tempest pilots were continually told not to get into a slow turning fight with the 109.
As mentioned before the Tempest had a broadly similar turn performance as the P47/Typhoon/P51 and Fw 190 so it fits

[MaxGunz]

Reality checks --
* wing loading and excess thrust are the 1st order factors. 2nd order is less.
* say hello to stall speed differences

At low speed the stall speed is critical which goes right to wing loading.
The plane that has the lower stall speed can still turn where the other cannot.

In banked level turns the lift is tilted, you need to have enough to keep the plane level, wings at stall angle must fly faster to make the extra lift needed to both hold the plane up and turn.

Excess thrust which changes with speed and height only determines when a plane can no longer hold stall.

Look at FW stall speed compared to what others you want.

Or you can take bits of war stories that tell less than they leave out and weave them with poetic license into a fabric fit for fairies and other fantasies. To call that reality or historic is a shame.

[Glider]

What you say is correct but equally the control forces do have a bearing on the high speed turns.

No one would deny that the Zero was one of the best slow speed turners, but at anything above 250mph the controls were almost rigid and as a result its actual performance in a turn at these sppeds was very poor. Had the controls been given a different gearing/ configeration whatever then she would probably have been an even better all round fighter.

It was a similar story for the 109 but the critical speed was higher.

I have little doubt that the calculations and theories would say that the 109 and Zero had the wing performance and power to turn at higher speeds, but if you cannot move the controls then are going nowhere other than in a straight line or a gentle turn.

[lonewulf]

"No one would deny that the Zero was one of the best slow speed turners, but at anything above 250mph the controls were almost rigid and as a result its actual performance in a turn at these sppeds was very poor. Had the controls been given a different gearing/ configeration whatever then she would probably have been an even better all round fighter."

I don't mean to throw (another) red herring into the mix but that's an interesting point. Could the turn performance of a fighter be altered in this way, or by simply increasing the size or throw of the elevators?? I don't know but I suspect not. It seems unlikely that the engineers of the day were unable to come up with such an obvious and easy fix for something like the 109.

[Glider]

Its something that is probably easier to say than do. The Size of the control surfaces clearly has a bearing on this. However, make them smaller and the plane loses some of its agility. Change the config and you have to change the wing design with obvious complexities. Change the gearing and the aircraft will handle differently in particular the secondary control effects.
Its a big change and I was wrong to imply in my previous posting that it was straightforward.

The basic design of the Spit wing didn't change until the Mk20 right at the end of the war. The P47 until the H again at the end of the war, The Fw 190 until the Ta 152 again at the end of the war. The only front line fighter that I can think of that significantly changed its wing design early in the war was the Me109 F in 1940.

My main point was that the force needed to change the controls does impact the planes ability to turn at high speed. Sabru Saki made the observation that a lot of the suicide pilots who just missed their targets when diving in a Zero, probably were unable to move the controls because of how they locked up at speed.

[Glider]

GASTON

Still waiting for you to come up with a reply to the challange in relation to your 95% of all combats involved turning combats

Just to avoid any confusion this is the challenge

I have a challange for you. Pick any combat, from any of the lists you like, be it a Spitfire, P47, P51 whatever, totally your choice. And we will analyse the ten combats either side of the one you picked and see how many of those involved involved a turning horizontal combat.

I repeat the choice of aircraft, list and combat is totally yours. I don't think I can be fairer than that.

You keep saying that have studied these for years, that they support your statements and that I haven't read them.
Yet we find either :-
a) that you have no idea what they say or
b) you do know what they say, ignore it and are therefore lying

So lets see if you are willing to use those combat reports to prove your point, or when challenged, do you run away and hide as you have done before on other forums.

[Herra Tohtori]

"...But how am I to know a good flight model from the bad?"
"You will know... when you are calm, at peace, passive. A pilot uses the flight model for positioning and defense, NEVER to attack."
"But tell my why I can't..."
"No, no! There is no why."

Seriously though, I read through this whole conversation and I noticed two trends: Cherry-picking data, and magical thinking. There have been more than one person to do this in this conversation.

Cherry-picking data means that you look at accounts, pick the ones that support your opinion, and analyze them with the exclusion of other, conflicting reports such as actual, physical hard data about the aircraft themselves - their mass, wing area, engine power, thrust, control forces, critical angle of attack, stall characteristics etc. etc.

Magical thinking is a bit more complicated and is a continuation of the cherry-picking process. Since pilot accounts describe plane A in a way that contradicts our understanding of flight dynamics, and what its performance should be, the pilot accounts must be right and our understanding of flight dynamics OR the parametres of the aircraft A must be wrong.

This is magical thinking: "To match pilot accounts, magical properties must be added to the aircraft so that no conflict occurs."

However, when it comes time to explain what physical phenomena facilitate these properties, things become a bit difficult because mechanical physics is, on the most part, quite well known collection of knowledge and adding "unknown flight characteristics" smells incredibly fishy.

It's like trying to explain Grand Canyon if the preconception is that the world is only eight thousand years old: Since the world can't be billions of years old for these sediment layers to slowly form, there must have been a global flood that accumulated all these sediments at one go! This has, actually, been used as evidence for a global flooding... along with the fossil record... but I digress.

While I wouldn't wish to accuse anyone of dogmatic faith in scripture or pilot accounds, I can't help but notice certain tendencies in the argumentation on this thread.


In reality, I would not automatically consider any pilot accounts - either combat- or test pilot - "reliable" accounts of the characteristics of the aircraft itself, but rather specific accounts of what this pilot did in this particular situation against that pilot in that plane and how it happened to work out. Additionally, you're assuming that the undoubtedly highly skilled, experienced and intuitive pilots had the ability to put their experiences, feelings, and fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants gauging of different planes into objective format.

It's absolutely right that pitting aircraft against one another in evaluation test flight might not reveal what plane is the "best one" at some specific flight regime. But comparing the accounts of combat pilots is not exactly reliable either, because - you know - the accounts are written mostly by surviving veteran pilots who were probably both highly experienced and biased toward their own particular aircraft. This type of bias is perfectly normal and expected from humans put into situation where their life hangs on the performance of a machine and how well they can handle said machine. It's easy for the most rational person to ascribe almost mythical qualities to such a machine, especially if it happened to bring them home time after time.


Regardless. Ignoring the possibility of hidden variables, I'm sure we can all agree that the laws of physics apply on aircraft regardless of their type, manufacturer or pilot. The pilot can bring them closer to the edge of their performance, and possibly do tricks that other pilot can't, but as far as raw performance goes, the capabilities of an aircraft are fairly straightforward. I say fairly because aerodynamics is a really complicated science and there are often surprises even from quite simple designs, but nevertheless some simplifications still hold true.

If we look at a situation where an aircraft is turning, there are two key variables that describe its performance. Ones is turning radius, and the other is turn rate. Transient turn rate (and turn radius) mainly depend on the g-loading of the airframe at critical angle of attack, but transient turns bleed energy - the aircraft's energy state is not at equilibrium.

In sustained turn, the aircraft is banked and has elevated angle of attack, produces lift toward the direction of the turn, and maintains constant airspeed (producing constant lift), constant turn rate and constant turn radius.

The first requirement is constant airspeed. The aircraft typically produces quite high amount of drag with high angle of attack, so the aircraft's engine must produce the thrust to offset drag so that the airspeed does not further reduce. Since thrust is (mostly) a function of how much air the propeller can move, this is pretty much a function of propeller efficiency and engine power: The work done by the drag forces must be equal to the work done by the propeller's thrust.

Therefore: An aircraft with more thrust can maintain higher angle of attack and therefore its sustainable rate of turn is better. Inversely, however, an aircraft with less drag at optimal angle of attack might well be able to sustain higher turn rate at lower engine power, so this is not at all clear-cut parametre. A simplified expectation would be that an aircraft with more engine power should be able to sustain higher turn rate assuming other variables are identical.

The constant turn rate and constant turn radius mean that the aircraft can produce a constant centripetal acceleration, ie. a force accelerating it toward the centre of the turn. While vast majority of this force is basically the lift of the aircraft's wings and control surfaces, at very high angles of attack the propeller's thrust is also partially directed "inward" of the turning circle. In fact, if you're dancing at the edge of stall - critical angle of attack being let's say 15 degrees - as much as 25% of the aircraft's thrust is directed "upward" relative to the local airflow around the aircraft. While the main function of the propeller is to, should we say, propel the aircraft through air, its effect on "hanging on the prop" in high AoA turns should not be neglected.

That said: Most of the centripetal force is accounted by the lift produced by the aircraft's wing at that specific angle of attack.

Centripetal acceleration, then, is the sum of aerodynamic pressure forces divided by mass of the aircraft (a = F/m).

Note that most talk about wing loading is, at best, a gross simplification that assumes the wing's characteristics are very similar between two aircraft.

Wing loading, as a parametre, is merely the mass of the aircraft divided to the total surface area of the wing. While somewhat indicative of the general characteristics of the aircraft - especially within a specific class of aircraft such as WW2 fighter aircraft - there can still be radical differences in performance. Wing loading does not determine turn performance. Total lift produced by the aircraft does, and wing area is only one part of that equation.

The other part of the equation is the wing's airfoil profile. The two most influential factors are the wing's camber and chord thickness. Those are the ones that affect the wing's lift coefficient most. Other variables tend to affect the wing's critical angle of attack and lift-to-drag ratio.

I found an interesting site which includes references to the approximate airfoil shapes of quite a few aircraft: http://www.ae.illinois.edu/m-selig/ads/aircraft.html


For example:

Focke Wulf Fw 190A-8
Wing root: NACA 23015.3
Wing tip: NACA 23009
Chord thickness ratio (root/tip): 15.3% - 9%
Wing loading: 241 kg/m² / 48.4 lb/ft²
Power/mass ratio: 0.29-0.33 kW/kg

(I couldn't find A-5 wing loading but if the A-5 variant's loaded mass is known it would be trivial exercise to find out).

Focke Wulf Fw 190D-9
Wing root: NACA 23015.3
Wing tip: NACA 23009
Chord thickness ratio (root/tip): 15.3% - 9%
Wing loading: 238 kg/m² / 48.7 lb/ft²
Power/mass ratio: 0.30-0.35 kW/kg

Supermarine Spitfire Mk. V
Wing root: NACA 2213
Wing tip: NACA 2209.4
Chord thickness ratio (root/tip): 13% - 9.4%
Wing loading: 133.5 kg/m² / 27.35 lb/ft²
Power/mass: 0.36 kW/kg

Supermarine Spitfire Mk. IX
Wing root: NACA 2213
Wing tip: NACA 2209.4
Chord thickness ratio (root/tip): 13% - 9.4%
Wing loading: 159.8 kg/m² / 32.72 lb/ft²
Power/mass ratio: 0.42 kW/kg


For some reference, here are some chord thickness ratios at wing root and wing tip from some other prominent fighters:

F4F Wildcat: 15.3% - 9%
F6F Hellcat: 15.3% - 9%
F4U Corsair: 15.3% - 9%

(Identical airfoil profile with FW-190, tremendously lighter wing loading...)

La-5/F/FN/7: 16% - 10%
MC.205: 18% - 9%
Bf-109 G-6: 15% - 9% (NACA 2315 mod - NACA 2309 mod)

Hurricane: 19% - 12.2%
Typhoon: 19% - 13%
Tempest: 14% - 10%

MiG-3: 14% - 8%
Yak-1/7/9/3: 14% - 10%


Now what has this got to do with anything on this thread?

Well, aside from wing area, the chord thickness affects the amount of lift that the wing produces.

That means that if you have same nominal wing loading on two planes, but the other one has thicker wing, the one with thicker wing is producing more lift. For example, the Hawker Hurricane has wing loading of 121.9 kg/m² which is only 11.6 kg/m² lower than Spitfire Mk.V's wing loading - but the thicker wing would produce more lift, which pretty much explains why the Hurricane turns so much better than Spitfire both in-game and by the pilot accounts:

More lift means more centripetal acceleration.

More centripetal acceleration means higher sustained turn rate.

But wait, that's not all! Higher chord ratio means that the wing also produces more drag. So that means the aircraft will need more engine power to offset the work done by increased drag force, or it will travel slower through the sustained turn - and reduced airspeed reduces available lift which reduces centripetal acceleration which reduces the sustained turn rate.

True to this assumption, the Hurricane really does lose its energy quite fast in hard turns and while its sustained turn is still better than Spitfire's, it is also really slow at that point.


Spitfire's wing is slightly thinner than the FW-190 wing at root, but slightly thicker at the wing tip; however, as the FW-190 wing was trapezoid and Spitfire wing elliptical, the root chord of Spitfire has much bigger significance and it can be said that Spitfire's wing is overall thinner than FW-190 wing.

What this means is that while FW-190 A-8's wing loading is as high as 241 kg per square metre and Spitfire Mk.IX's wing loading is 160 kg per square metre, the Spitfire doesn't in fact turn 33% better than the FW-190 A-8. Instead the difference would be somewhere between 0%-33% in unpowered turns. In sustained powered turns, the thrust of the propeller will also affect things as it is directed "outward" from the turning circle, and the thrust/weight ratio also comes to play - and Spitfire IX has a lot more power.


So how can we make any sense of any of this?


The answer is: It's really hard, really complicated, and the vast odds are against armchair pilots trying to think how each of these parametres affects each other.


As far as simulation accuracy goes... if you have a good flight dynamics model, and you have the correct values for relevant terms for the aircraft, they should have close to historical performance characteristics.

Will they behave like the planes historically did? Hell no. First of all most pilots in IL-2 tend to operate very differently from the paranoid survivors who checked their six every twelve seconds, kept track of everything that happened around them, and aspired to never put themselves in a position to get shot at, while putting themselves in a position where they could shoot at the enemy.

As has been said in this discussion, bullets flying tends to motivate men and mice. In a real combat situation, a lot more factors affect the outcome than just the performance of the aircraft. For example, FW-190 offers much better all-round visibility than the Spitfire (or Bf-109 for that matter). Additionally, when Bf-109's and FW-190's were operating together, it would make perfect sense for the FW-190's to fly at lower altitude and Bf-109's at higher altitude because the BMW engine was inferior at higher altitudes compared to the DB engine of the 109.

I am reasonably certain that no FW-190 pilot would have wanted to enter into a sustained turn fight with any allied fighter aircraft if they had any other choice.

As the facts may be, they often may not have had any other choice as the quality and amount of material and pilots on the Allied side grew and Luftwaffe was run over by P-51's, P-47's, Spitfires, Tempests etc. etc.

Whether or not any of these designs were objectively "better" at turning than FW-190 or Bf-109 didn't really matter much at this point. The Luftwaffe fighters' main task was to go after the bomber fleets, and they would have tried to avoid combat with Allied fighters as much as possible.

And even so: As the war progressed, many Allied fighter pilots flew all their sorties with no enemy combat, while Luftwaffe pilots engaged in combat almost every sortie. Is it a big surprise that pilot accounts of the capabilities of individual aircraft may have been skewed by the other factors affecting the set-ups of the individual fights? I think not.


If there's something I've learned while studying physics it is that complicated interactions of a veritable horde of parametres is not always quite exact science and often the only reliable data comes from experimentation.

Sadly, the majority of war-time fighter aircraft have been destroyed or otherwise rendered flightless. The best solution to the question of evaluating flight performances would be to construct new production planes of each fighter, and then test their performance.

Needless to say this may prove somewhat expensive, so in lieu of that, the best alternative is to look at the sources of data, form some sort of opinion on what data to use, and then use it. In the end, this is first and foremost a game. As much as I would love to know that the aircraft we fly on bit sky are accurate representations of their real world counterparts, I'm willing to accept that sometimes we can't get what we want quite as much as we want.

With that in light, as long as I'm having fun and I can find viable ways to use different aircraft in the game, I can live with possible historical inaccuracies.


Finally, an anecdote.

I have encountered a couple FW-190 pilots in this game that would outmaneuver a Spitfire flown by me. I have, on occasion, done so myself. But whether "outmaneuver" is the same as "out-turn" is anyone's guess...

End of story. Take of it what you will, ignore the rest if you wish.

[MaxGunz]

@Glider:

Eric Schilling described the 'barn door' ailerons of the Zero as the same kind of limit that you do.

Even the term high speed, IMO is relative to the plane and not absolute. But those Gaston-claims from 2008 (yup, read the post dates) keep going to FW's out-turning Spits at low speed.. are much easier to shoot down.


Herra, you should have been around 8-10 years ago when the aero-engineers were posting actively. All the little details, the full 9 course meal was laid out and the result was more to disagree on!

As to pilot stories, just count the missing details starting with who was piloting the other plane(s) or how good were they? Don't forget that 'much' is not a detail! In the end, if they tell 10% then that is a very detailed story.

[Herra Tohtori]

Herra, you should have been around 8-10 years ago when the aero-engineers were posting actively. All the little details, the full 9 course meal was laid out and the result was more to disagree on!

I have no doubt.

As to pilot stories, just count the missing details starting with who was piloting the other plane(s) or how good were they? Don't forget that 'much' is not a detail! In the end, if they tell 10% then that is a very detailed story.

Yep, exactly my point. It's unlikely, and unfair, to expect pilot accounts to be a viable source of objective information, considering most anecdotes come from pilots who happened to survive multiple encounters with the enemy.

The dead men tell no tales of why their aircraft "failed" them while the survivors claim that you could outmaneuvre spitfires with FW-190's - a claim, I am certain, that was absolutely certain with regards to early FW-190 A versus Spitfire Mk.V's, but outmaneuvering... outflying... power, climb, dive speed, roll rate... it's not necessarily the same as "turning harder" (though that does help).

Fact is, ALL the aircraft in the war - were a product of their time, derivatives of same technology and engineering principles. Most of them could do the same things as the other, with small variations on how fast or how well or how hard it would do thing X, and it was up to the PILOTS to identify the strong points and weak points versus this or that aircraft, and then USE the strong points while AVOIDING the weak points against that particular aircraft. The pilots with good situational awareness, or the lucky ones who managed to gain enough experience to learn the basics, would usually survive longer and longer as their experience about their plane and the enemy planes increased.

I remember hearing that during the Battle of Britain, if you survived the first five sorties, your odds of surviving the whole war increased exponentially, and this is exactly why, in my opinion.

And now you have the surviving pilots telling how they out-turned the enemy plane, so you would likely find anecdotes about ANY plane having out-turned ANY enemy plane. Question is whether the enemy plane was turning as hard as they could. After all, the bandit you don't see is the one that gets you. As long as you can maintain visual contact on an enemy, you can usually evade pretty effectively even if you are flying "inferior" aircraft - either in energy, angles, or both aspects.

But when you're not sure where the enemy is, and you're trying to locate them, you don't necessarily turn quite as hard as you could because you like being able to see and breathe and turn your head without breaking your neck... that's when the FW-190 that has your Spitfire in your sights will "out-turn" you, maybe?

I could think of a myriad more reasons why pilot accounts, interesting stories as they are, should only be viewed as evidence of why that pilot happened to survive the war, and not necessarily so much related on the aircraft they flew on. Then, flight valuation test data and performance data of engines and airframes from the most reliable sources remains the best option...


More anecdotes: Finnish Air Force pilots tend to have thought almost universally that there was not much difference between the turning ability of Bf-109 G-2 and G-6 - only if you had wing cannon gondolas, the handling of the G-6 would be significantly reduced...

...and the leading Finnish ace, the highest scoring non-German ace (Eino Ilmari Juutilainen) finished the war with 94 confirmed aerial combat victories in 437 sorties, without having ever been hit by enemy aircraft. He also never lost a wingman.

Naturally, from this anecdote we can deduct that the Bf-109 G-6 and by extension all the other late Gustavs are undermodeled as far as their turning ability goes! ;)

[IceFire]

...and the leading Finnish ace, the highest scoring non-German ace (Eino Ilmari Juutilainen) finished the war with 94 confirmed aerial combat victories in 437 sorties, without having ever been hit by enemy aircraft. He also never lost a wingman.

Naturally, from this anecdote we can deduct that the Bf-109 G-6 and by extension all the other late Gustavs are undermodeled as far as their turning ability goes! ;)

Or Finnish pilots are overmodelled :cool:

[Glider]

Or Finnish pilots are overmodelled :cool:

Overmodelled no, cool certainly

[MaxGunz]

Or Finnish pilots are overmodelled :cool:

First time Russia sent troops to Finland they found that the whole Finnish military was over-modeled! But quantity has a quality all its own... :(

Really, in the old Avalon Hill Panzer Leader series design notes they rated the Finns so highly that the regulars were treated as elite officers.

[K_Freddie]

First time Russia sent troops to Finland they found that the whole Finnish military was over-modeled! But quantity has a quality all its own...
This happens when you shoot people without realising that they're your best you'll ever have.

That's him, the one I forgot ... MaxGunz ;)

So that we're now all back +- a few extras.. are we agreed that the aeronautical engineers do not know everything about aerodynamics, as well as the pilots do not know much about aeronautical formulae ??

;)

[MaxGunz]

AE's can tell you to what decimal point they know and prove it.

People expect too much from computers and algorithms they can run.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* To match charts everywhere and still give every effect possible is not possible on a PC is not a failure of aero-engineering.
* To know all the details of historic planes without the actual planes is also not possible given that serially produced planes did vary often as much as 5% in a production run.
* Gauges of the times have different kinds of error including position error so we have seen a picture of 2 fighters wing to wing where IAS on one was 20 kph more than the other. How can anyone play comparison chart monkey when that is true? How can their knickers get so twisted over 'FACTS!' that are not?
* Flight sim makers bring however much they can make work on the PC of what they know. It is wrong to try and judge what they know by how the sim works.

You want to play "all opinions are equal", it is because you can't tell any better. You might as well invoke the influence of the planets and stars or even resort to "stress risers".

[Airfoil]

I am reminded of a story a friend told me of a conversation he heard at an Aircrew Association gathering with vets from the Luftwaffe and the RAF/RCAF. One Hurricane pilot was talking with a Do-17 pilot of the same vintage. He was saying how fast the Do-17 was and relaid his constant cursing that his Hurricane was not fast enough.

His counterpart chuckled and said he always thought the Do was too slow and they were too easy to catch. When you are trying to catch (or run away from something) you are never fast enough or I would imagine, able to turn tight enough. Perspective is everything.

[JtD]

Its something that is probably easier to say than do. The Size of the control surfaces clearly has a bearing on this. However, make them smaller and the plane loses some of its agility. Change the config and you have to change the wing design with obvious complexities. Change the gearing and the aircraft will handle differently in particular the secondary control effects. This was actually done with the ailerons when the P-36 was upgraded to the Allison engined P-40. The leverage was increased, which meant less maximum aileron deflection at low speed (stick travel limit), but more aileron deflection at higher speeds (force limit). The P-40 had a lower roll rate at low speed than the P-36, but a considerably higher maximum roll rate and a much higher roll rate at high speed.

[ElAurens]

Indeed, I do believe that until the FW 190 came along the P 40 was the roll rate king of fighters.

[Glider]

This was actually done with the ailerons when the P-36 was upgraded to the Allison engined P-40. The leverage was increased, which meant less maximum aileron deflection at low speed (stick travel limit), but more aileron deflection at higher speeds (force limit). The P-40 had a lower roll rate at low speed than the P-36, but a considerably higher maximum roll rate and a much higher roll rate at high speed.

Thanks for this, something I didn't know before. It helps explain why the P36 did as well as they did against the Ki43 when it didn't have the speed advantage that the P40 had.

Thanks again

[K_Freddie]

They say when holding a weapon, one should point it skywards as you might shoot yourself in the foot. :cool:

[MaxGunz]

http://yarchive.net/mil/p40.html

[Gaston]

[I]"...

I am reasonably certain that no FW-190 pilot would have wanted to enter into a sustained turn fight with any allied fighter aircraft if they had any other choice.
.

Do you know of any FW-190A pilot who actually said such a thing?

The only concrete thing in that direction I ever found, for all of WWII, is a ridiculous quote from a German La-5 Rechlin test center evaluation: It said that the La-5FN's sustained turn rate is slower than a Me-109G, but faster than a FW-190A's...

It positively reeks of ignorance and sillyness, and the Rechlin test center itself has said several times textually the opposite ("The FW-190A out-rolls and out-turns our Me-109F at any speed"), but it's there...

Another quote, in the same direction, is a comparison test between the Me-109G14AS and FW-190A-9s at 26-28 000 ft., which puts the Me-109G14AS as far faster turning at said altitude (where the FW-190A can barely fly), which is very plausible given the absurdly high and impractical altitude of the test, given the time period and the available roles for the Luftwaffe at the time (late '44)...

That's it for my fifteen years of research... British RAE tests unequivocally state the FW-190A turns far better than the Me-109G, which Me-109G is out-turned by a P-51B with full drop tanks, while the same P-51 cannot out-turn the FW-190A even when clean... It seems the Me-109G is badly short-changed here (it has only a slight disadvantage to, occasionally, a perfect sustained turn parity to the P-51B in actual battles), and this, to my mind, just shows how unreliable these non-combat side-by-side tests can be...

Given what else I've been finding for fifteen years now, and posting for five, I'd say you'd be up the creek finding such a ridiculous agreeing statement (to what you said) from an actual FW-190A combat veteran.

Occasionally some FW-190A pilot did believe this crap, judging from their continual use of diving and ailerons in combat, but judging from the outcomes of those tactics, these pilots typically didn't live long enough to voice their opinion about it...

Gaston

[Herra Tohtori]

Do you know of any FW-190A pilot who actually said such a thing?


Well, I'm just pretty sure no pilot flying ANY PLANE would have ever wanted to enter a prolonged turning fight with any fighter, if they had alternatives...

The only concrete thing in that direction I ever found, for all of WWII, is a ridiculous quote from a German La-5 Rechlin test center evaluation: It said that the La-5FN's sustained turn rate is slower than a Me-109G, but faster than a FW-190A's...

It positively reeks of ignorance and sillyness, and the Rechlin test center itself has said several times textually the opposite ("The FW-190A out-rolls and out-turns our Me-109F at any speed"), but it's there...

Another quote, in the same direction, is a comparison test between the Me-109G14AS and FW-190A-9s at 26-28 000 ft., which puts the Me-109G14AS as far faster turning at said altitude (where the FW-190A can barely fly), which is very plausible given the absurdly high and impractical altitude of the test, given the time period and the available roles for the Luftwaffe at the time (late '44)...

That's it for my fifteen years of research... British RAE tests unequivocally state the FW-190A turns far better than the Me-109G, which Me-109G is out-turned by a P-51B with full drop tanks, while the same P-51 cannot out-turn the FW-190A even when clean... It seems the Me-109G is badly short-changed here (it has only a slight disadvantage to, occasionally, a perfect sustained turn parity to the P-51B in actual battles), and this, to my mind, just shows how unreliable these non-combat side-by-side tests can be...

Given what else I've been finding for fifteen years now, and posting for five, I'd say you'd be up the creek finding such a ridiculous agreeing statement (to what you said) from an actual FW-190A combat veteran.

Occasionally some FW-190A pilot did believe this crap, judging from their continual use of diving and ailerons in combat, but judging from the outcomes of those tactics, these pilots typically didn't live long enough to voice their opinion about it...

Gaston


To be sure, I personally think IL-2 does not sufficiently model the control forces required to maneuver at high speeds. An FW-190 would very likely out-turn a Bf-109 if the pilot in 109 could not use full control deflection due to excessive control forces. Same applies to P-51.

Additionally in the Bf-109 we can use both the trim wheel and flaps fast and with no difficulty; I would love to see the octopus pilot that can juggle all that in combat. The flaps in 109 were very slow to actuate and fully manual - you turn a wheel in cockpit and the flaps go down, you couldn't really actually use "combat flaps" as a quick decision - you would have to set combat flaps position before hard maneuvering.


The pilot makes an incredible difference in these birds. Especially in Bf-109 where not only pilot's skill but physical constitution and strength would definitely affect the aircraft's turn performance at high speeds. Just as A6M would roll better when pilot could exert higher force on the control column. Every virtual pilot has identical strength to move the controls, when comparing two pilots in two identical planes. Whether that strength remains constant from plane to plane is anyone's guess.


The actual physics of the matter are not exactly up for debate, though. The comparative weighs, lift capabilities of the wings, thrust from the propeller... all these factors are well documented and can be modeled quite well, physical testing notwithstanding.

Fact of the matter is that the 109 had lower wing loading, better thrust-to-weight ratio, and very similar wing chord profile as the FW-190. That means at similar airspeed and angle of attack, the Bf-109 wing would be able to produce better centripetal acceleration, reducing in better turn rate and (at same airspeed) smaller turn radius.

To me that tells that when flown to their capabilities the 109 would probably have no problems out-turning FW-190 in a prolonged horizontal plane turning fight, and moreover would have no problems controlling the engagement in vertical plane due to better turn rate. The FW-190 pilot would be insane to offer such fight when the plane is faster anyway (at low to medium altitudes).

[MaxGunz]

Stall speed shapes the low speed limits of flight and maneuver. Those stall speeds are historical qualified and quantified facts, not unqualified comments or unsupported opinions taken further for an agenda.

Of course you can always bring up "stress risers" again, or find some other fake buzz word to crank that cracked theory along.

15 years of playing with words and discounting everything that says the 190 wasn't a great stall-fighter vs people who model the planes based on REAL parameters and full educations in aerodynamics who say different. Hmmmm, boy, ain't dot tricky eh?

[K_Freddie]

Ah! it's good to have all back again...
As we've settled down to the aerodynamic theorists, who professes to know everything, and the pilot who experiences everything....

Is there any pilot report that can explain the different facts explicitly - probably not.

On the other hand is there any aerodynamic 'theorist' who has explicit flight knowledge of the aircraft in question - Zippo ;)

So who are we to trust in this scenario - I'll take pilot experience any day, tempered with a bit of common sense

The biggest difference on all aircraft designs was that Kurt Tank, was a pilot, beside FW190 design engineer.. :)
Yup.. I'll still stick with Gaston's theory

[Glider]

Do you know of any FW-190A pilot who actually said such a thing?

The only concrete thing in that direction I ever found, for all of WWII, is a ridiculous quote from a German La-5 Rechlin test center evaluation: It said that the La-5FN's sustained turn rate is slower than a Me-109G, but faster than a FW-190A's...

It positively reeks of ignorance and sillyness, and the Rechlin test center itself has said several times textually the opposite ("The FW-190A out-rolls and out-turns our Me-109F at any speed"), but it's there...

Another quote, in the same direction, is a comparison test between the Me-109G14AS and FW-190A-9s at 26-28 000 ft., which puts the Me-109G14AS as far faster turning at said altitude (where the FW-190A can barely fly), which is very plausible given the absurdly high and impractical altitude of the test, given the time period and the available roles for the Luftwaffe at the time (late '44)...

That's it for my fifteen years of research... British RAE tests unequivocally state the FW-190A turns far better than the Me-109G, which Me-109G is out-turned by a P-51B with full drop tanks, while the same P-51 cannot out-turn the FW-190A even when clean... It seems the Me-109G is badly short-changed here (it has only a slight disadvantage to, occasionally, a perfect sustained turn parity to the P-51B in actual battles), and this, to my mind, just shows how unreliable these non-combat side-by-side tests can be...

Given what else I've been finding for fifteen years now, and posting for five, I'd say you'd be up the creek finding such a ridiculous agreeing statement (to what you said) from an actual FW-190A combat veteran.

Occasionally some FW-190A pilot did believe this crap, judging from their continual use of diving and ailerons in combat, but judging from the outcomes of those tactics, these pilots typically didn't live long enough to voice their opinion about it...

Gaston

Glad to see that you re still alive Gaston.

As for your 15 years of research I don't believe a word of it. Please take up the challange I have given you a number of times. If you can prove your point using the evidence you claim then you have some credibility, without it you have none.

You can of course supply the British tests which say what you say :-

That's it for my fifteen years of research... British RAE tests unequivocally state the FW-190A turns far better than the Me-109G, which Me-109G is out-turned by a P-51B with full drop tanks, while the same P-51 cannot out-turn the FW-190A even when clean... It seems the Me-109G is badly short-changed here (it has only a slight disadvantage to, occasionally, a perfect sustained turn parity to the P-51B in actual battles), and this, to my mind, just shows how unreliable these non-combat side-by-side tests can be...

I say this as you have considerable form for saying things that are not supported and as a result are not true.

[JtD]

Ah! it's good to have all back again...
As we've settled down to the aerodynamic theorists, who professes to know everything, and the pilot who experiences everything....

Is there any pilot report that can explain the different facts explicitly - probably not.

On the other hand is there any aerodynamic 'theorist' who has explicit flight knowledge of the aircraft in question - Zippo ;)

So who are we to trust in this scenario - I'll take pilot experience any day, tempered with a bit of common sense

The biggest difference on all aircraft designs was that Kurt Tank, was a pilot, beside FW190 design engineer.. :)
Yup.. I'll still stick with Gaston's theoryIt's not a good idea to stick with a theory that ignores 80% of the facts and misinterprets another 15%.

[MaxGunz]

The pilot who experiences everything... LOL! What poetry! What utter nonsense!

What's behind stall and low speed turning is well within demonstrated facts. It's something that -all- those pilots had to learn right at the start. If you don't think so, find an old ground school manual.

If you want to quibble 2 or 3 places past the decimal and offhand say that makes aerodynamics knowledge of flight less than that of not a combat pilot but of some non-pilot, crap-math-and-science gamer's interpretation of what the combat pilot wrote as an after-action report or war story then go ahead if it lets you feel better about yourself but you're wrong.

[Rot Bourratif]

Herra is making a good point about control stiffness in certain flight configurations.

There is also the issue of G load on the capacity to effect the controls as your limbs are pulled in another direction.

High G load sustained turns will tire the pilot out and make him dizzy.

Maybe a Spitfire pilot who just escaped a couple of passes by a 190 through pulling as hard as he could on the stick will be tired out.

Maybe the 190 pilot would notice that the turns are not as sharp any more and now easily turn with him.

Nothing to do with actual Aircraft performance, though.

Just my tuppence.

[K_Freddie]

So, aerodynamic maths explain 100% of flight, a 100% of the time and the pilot's always wrong, according to the 'propellor head' on the ground.

You sound like an aircraft crash investigator out to needle the pilot, as they usually do. Not that they always wrong, but they not always right and in this situation not likely to accept this.
;)

[JtD]

So, aerodynamic maths explain 100% of flight, a 100% of the time and the pilot's always wrong, according to the 'propellor head' on the ground.I gave it a 5% margin.

[K_Freddie]

I was thinking up to 10%, which is why I'll allow Gaston's argument.

I'm well aware of the manuals and their contents, the pilot errors, etc...
While not being a Mech/Aerodynamic engineer, I do work in the engineering field.. some 34 years of it, some on aircraft and some pilot time. So I am no stranger theory, formulae and modelling.. as well as the practical side, plus all the goodies that go with it.

Putting this all together, I'm not going to rule out Gaston 100%.
;)

[Janosch]

Just one more thing, said Columbo. What about computer games besides Il-2? It seems that Fw-190 made first appearance in Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe (1991) (I can do research too, ha ha ha), and it wasn't a great turnfighter there, and so it has been ever since in all games to follow. Do you guys think that the all of the game designers who put 190 in their games did their research wrong?

[K_Freddie]

It's like Stats.. you see what you want to see.
Before IL2 came out not many (in the west) knew that there was a war on the eastern front, never mind a tank busting machine like the IL2, I mean the P51 won the war.

I at the time believed all that 'research' too, but Oleg opened our eyes.
Now I'm a bit wiser about being too judgmental.
;)

[Oryx]

Wow, I haven't posted about Il-2 for a very long time, but just cannot resist with a comment like the one below:

So, aerodynamic maths explain 100% of flight, a 100% of the time

Actually, it does. For the simple reason that flight is described "perfectly" by the laws of physics. There are no exceptions. At least, in many years of flight testing from inside the aircraft and from a telemetry station on the ground, I have yet to see a single case of an aircraft defying the laws of physics. Also, today the knowledge surrounding the various factors that contribute to the forces acting on the aircraft are very well understood and can be modelled very accurately - at least accurate enough that the prediction models get extremely close to the measured ones.

When it comes to flight simulation, however, the programmers must strike a balance between fidelity and practicality. The most difficult part is not to model the kinematics - the equations are quite simple - but to generate the data to populate the models. To generate this data is both time consuming and costly. I have worked with simulators where the fidelity was so high, that we would sometimes only use spot checks in actual flight to confirm the simulator predictions. However, to achieve that level of fidelity took wind tunnel tests, numerical predictions (such as CFD) and also in-flight systems identification. The costs are obviously staggering to create such a model. This is not feasible for a game, especially ones where more than one aircraft needs to be modelled, so developers have to make some decisions on how far to go in the modelling process. The result will always be a compromise. It doesn't mean there are some voodoo aerodynamic effects going on that engineers don't understand.

and the pilot's always wrong, according to the 'propellor head' on the ground.

I don't think it is one or the other: I often rely on test pilot comments during testing. However, what is very true and I think both you and Gaston seem to miss, is that the combat environment is probably the worst possible time to compare aircraft performance. There are just too many things going on to make any quantitative judgement, unless the differences between the aircraft are really large, such as a jet vs a piston-prop. For example, does the other guy really have a faster aircraft, or did he just start the fight slightly higher and was able to build up some energy into the merge? Or does he really turn better or is the fight just happening closer to his corner speed than yours? Half the time, you won't even remember your own configuration during the fight (speed, height, throttle settings, etc), let alone what the other guy was doing. Even if one aircraft type consistently outperformed another on a certain aspect during combat, the reason might very well still lie with better tactics rather than a true performance advantage.

I say the above with utmost respect to fighter pilots with whom I have also worked extensively. I have seen clearly inferior aircraft consistently beat superior aircraft in mock combat when the pilot in the inferior aircraft was experienced, especially when he was experienced in both types. An example that I have seen with my own eyes were fights between fighter trainers and front-line fighters, where instructors in the trainers could consistently give rookies in the front-line fighters a hard time. I bet some of those rookies were thinking to themselves that their mounts were not nearly as good as advertised, while in reality the instructors just understood better how to exploit the strengths and weaknesses of the two types.

Somewhere earlier in the thread I think Gaston referred to "canned tests". Yes, that is exactly what one has to do during flight tests to determine the true potential of the aircraft. The only way to really know is to isolate parameters one by one and then test them. Combat is not the time to measure what the aircraft can do - combat is the time to put that knowledge to use.

By the way, flight testing is about much more than performance - I have spent much more time on flying qualities and handling qualities testing than performance testing. Handling qualities are extremely important when the question comes up on whether you can consistently extract the maximum potential out of the aircraft. Yet, on gaming simulations the topic of handling qualities seldom come up as few people know how to measure and interpret them. Of course, these days even more time is spent on avionics and systems testing, but that is another topic.

A small final comment before I let you guys be. I honestly don't have the time or energy to comment on every point made by Gaston, but this one really stood out:
My note: horizontal combat was never considered outdated in all of WWII, except for the Allies in the Pacific: It covers about 95%+ of all Western air battle in 1944
This is simply not true. There were many dogfights in WWII and many did indeed end up in horizontal combat. In fact, I bet the natural reaction when bounced is to turn. However, attacking from superior height was the preferred method for just about everyone and it remains so today. Horizontal combat (in fact, dogfighting in general) is always a gamble - you may or may not win depending on the relative skill of your oponent. Attacking from superior height gives the attacker an "unfair" advantage, even if he has an inferior aircraft. Entering a fight with the plan to immediately enter horizontal combat is never a good idea. Only once the fight developes into a dogfight might a pilot with an aircraft with known good turning performance prefer to stay in the horizontal. The most consistent results always came from attacking using an energy advantage (height or speed) and then to get the victim on the first pass, ideally without him ever seeing you and without letting a "dogfight" develop - and this is exactly what accounted for the majority of aerial kills in WWII.

[IceFire]

Oryx: Agreed, that comment does stand out and it's in stark contrast to any volume of reading on WWII air combat on nearly all fronts of the war.

I love this quote from a Russian pilot in particular:
Q: Could you describe ordinary dogfight?
I can’t understand the question… There were no dogfights. You saw an airplane, approach it from behind, attack and leave. Bombers were not advised to attack from straight behind – the gunner would get you. Better attack it from behind-low, with an angle 20-30 degrees. Take lead and fire your weapons.
On the other hand over Kuban it was always cloudy, enemy would suddenly appear out of the clouds in front of you… And you just press the button… Single shot. I do not remember a single case when there would be a “dogfight”. Speed and maneuver is everything!
http://mig3.sovietwarplanes.com/pilots/zyvagin/zyvagin.htm

This would not be an isolated comment either. It's not to say that dogfights didn't happen but they are much romanticized I think.

[MaxGunz]

Holy Crow! A WWII pilot quote not being taken out of context or otherwise misused!

[Herra Tohtori]

So, aerodynamic maths explain 100% of flight, a 100% of the time and the pilot's always wrong, according to the 'propellor head' on the ground.
;)


Aerodynamics as a science explains the flight characteristics of any aircraft with excellent precision.

Simulators are a different thing. Not only is the performance and handling characteristics always an approximation to some degree, the amount of things simulated may affect the actual combat performance of the aircraft.

For example, if you choose to fly with wonderwoman view, the visibility (cockpit design) ceases to be a factor, which gives a lot of advantage to planes such as F4U, Bf-109, and many others. When you restrict views to cockpit view only, planes with better visibility suddenly become a lot more effective in combat because the pilot can maintain their situational awareness better.

This is an example of a factor affecting combat performance in simulator, without having any difference in hard aerodynamic performance.

Similar example would be the thing I mentioned earlier: Handling qualities, control forces required to maneuver the aircraft, things that the simulation can only approximate to some degree based on some data. How hard can a pilot deflect ailerons in A6M Zero flying at 500 km/h? How hard is it to actually turn a Bf-109 diving at 650 km/h?

In other words, while simulators can usually be very accurate with the aerodynamic performance modeling, the combat performance of aircraft in virtual sky doesn't necessarily fully take into account the other things that were a definite factor in real life. Pilot skill, physical condition, fatigue level, tactical situation in majority of engagements, tactics that are used, fabrication differences between individual planes, visibility from the cockpit - none of this is usually even discussed when we're comparing aircraft performance.


The notion that any combat pilot with any practical experience (bar the very beginning of the war) would have voluntarily offered fight in horizontal plane if their plane was faster than the other is quite amusing. Even if your plane has better turn radius and turn rate, you would still want to retain all the energy you can in case the bandit's friends pop up when you're working on them.

Losing your energy puts you in more vulnerable position, no matter what your aircraft can do.

[KG26_Alpha]

Oryx: Agreed, that comment does stand out and it's in stark contrast to any volume of reading on WWII air combat on nearly all fronts of the war.


http://mig3.sovietwarplanes.com/pilots/zyvagin/zyvagin.htm

This would not be an isolated comment either. It's not to say that dogfights didn't happen but they are much romanticized I think.

Actually, in the interview over Kuban, not once does he mention he actually intentionally put his aircraft on the six of an enemy, rather they seemed to fly into his gun-sight.




.

[MaxGunz]

Similar example would be the thing I mentioned earlier: Handling qualities, control forces required to maneuver the aircraft, things that the simulation can only approximate to some degree based on some data. How hard can a pilot deflect ailerons in A6M Zero flying at 500 km/h? How hard is it to actually turn a Bf-109 diving at 650 km/h?

Oleg did model stick forces along with trim. IL2 pilots are restricted to 20 kg strength for game considerations, possibly because fatigue modeling was too much code. The IL-2 stick interface is strength based, how far you move your joystick modified by your stick settings says how much strength the virtual pilot applies to the virtual stick. And trim affects the virtual back forces (from control surfaces) that IL-2 does model. Oleg having been a test pilot did have ideas he wanted in his sim.

[Gaston]

Well, I'm just pretty sure no pilot flying ANY PLANE would have ever wanted to enter a prolonged turning fight with any fighter, if they had alternatives...).

How come then most of the time they did dogfight, and even more so if they were flying a P-47D or a FW-190A?

When they avoided dogfights was when they flew Spitfires... I've never seen any aircraft type that avoided dogfighting as consistently as the Spitfire...

In fact the avoidance of dogfighting by the late Spitfire marks is so consistent and so extreme I had a hard time believing it, thinking as I was that the weakness of guns forced turnfighting even on 1944 pilots: Because only 2% of shots are on target, the target has to be peppered for a sustained time to be brought down, which doesn't help diving and zooming...

It turns out the Spitfire's 20 mm are really long-range and powerful, and allows the Spitfire to avoid turnfighting where it is at a disadvantage compared to most types, except the Me-109G or P-51 which are roughly equal or slightly inferior to it...




To be sure, I personally think IL-2 does not sufficiently model the control forces required to maneuver at high speeds. An FW-190 would very likely out-turn a Bf-109 if the pilot in 109 could not use full control deflection due to excessive control forces. Same applies to P-51.

The Me-109G easily out-turns the FW-190 in unsustained high speed high G turns, despite much heavier elevator controls (which the trim does lighten, but not that much).

Same with the P-51 vs the P-47D, despite the P-47 having much lighter high speed elevator controls and the P-51 being described "as a real two-hander"...

So heavier controls are here inversely related to high-speed turn performance... Just because it is counter-intuitive doesn't mean our eyes have to be glued shut to what actually happens...

The FW-190A easily out-turns the Me-109G at low speeds sustained turns despite a much higher wingloading...

My theory explains perfectly well why those counter-intuitive things are the way they are.... And that includes how reducing the throttle reduces the wingloading...



The pilot makes an incredible difference in these birds. Especially in Bf-109 where not only pilot's skill but physical constitution and strength would definitely affect the aircraft's turn performance at high speeds. Just as A6M would roll better when pilot could exert higher force on the control column. .

Even at high speeds the pilot strength differences would actually be small compared to the enormous leverage forces acting on the aircraft, which actuall pre-determines what the pilot's strength actually is... In many cases the lightness of controls still results in poor high speed performance, which means the available leverage is sometimes way beyond what the airframe can do... It is leverages that matter, not pilot strength...

At high speed in a FW-190A, it might have better paid to have a light perceptive touch to avoid having the aircraft drop a wing or slip tail forward, if the aircraft's high speed turn/dive pull-out performance had not been so poor...

However the constant vibration in the FW-190A's control collumn killed the pilot's hand sensitivity to pressure anyway (like in the controls in the Black Hawk helicopter today), and this happened to a more or lesser extent on many types, and so the fine touch was just not available to a FW-190A pilot hoping to survive on this delicate touch at high speed: Better to fly at low speeds where the aircraft performance was far more capable of compensating the numb hands of the pilot...


The actual physics of the matter are not exactly up for debate, though. The comparative weighs, lift capabilities of the wings, thrust from the propeller... all these factors are well documented and can be modeled quite well, physical testing notwithstanding.

Well if they are so well documented, can you point me to the actual wing bending tests made during flight of WWII fighters aircrafts?

As far as I know nada... And if they had done any, the relationship between engine power and wingloading would be well established: The fact that it isn't shows it was never done in flight on big-engined nose-driven low-wing monoplane types...


Fact of the matter is that the 109 had lower wing loading, better thrust-to-weight ratio, and very similar wing chord profile as the FW-190. That means at similar airspeed and angle of attack, the Bf-109 wing would be able to produce better centripetal acceleration, reducing in better turn rate and (at same airspeed) smaller turn radius..

How come then the Me-109G is always out-turned by everything in sustained turns (except sometimes the P-51), unless it drops its throttle?


To me that tells that when flown to their capabilities the 109 would probably have no problems out-turning FW-190 in a prolonged horizontal plane turning fight, and moreover would have no problems controlling the engagement in vertical plane due to better turn rate. The FW-190 pilot would be insane to offer such fight when the plane is faster anyway (at low to medium altitudes).

How come Rechlin test conclusions are the opposite for the horizontal plane, and general pilot opinion, both friend and enemy, was usually the complete opposite?

And how come KG 200 unequivocally states "The P-47D (Razorback needle prop) out-turns our Bf-109G"?

And when they don't bother specifying the "turn", is intended to mean sustained low-speed, not short-lived high speed, where the term "radius" is used instead...

You just have to close your eyes on a lot to cling to more intuitively easy concepts.

More often than not, reality defeats intuitively easy ideas...

Gaston

[Oryx]

And this, ladies and gentleman, is why I and most other aeronautical engineers stopped posting on these forums.

And that includes how reducing the throttle reduces the wingloading...

Wing loading is measured in kg/m^2 - it is mass divided by area, not force divided by area. Unless you live in a different universe than us, throttle setting cannot change either the mass of the aircraft or the area of the wing.

There is no point trying to argue with you. You will believe what you want to believe, make up your own version of physics as required and suck random statistics out of your thumb - whatever. I have made my two posts for the decade.

[lonewulf]

How come then most of the time they did dogfight, and even more so if they were flying a P-47D or a FW-190A?

"When they avoided dogfights was when they flew Spitfires... I've never seen any aircraft type that avoided dogfighting as consistently as the Spitfire...

In fact the avoidance of dogfighting by the late Spitfire marks is so consistent and so extreme I had a hard time believing it, thinking as I was that the weakness of guns forced turnfighting even on 1944 pilots: Because only 2% of shots are on target, the target has to be peppered for a sustained time to be brought down, which doesn't help diving and zooming...

It turns out the Spitfire's 20 mm are really long-range and powerful, and allows the Spitfire to avoid turnfighting where it is at a disadvantage compared to most types, except the Me-109G or P-51 which are roughly equal or slightly inferior to it..."



Gaston, I begin to wonder if you actually comprehend the difference between what people do in the real world, and what people do in simulations. No one in their right mind is going to chance their future on the outcome of a sustained dogfight with an unknown enemy - unless forced to by circumstance. Combat pilots aren't there to test the capabilities of their aircraft or match their skills against those of the enemy. Their job is simple, it is to destroy the enemy as quickly and safely as they can. All sorts of crazy stuff may happen in war comics and movies but in real life where real ammunition is being used (by both sides) that sort of stuff is a no no. Get yourself into a sustained turn-fight with another aircraft and in all probability someone else, someone you haven't seen, will end the fight for you.

[K_Freddie]

Wing loading is measured in kg/m^2 - it is mass divided by area, not force divided by area. Unless you live in a different universe than us, throttle setting cannot change either the mass of the aircraft or the area of the wing.

Wouldn't weight be effected by mass + G-loading with is dependent on AOA, coupled with speed, which is controlled by throttle setting ?

Something a pilot would know instinctively.. ;)

Edt: Terminology correction.. 'Mass effect' not being consistent as weight changes. :) =>> Wing loading = Force / wing area (for want of a basic formula)

[JtD]

No, mass does not change with g. Weight does.

[K_Freddie]

Ja, you're right.. Sorry, I forgot for a moment :oops:

[K_Freddie]

I got a bit curious seeing that we're on about the Spit-vs-FW190. decided to have a look at the specs on wiki (if you can trust such a source - no smoke without a fire)

2 specs I find interesting are loaded weight and max takeoff weight. In both case on wiki, the Spits (Vb and XIV) loaded weight is only around 250Kgs below max takeoff weight. whereas the FW (A8 and D9) is a whopping 500Kgs. This is for a heavier aircraft with a weaker engine ??

This make me think that the Spit when loaded is simply flying closer to it's limit of staying in the air, than the FW even with it's higher wing loading. Which might encourage Spit pilots not to get happy about tight dogfights and rather use hit and run, which seemed to be the norm in the latter part of the war.

Something to think about ;)

[JtD]

Maximum take off weight has nothing to do with the ability of the plane to 'just stay in the air'.

Additionally, figures on wikipedia are wrong, for instance loaded weight (8488 lbs) is used for the stated Spitfire XIV maximum take off weight (9278 lbs with 90 gal drop tank).

[K_Freddie]

You'll find an airline pilot will not take off if his a/c is too heavy (close or beyond recommended takeoff weight)... there must be a reason for this. ;)

[JtD]

Yes, there is. In fact there are several.

[MaxGunz]

If you don't take into consideration what the takeoff speeds, runway lengths and air density are then you won't get much out of takeoff weights.

It's like when The Joke would say that more weight on a plane makes the plane faster because hang gliders fly faster with ballast. Yes the gliders do, because if they don't fly faster they will stall when the unballasted, slower glider is still not stalled.
But -powered- airplanes don't get their energy from their weight, they can go faster using the spinny thing up front. More weight just makes their wings have more drag, which BTW is not proportional to wing loading.

[Herra Tohtori]

Well, that all gets really complicated really fast.

Let's compare two aircraft of roughly same engine power, mass, and wing chord profile - only difference being that the other one has more wing area; for the sake of exercise let's keep the wing's aspect ratio also same, ie. chord length increase is proportionally same as wing span increase.

An aircraft with smaller wings has less parasitic drag.

But it has higher wing loading, which means at the same speed it has to use higher angle of attack, which increases the drag.

Both aircraft, however, have a certain optimal angle of attack at which the wing produces the least amount of drag.

Then, their optimal cruise speed is when they are flying at exactly this angle of attack, and the lift is exactly enough to counter the aircraft's weight.


For the aircraft with smaller wing, this optimal cruise speed will be higher than the aircraft with larger wing. What this means is, basically, that the smaller wing aircraft is better optimized for high speed flight and will achieve better efficiency when flown at higher speeds... and will reach higher top speed at level flight with the same thrust output from the engine!

That last part is actually pretty elementary physics. The top speed of any object is achieved when the power output equals friction/drag losses.

When the power output remains constant but drag coefficient reduces, then the drag losses are equalized at higher velocity.



However, things change drastically when these aircraft are compared in high angle of attack situation. At same angle of attack, the aircraft with larger wing will produce more lift and therefore turn better. There are also other, secondary effects such as better acceleration and better climb rate, which both very much explain why lower wing loading typically makes "dogfighting" easier compared to planes with high wing loading.

This does not necessarily correlate with combat effectiveness of the aircraft. The benefits gained in "angles maneuvers" are lost on energy maneuvers. The aircraft with smaller wing will accelerate faster in a dive, it will have higher dive speed limits, it will be more stable at high speeds, and it will lose less energy at dives and zoom climbs as long as angle of attack is reasonably small.


Of course, this is idealized comparison. There are not many examples where these conditions apply. One example that comes to mind is Ta-152C vs Ta-152H-1. In this case, the Ta-152C had smaller wing and Ta-152H-1 had larger wing. However these aircraft differed in other ways; Ta-152C used the DB603LA engine, whereas the Ta-152H-1 used Jumo 213E engine. Additionally the H model's long wing had much higher aspect ratio and thus was better optimized for high altitude flight due to lower induced drag, which is a different form of drag than parasitic drag...


However, comparison of these aircraft in IL-2 largely corresponds to what I just said. The Ta-152 H-1 accelerates better, climbs better, turns better, and at high altitudes it performs quite a bit better.

The Ta-152C has pitiable acceleration and climb rate, turns like a hippo in a bath tub, and top speed is puzzlingly low (I have some suspicions regarding the DB-603 engine model), but it definitely has higher dive speed, dive acceleration, and it retains energy quite well once you get it really going. It also offers excellent stability.

Which is a better airplane would depend entirely on what you were doing and how.



Wing loading of aircraft varies with g-loading, but typically it's expressed in level flight (1g acceleration), where it can be expressed in mass/wing area which colloquially is understood much better by people, than the actual implications of "wing loading".

If you REALLY want to get into it, wing loading is actually expressed in units of pressure. It is, quite simply, the aerodynamic lift force produced by the wing, divided by the area of the wing.

What does this means from the aerodynamic perspective?


As an aerofoil passes through air, it basically does work on the airflow to create pressure differential between upside and downside of the wing. These pressure differentials generate the lift that is used to counter the aircraft's weight.

The pressure differential is not constant over the wing; at some places it's higher, at the edges it's lower. However, if we were to average the pressure differential over the wing, it would turn out to be exactly the same as wing loading: Force of aircraft's weight, over the surface of the wing.

Why then is smaller wing loading preferable? Because the smaller wing loading means your wing needs to create less pressure differential.

Less pressure differential means less work done by the wing on the airflow - which, incidentally, is one source of drag in airplanes.


This is, of course, quite a bit simplified and it would be better to draw an image but I see this represented very, very well in IL-2. FW-190 included.

[MaxGunz]

For the aircraft with smaller wing, this optimal cruise speed will be higher than the aircraft with larger wing. What this means is, basically, that the smaller wing aircraft is better optimized for high speed flight and will achieve better efficiency when flown at higher speeds... and will reach higher top speed at level flight with the same thrust output from the engine!

And then they both pull and hold a hard turn. Which one reaches stall first?

The stall speed multiplies by the square root of G's pulled resulting in a greater difference between the planes -- from high speed start it will be the one that runs out of smash first.

However the claim that a 190 should out-turn a Spit at low speed fails right there as you would have to defy physics or have a very poor Spit pilot in the Spit and a very good 190 pilot in the 190 to do so and then we are no longer comparing just the planes.
Take away knowing who is flying which plane (and most other details) and we have a war story to misuse and come up with ignorance-based 'data'.

The real cool stuff happens at higher speeds where turn fighters can't turn so hard without losing speed. The best energy fighting tactics use that whether online or IRL, check with Robert Shaw if you think different. At speed the 190A is booja but then 'at speed' in a 190A is 'high speed' in a Spit V.

[Arth7ur]

I'm not sure if he's saying the FW190 doesn't turn well enough or if it turns too well.http://www.rxor.info/01.jpghttp://www.rxor.info/22.jpghttp://www.rxor.info/8.jpghttp://www.rxor.info/03.jpghttp://www.rxor.info/23.jpghttp://www.ryzu.info/9.jpg

[MaxGunz]

Herra didn't make that claim of 190 being a great low speed turnfighter.
Gaston did. That's what "The claim" refers to.

[Herra Tohtori]

And then they both pull and hold a hard turn. Which one reaches stall first?

They both reach stall at the same angle of attack (assuming, as with earlier premises, that the wing chord profile is the same and only difference is wing area). There is not such thing as "stall speed".

However: If starting airspeed is the same, and both aircraft start turning on the exact same trajectory - same turn rate, same turn radius, then the following applies:

Both aircraft need equal amount of lift to stay on equal trajectory.

As velocity is the same initially, and the only difference on planes is wing area, that means angle of attack must be different between the planes.

That means that the aircraft with smaller wing must hold higher angle of attack to travel on the same path than the larger wing aircraft.

This will, of course, quite fast start making a difference on where on the path the airplanes are. Because the small-winged aircraft needs to pull higher AoA to stay with the other version, it ends up having much more drag, and assuming both planes are having their engines balls to the wall that means the small wing aircraft will start losing energy in the turn much faster than the large winged aircraft.

As the small winged aircraft starts losing speed, it also starts losing lift and thus turning ability, and it needs to start pulling even more angle of attack until critical angle of attack is reached.

In this exercise, it is fairly likely that the aircraft with smaller wing will reach its critical angle of attack first if it tries to stay turning with the other aircraft.

Additionally, if we are to assume that the large wing aircraft starts pulling the turn exactly at the critical angle of attack to begin with, then it is quite impossible for the small wing aircraft to even stay with it on the turn, because it cannot increase its own angle of attack higher than the critical AoA, and stalls immediately at the beginning of the turn - or ends up on a wider turn than the large-wing aircraft.

This, personally, I can confirm with great satisfaction in IL-2.


The stall speed multiplies by the square root of G's pulled resulting in a greater difference between the planes -- from high speed start it will be the one that runs out of smash first.

Did I mention that the concept of "stall speed" is something I personally find rather annoying?

Stall speed is an indicatory value for pilots and only holds at level flight. Aircraft can stall at any speed when thrown around with fists of ham.

Stall speeds are given as the speed at which the aircraft can JUST hold its own weight with its lift, without losing or gaining altitude or airspeed, and holding angle of attack at or very near critical AoA.

It gives some idea of the aircraft's performance since the stall speeds can be compared, however its relation to turning performance is not necessarily 1:1.


However the claim that a 190 should out-turn a Spit at low speed fails right there as you would have to defy physics or have a very poor Spit pilot in the Spit and a very good 190 pilot in the 190 to do so and then we are no longer comparing just the planes.
Take away knowing who is flying which plane (and most other details) and we have a war story to misuse and come up with ignorance-based 'data'.

Amen.

However we can probably both agree that as the FW-190 was introduced it had great successes against the contemporary Spitfires for various reasons, which could be listed but have already been mentioned in the thread.

"Better turning ability" is decidedly not one of them, but the otheres - higher speed, excellent visibility, easy operation of engine to get the most out of it (Kommandogerät love) while Spit pilots had to dick around with engine settings... All of these could easily have made plausible situations where a FW-190 (or entire group of them) "outmaneuvered" Spitfires, using energy tactics, team tactics, and surprise of Spit pilots at finding entirely new aircraft that they've never seen before.

The real cool stuff happens at higher speeds where turn fighters can't turn so hard without losing speed. The best energy fighting tactics use that whether online or IRL, check with Robert Shaw if you think different. At speed the 190A is booja but then 'at speed' in a 190A is 'high speed' in a Spit V.

Yeah, at transient turns (rather than sustained turns) there are some different factors to consider. An aircraft's transient turn rate basically depends on how fast it can dump energy into direction change, whereas sustained turn rate depends on how fast the engine can produce energy to compensate for drag losses, keeping the airspeed constant (and with that, turn rate and turn radius).

[MaxGunz]

Thank you Herra!

I like stall speed as an aggregate measure of a number of factors when the plane is in flight at critical angle. I can predict that in a 4 G turn it will reach stall at 2x stall speed if piloted perfectly. And I think the neat part is that would be 2x clean stall or 2x dirty stall depending on configuration.

Of course piloting can change that but never for the better.

One thing though. In the turn where the smaller wing version of our plane is experiencing higher drag and slowing down at a greater rate, the very act of slowing down does tend to reduce turn radius so there's some ratio of lost lift widening the turn to lost speed tightening the turn, the path is not simply the rate so in my view...

If both start -above- corner speed then for a time the ratio might benefit the higher wing loaded variant. And I think that's where high speed turn performance maybe delivers a bit more.

As you say, it gets complicated. :)

IMO the place the higher wingload plane will get the biggest advantage is combining high speed and the vertical. That's where the FW's have been best for me.

[Gaston]

So nobody has come up with prop fighter wing bending data during turns so far... Why am I not surprised?

Nobody has come up either with one example of Spitfire out-turning the FW-190A in low speed sustained turns: There is quite a few accounts clearly demonstrating the opposite, with one pilot stating this was a general fact... Quite a discrete 60% advantage let me tell you!

"Il-2 confirms with great satisfaction"

But what about the satisfaction of a real wartime FW-190A-8 Western Front ace?

The only time I ever heard a real WWII German ace directly opining on a simulation forum was through a relative on the Aces High "vehicles forum" around 2005, a Western Front FW-190A ace who unfortunately was not identified by the relative posting his replies to queries, because I suppose there were P-51s being shot down in his accounts, (a rotten deal for making my case at any rate)...

A lot of about the way the posting relative presented his comments made it clear he was in contact with the real deal... He mentionned 3 separate types of aileron chords being available as an offered pilot "option" on the A-8, the widest chord being picked by the ace in question to help "catch" the wingdrop during low-speed turns... He described increasing further the "chord" of the ailerons by adding field-mounted "spacers" on the aileron hinges to increase their effectiveness at "catching" the wing drop, riding the turn on deflected ailerons (He describes precisely relaxing the pull on the stick just as the ailerons are deflected to catch the wing drop)...

He described reversed a tailing P-51D in this manner using just two 360° turns flat on the ground (the P-51 straining very near its stall all the way)...

He described the huge advantage of the broad wood prop, but also the risk of hitting the ground with it on landing (not clear if that was much greater than with the narrow metal prop)...

He described using the FW-190A-8 exclusively as a low-speed turnfighter, reducing the throttle and dropping the flaps before a merge with faster P-51s... He did not care about their greater speed because he could turn to go head-to-head with them if they did not stay with him... Head-to-head was apparently a big advantage for the FW-190A, so the P-51 was presumably just as well off dropping the throttle and turning as well...

The remarkable thing is, I have never heard of such details anywhere else, and yet nothing of the aileron details and other issues has ever been challenged as being false...

I have asked years later of the site owner, surnamed Hitech, to tell me where to find this thread, titled "FW-190A veteran experience" (it went on for about 4 pages the last time I saw it): He actually claimed not to remember it... It is of course deleted from the archives, and he knows nothing about it...

I guess everything the "real deal" had to say just exposed too harshly how current simulations, his and others, were a big pile of claptrap...

But apparently, after all my threads, the Aces high FW-190A got quite a bit better... :D

Gaston

[K_Freddie]

Another 2c worth as we're on a roll.

The Spit wing is narrow in thickness and long in chord, designed for speed.
Take this to low speeds

If you rotate the spit the chord length now presents a larger area for drag (but producing momentary better lift) compared to the shorter chord of the FW, which has a thicker wing producing better lift and less(or equal) drag than the spit for the same rotation over longer time. Not forgetting the FW weight, but it's further from it's takeoff weight (Yes.. we're now in this region as I hinted before) than the spit, so it can probably be pulled harder.

The thing in the spits advantage is it's power-to-weight ratio which could help it in the climbing turn, but is an inline engine more advantaged against a radial at low speeds. From what I can see and have read, the inline is a bugger to control at low speeds.

I'm willing to take a bet that the Spit had very little advantage (if any) over the FW and such low speeds, which would account for Gastons 'research results'

Your turn ;)

[JtD]

http://www.austria-lustenau.info/forum/images/smilies/facepalm.gif

Just for giggles:

"I...stall-turned to port to attack the rear two Fw 190's. They broke and turned with me but I could easily out-turn them..." (http://www.spitfireperformance.com/64-stewart-30july42.jpg)

Spit IX vs. Fw 190. I actually looked for two minutes, found more than you in fifteen years.

[K_Freddie]

At 10K plus .. YOU must be joking... and no mention of speed...
Sorry .. disqualified for the current argument ;)

[MaxGunz]

Another 2c worth as we're on a roll.

The Spit wing is narrow in thickness and long in chord, designed for speed.
Take this to low speeds

If you rotate the spit the chord length now presents a larger area for drag (but producing momentary better lift) compared to the shorter chord of the FW, which has a thicker wing producing better lift and less(or equal) drag than the spit for the same rotation over longer time. Not forgetting the FW weight, but it's further from it's takeoff weight (Yes.. we're now in this region as I hinted before) than the spit, so it can probably be pulled harder.

The thing in the spits advantage is it's power-to-weight ratio which could help it in the climbing turn, but is an inline engine more advantaged against a radial at low speeds. From what I can see and have read, the inline is a bugger to control at low speeds.

I'm willing to take a bet that the Spit had very little advantage (if any) over the FW and such low speeds, which would account for Gastons 'research results'

Your turn ;)

Take it down to stall and lose your bet.

Your 'givens' about the Spitfire are wrong. Why not just say the Spitfire won because it bestowed 'gifts' upon the British pilots, or some other statement made from denial?

[K_Freddie]

Spit IX vs. Fw 190. I actually looked for two minutes, found more than you in fifteen years.
I've been around for a lot lonnnger ;)

[ElAurens]

Please keep going Gaston, I've never laughed so hard about an FM girlie fight in my entire time with IL2.

Just remember, if you keep repeating untruths enough people will grow tired and leave the discussion and you can claim a "win".

It's called the "big lie", and it was invented by the Germans as well...

[JtD]

At 10K plus .. YOU must be joking... and no mention of speed...
Sorry .. disqualified for the current argument ;)I actually was expecting Gaston to post the lame excuse of whatever kind. 3000m is too high because...? Speed mentioned in all the infinite number of accounts Gaston tells us he's heard someone tell who's read it somewhere on the internet is what?

FYI, a :wink: doesn't make posting nonsense any more bearable. You'd be better of asking questions.

I've been around for a lot lonnnger ;)I wasn't talking to you, and I don't care. :)

[K_Freddie]

It's called the "big lie", and it was invented by the Germans as well...
You sound like the PR guy sending the 8th or any fighter command to Germany 1943-5.. I'm sure they just loved you :grin:

[K_Freddie]

JtD...
It seems like Gaston has done a few years of research into combat reports (if he claims right), maybe on a project of sorts.

Aerodynamics and models are accurate, no doubt to a certain %, but have they been verified under certain and specific conditions.
For the aircraft under question, most likely not, considering the conditions of the time. That leaves us with what... theoretical values, or 'real experiences'.

Every research into the past relies on Current Knowledge and Statistics. Gaston is the Statistics of this research.
What aerodynamic proponents are arguing are static test results, if you can call them that, and not dynamic as they quiet simply do not have the same aircraft in question.

;)

[Glider]

JtD...
It seems like Gaston has done a few years of research into combat reports (if he claims right), maybe on a project of sorts.



Must be the worst research I have ever seen. None of his claims stacks up and he will not tell us where in the 'research' the evidence supports his claim.

[K_Freddie]

You must have missed it... :cool:
You must also clarify his claim ?

[MaxGunz]

You must have missed it... :cool:
You must also clarify his claim ?

Every one of his claims have been shot down multiple times on presentation, that's a fact.

Both of you have weird ideas on how much is not known and fail to acknowledge not only how much is known but the nature of that knowledge. But then both of you live in special worlds where physics is only what you choose to understand. Nothing is true until you make the mistake of admitting it. :rolleyes:

JTD can in 2 minutes find multiple accounts of what Gaston swears there are none.
To which your answer is that you have been around longer than that.
Yeah, you really showed HIM!

[K_Freddie]

Yeah, and those reports are not relevant to the envelope Gaston is talking about.. You really showed us haven't you !! ;)

A matter of fact that none of you have come up with a decent counter argument, or proof therof, beyond reasonable doubt that Gaston is talking tripe.
You all revert back to aerodynamic formulae and charts, most of which are from pilots that you wish to discredit, so where does that leave your argument.
While aerodynamics does play a significant role, most of you are not willing to remotely admit that there might be a problem with the data, in the area that is in discussion.

If I were a test pilot, I'll be crying with laughter.

[JtD]

K_Freddie, over the years I've brought up dozens of arguments. All of which were chosen to be ignored. Why should I bother to continue a discussion that in fact is just a monologue by someone to justify an alternate reality?

Again, why does a turn-fight at 3000m not count? Other than it not suiting the theory.

[MaxGunz]

Same reason why Gaston's claptrap fails, lack of full information.

In the meantime Freddie has joined Gaston in claiming that none of their BS has ever been shown false. It goes along with Gaston claiming that there is no historic information that counters his view. They have 2 standards and the old crank-loser's tactic of waiting months or longer after getting beat; put the same BS up again as if nothing happened before.

I see "wing bending" getting dragged in again. Please, QUALIFY THAT!

How many remember the "stress risers" championed by Gaston in post after post. Not a solid value to any of it and then the term got looked up. Gaston pushed a non-applicable term that has NOTHING TO DO with aerodynamics as if it does, complete with BS diagrams that NEVER QUANTIFIED A THING as some magical force that keeps planes from turning. Oh yeah, he really knows his BS and at least one player not only eats it but says how good it tastes!

FW190's have higher stall speeds than Spitfires. No amount of playing with partial factors and effects changes that. If -ignorance- was all you need to fly then those two would be posing for photos by the Mars Rover.

[Gabelschwanz Teufel]

There is plenty of information. Much of it is speculative, subjective and very selective.

[MaxGunz]

There is plenty of information. Much of it is speculative, subjective and very selective.

Full information allows repeat of the event without choosing one of many possible widely different interpretations.

[Gabelschwanz Teufel]

Indeed

[Glider]

Yeah, and those reports are not relevant to the envelope Gaston is talking about.. You really showed us haven't you !! ;)

A matter of fact that none of you have come up with a decent counter argument, or proof therof, beyond reasonable doubt that Gaston is talking tripe.
You all revert back to aerodynamic formulae and charts, most of which are from pilots that you wish to discredit, so where does that leave your argument.
While aerodynamics does play a significant role, most of you are not willing to remotely admit that there might be a problem with the data, in the area that is in discussion.

If I were a test pilot, I'll be crying with laughter.

Interestingly I have not gone back to aerodynamic formula or charts. All I have done is go back to what Gaston has put forward as his evidence and offerred to debate his theory using the data that he claims supports his theory.
It is notable that he has not taken up that challange. The question I put to you is why hasn't he taken up the offer which is more than fair.

Just to remind you. He has said that 95% of all combats involve sustained turn and that the combat reports support this statement.
My challange is that he picks any combat report, from any of the lists of combat reports and we will analyse the ten either side of the report that he has chosen and see the percentage.

Why do you think he hasn't taken up that offer. Or indeed can you see what is wrong with that offer

I await your observation with interest

[MaxGunz]

Personally, I found that flying sims, once I got past rookie level, gave me a lot of insight into what many combat stories and Robert Shaw were saying.

When you include superior energy and tactics, like what accounts of FW-190's vs Spitfire V's over the channel tell, even EAW delivers.

But don't just take my word for the modeling in IL-2 when there's been a whole trail of aerobatics pilots and at least one test pilot say it's good.

The actual historic test data of the real FW's have been used is both table-driven and model-driven flight sims (as opposed to arcade games) and the FW's behave pretty much the same on turning, they won't turn inside Spits with both planes at low speed and co-alt but they will at higher speed, see IL2Compare for an idea where.

Look up clean stall speeds; FW at 110 mph to 130 mph and Spitfires at 80 mph to 95 mph. Spits have the power to sustain over 3 G's, I expect the FW to be in the same range but have to be faster to do it *or* simply use the vertical and occasionally be able to pull lead instead of the constant lead you can hold when turning inside a target. You don't have to have the better turning plane to get inside a target, you just need more energy.

[Glider]

K Freddie
I am still awaiting your views as to why Gaston refuses to debate his theory using the evidence that he says supports his case.

[Herra Tohtori]

I have yet to understand why wing bending would significantly affect the turn capabilities of these aircraft. It's like saying you can't measure a flag pole's height by putting it flat on the ground, because then you're measuring its length instead...

Logical parse-errors aside, what I can glean from the thread is as follows:

Apparently, Gaston's claim is that since no wing bending tests have been done to measure dynamic wing loading on these aircraft, we can't make accurate predictions about their turn performance.

However, the fact of the matter is this:

-Wing bending can not decrease the aircraft's mass.
-Wing bending can not increase the maximum lift produced by the wing.

Latter point can be proven by

a) assuming that the wings do not deform significantly when aircraft is flown within the flight envelope (and over-g tends to permanently deform the airframe, often fatally)

and

b) in a dihedral setup of wings, when the wings bend upwards under load, the lift can only decrease as the total wing span decreases.


Since the aircraft's weight is not affected by any wing deformations (how could it?) and the wing deformations cannot significantly alter the lift capabilities of the wing to positive direction, it naturally follows that wing bending does not have significant effect on the aircraft's lift to weight ratio at different angles of attack.

A simple fact of rotational physics is that for an object to stay on a circular path, a centripetal force (lift) is required to accelerate (g-forces) the object's mass towards the centre of the circular path.

The equation for this force is simply F = ma and no nonsense about wing bending will change the fact that you need certain amount of LIFT to turn an aircraft of certain MASS at a certain rate and turn radius.

You can increase turn rate and decrease turn radius by either increasing lift, or decreasing mass. I think we can all agree that the weights of WW2 aircraft are fairly well documented, so this entire argument can be condensed to the following statement:

Gaston's claim is that the FW-190 Anton models produced significantly more lift than aerodynamical models and testing suggest, especially on low speeds (which, incidentally, is where any wing provides the least lift, if you know anything about aerodynamics).

What this magic mechanism would be, he neglects to comment on. The problem, here, is that aerodynamics is a very well documented science and going against it would require a bit more than cherry-picked pilot reports interpreted with a hefty bit of bias.

Additionally - and even more confusingly - since Gaston's claim is that this magical increase in lift at low speeds would have made the FW-190 a better low speed turn fighter than Spitfires and Bf-109's, it logically follows that this magic lift increase would not appear on other contemporary aircraft which the FW-190 is compared to.

Which, I need to impress, were not fundamentally different from the FW-190 regarding their wing profile. In fact majority of the WW2 fighter aircraft used vastly similar wing chord profiles, which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who is familiar with the term "convergent evolution" - there were certain key designs that were used by almost everyone because they were the best, and most successful. The FW-190 was an advanced design, but it did not include Haunebu technology or any other occult magic to match it to anyone's interpretation of what its capabilities were.

It was a machine of finite, and variable capabilities, and the pilots who flew it and survived were capable of making it perform to its best. At certain flight envelopes, at certain times of the war, it would definitely outperform, outfly, even out-turn its adversaries. But a blanket statement that FW-190 Anton series were better at sustained low speed turns than Spitfires defies any logic and the combined might of applied sciences.

But if there's something I've learned in my time on the Internet, it is that you cannot change the mind of a true believer. The best you can hope for is to prevent them from converting others, and the way you do this is to expose their claims for the baloney they are.


Overall, this conversation should be analyzed with the help of this little video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUB4j0n2UDU

[MaxGunz]

I believe that those who 'get it' will understand and be better at flying and combat whether virtual or real while those who don't will be finding fault with whatever doesn't meet their poorly founded expectations.

Learn the differences in planes, put them into practice, and those war stories will become more clear and less a puzzle to be re-arranged to spell out how really little you understand.

[Gaston]

I have yet to understand why wing bending would significantly affect the turn capabilities of these aircraft. It's like saying you can't measure a flag pole's height by putting it flat on the ground, because then you're measuring its length instead...

Logical parse-errors aside, what I can glean from the thread is as follows:

Apparently, Gaston's claim is that since no wing bending tests have been done to measure dynamic wing loading on these aircraft, we can't make accurate predictions about their turn performance.

However, the fact of the matter is this:

-Wing bending can not decrease the aircraft's mass.
-Wing bending can not increase the maximum lift produced by the wing.

Latter point can be proven by

a) assuming that the wings do not deform significantly when aircraft is flown within the flight envelope (and over-g tends to permanently deform the airframe, often fatally)

and

b) in a dihedral setup of wings, when the wings bend upwards under load, the lift can only decrease as the total wing span decreases.


Since the aircraft's weight is not affected by any wing deformations (how could it?) and the wing deformations cannot significantly alter the lift capabilities of the wing to positive direction, it naturally follows that wing bending does not have significant effect on the aircraft's lift to weight ratio at different angles of attack.

A simple fact of rotational physics is that for an object to stay on a circular path, a centripetal force (lift) is required to accelerate (g-forces) the object's mass towards the centre of the circular path.

The equation for this force is simply F = ma and no nonsense about wing bending will change the fact that you need certain amount of LIFT to turn an aircraft of certain MASS at a certain rate and turn radius.

You can increase turn rate and decrease turn radius by either increasing lift, or decreasing mass. I think we can all agree that the weights of WW2 aircraft are fairly well documented, so this entire argument can be condensed to the following statement:

Gaston's claim is that the FW-190 Anton models produced significantly more lift than aerodynamical models and testing suggest, especially on low speeds (which, incidentally, is where any wing provides the least lift, if you know anything about aerodynamics).

What this magic mechanism would be, he neglects to comment on. The problem, here, is that aerodynamics is a very well documented science and going against it would require a bit more than cherry-picked pilot reports interpreted with a hefty bit of bias.



Your comments show little understanding of what I said.

I said the wings on these old aircrafts ALWAYS bend more than previously assumed for a given horizontal turn, since wind tunnels do not imitate a curved trajectory, and wing bending on these old nose-pulled types was never actually measured in turning flight (dive pull-outs measurements would not count because of the prop unloading in the dive)...

The structural limit before permanent deformation on these fighters was typically a factor of two, so way beyond the assumed loads: 14 Gs on the Me-109G and 13 Gs on the P-51, so there is plenty of room for the structure to bend more than the assumed 6 or 7 Gs of assumed actual wing bending load.

If you don't understand that more wing-bending applied differently among types can play havoc with wingloading assumptions, and is important for the wingload hierarchy between aircrafts, I don't know what to say to that... Your comment makes absolutely no sense.

Even Glider would readily agree that if the wingload is added to unevenly across types, it would change the wingload hierarchy between types, which is what this is all about...

Your comment that weight cannot be added to just because an object is in flight seems on its face nonsensical: If I press down, say through leverage, with a fifty pound force on an 80 lbs block, flying or not, it will then become (for all practical purposes) 30 lbs "heavier" than the "heavier" 100 pound block, flying or not... I cannot fanthom what you fail to get in this...

I never said the FW-190A produces more lift at lower speeds and lower Gs than at higher speeds and higher Gs: I said that the "extra" load is proportionately greater at lower Gs, because it is not changed by speed but by power, and the power stays the same since it is assumed to be at the same maximum in all turns, high or low G, for simplicity's sake...

So it is logical that an aircraft that has less of that "extra" power load (because of better leverage over a shorter nose) will benefit more at low speeds where the power is "larger" compared to the "pure weight" G loads... But at high G loads the actual mass of the aircraft is multiplied by the Gs, while the power is assumed the same, so the lighter aircraft benefits more than the heavier aircraft from high Gs, and the "power leverage load" is proportionately smaller to the "real" G load, so having a big advantage in "leverage power load" (like the FW-190) is less significant and becomes less and less significant as the turn becomes more and more tight beyond what is sustainable in speed...

At high Gs, weight matters increasingly more than power, everyone should be able to understand that... Hence the FW-190A's turn performance goes down relative to lighter fighters when Gs go up beyond a sustainable speed... Which is exactly what can be observed in innumerable combats...

There is no way, if you accept the premise of an extra load on the wing due to power, that any of this is debatable...

As for the issue of where the extra lift comes from, it is a thorny issue, but since we don't know how much those wing actually bend in turning flight (thus with assymetrical air inflow), who can say the extra lift is not there?

If there is extra wing bending, and if it changes with power level, then it means that the extra lift is there, and it is power-related, regardless of what our other assumtions are...

Note that I attribute the load to the leverage of the power coming from a long nose, so that is why more recent studies of very advanced jet fighters completely failed to uncover this extra power load... The existence of such in-flight wing bending tests seems not to overlap further back than the early jet age... Current warbird operators do not use wing strain gauges in flight, at least not routinely...

I also think that one of the features of that extra "nose power" load is that the width of the prop surface creates its turn assymetry through increased thrust in the disc's inside turn half, which increased thrust could help "mask" the inevitable extra drag needed for that extra load on the wings...

By saying "wing bending cannot create extra lift", you are confusing cause and effect... The cause of the extra lift is obviously complex if it was hidden for 100 years (but it isn't so outlandish if you include the "gradually increasing" assymetrical inflow of air in a turn, which is not duplicable in wind tunnels)...

In any case I'll be back: I am now compiling a list of P-47D combat reports to answer Glider's challenge. To be fair to him, the ratio of multiple 360 turns to dive followed by zoom seems more like 70-30 than the 90-10 I previously said, and it has to be added more than half of all the reports are a fairly meaningless jumble of actions, but I think Glider will find it hard to match the number of meaningful turn battles with an equal amount of dive and zoom, especially if dives followed by a long chase are excluded...

This compiling is very rewarding for me, as the accounts do clearly demonstrate the superiority, in low-speed turns at any altitudes, of both the P-47D and the FW-190A to the Me-109G (and the slight superiority of the FW-190A to the P-47D).

Gaston

[Janosch]

The structural limit before permanent deformation on these fighters was typically a factor of two, so way beyond the assumed loads: 14 Gs on the Me-109G and 13 Gs on the P-51, so there is plenty of room for the structure to bend more than the assumed 6 or 7 Gs of assumed actual wing bending load.

No way you could pull anywhere near 14 Gs without wings coming off!

Your comment that weight cannot be added to just because an object is in flight seems on its face nonsensical: If I press down, say through leverage, with a fifty pound force on an 80 lbs block, flying or not, it will then become (for all practical purposes) 30 lbs "heavier" than the "heavier" 100 pound block, flying or not... I cannot fanthom what you fail to get in this...

Weight or mass of object doesn't change in normal circumstances... only the fuel consumption changes it. When speed approaches the speed of light, only then mass goes infinite. Wasn't it Einstein who said something like that?

This compiling is very rewarding for me, as the accounts do clearly demonstrate the superiority, in low-speed turns at any altitudes, of both the P-47D and the FW-190A to the Me-109G

Too bad it doesn't actually prove anything, e.g. that Me-109G would really turn worse than a P-47D. In such fight, the 47 loses... most notably because it's heavier.

[MaxGunz]

Your comments show little understanding of what I said.

That's because your made-up nonsense cannot be understood in any logical sense.

I said the wings on these old aircrafts ALWAYS bend more than previously assumed for a given horizontal turn,

SOURCE?

since wind tunnels do not imitate a curved trajectory, and wing bending on these old nose-pulled types was never actually measured in turning flight (dive pull-outs measurements would not count because of the prop unloading in the dive)...

SOURCE?

And when did they put full size planes in WWII wind tunnels?

The structural limit before permanent deformation on these fighters was typically a factor of two, so way beyond the assumed loads: 14 Gs on the Me-109G and 13 Gs on the P-51, so there is plenty of room for the structure to bend more than the assumed 6 or 7 Gs of assumed actual wing bending load.

Ass-uming the pilot can take any 13 or 14 G's beyond momentarily, less than a second.

If you don't understand that more wing-bending applied differently among types can play havoc with wingloading assumptions, and is important for the wingload hierarchy between aircrafts, I don't know what to say to that... Your comment makes absolutely no sense.

SOURCE?

Something besides in the mind of Gaston, please!

Even Glider would readily agree that if the wingload is added to unevenly across types, it would change the wingload hierarchy between types, which is what this is all about...

A new of line of unsupported BS?

Your comment that weight cannot be added to just because an object is in flight seems on its face nonsensical: If I press down, say through leverage, with a fifty pound force on an 80 lbs block, flying or not, it will then become (for all practical purposes) 30 lbs "heavier" than the "heavier" 100 pound block, flying or not... I cannot fanthom what you fail to get in this...

Because it is complete physics-violating BS to say that you can from within the plane press down and make the plane heavier. You are now in the realm of violating the 2nd Law of Motion in Grand Crank Style. The classic non-demo is a 150 lb man pulling his bootstraps with 160 lbs force and expecting to lift himself off the ground.
Pressing down on a block that you are not standing on does not apply to pressing down on a plane by any means within the plane. That does not include changing the controls that affect air flow (external to the plane) which does not change the weight of the plane regardless.

I never said the FW-190A produces more lift at lower speeds and lower Gs than at higher speeds and higher Gs: I said that the "extra" load is proportionately greater at lower Gs, because it is not changed by speed but by power, and the power stays the same since it is assumed to be at the same maximum in all turns, high or low G, for simplicity's sake...

Which is BS. Power/thrust does not change wingloading.

So it is logical that an aircraft that has less of that "extra" power load (because of better leverage over a shorter nose) will benefit more at low speeds where the power is "larger" compared to the "pure weight" G loads... But at high G loads the actual mass of the aircraft is multiplied by the Gs, while the power is assumed the same, so the lighter aircraft benefits more than the heavier aircraft from high Gs, and the "power leverage load" is proportionately smaller to the "real" G load, so having a big advantage in "leverage power load" (like the FW-190) is less significant and becomes less and less significant as the turn becomes more and more tight beyond what is sustainable in speed...

At high Gs, weight matters increasingly more than power, everyone should be able to understand that... Hence the FW-190A's turn performance goes down relative to lighter fighters when Gs go up beyond a sustainable speed... Which is exactly what can be observed in innumerable combats...

There is no way, if you accept the premise of an extra load on the wing due to power, that any of this is debatable...

So given that physics is wrong and your joke ideas are right, you have a muddled 'point'.

As for the issue of where the extra lift comes from, it is a thorny issue, but since we don't know how much those wing actually bend in turning flight (thus with assymetrical air inflow), who can say the extra lift is not there?

Not you, that's for sure. How far the wings could cantilever without deforming was tested and known. They did test structures to destruction but then engineers did and still do things like that.

If there is extra wing bending, and if it changes with power level, then it means that the extra lift is there, and it is power-related, regardless of what our other assumtions are...

If... Enough ... nothing real, no source... Then It Means, whatever you decide in your fantasyland ... Other Assumptions and non-factors from non-facts....

Note that I attribute the load to the leverage of the power coming from a long nose, so that is why more recent studies of very advanced jet fighters completely failed to uncover this extra power load... The existence of such in-flight wing bending tests seems not to overlap further back than the early jet age... Current warbird operators do not use wing strain gauges in flight, at least not routinely...

What recent studies This Time? SOURCE?

I also think that one of the features of that extra "nose power" load is that the width of the prop surface creates its turn assymetry through increased thrust in the disc's inside turn half, which increased thrust could help "mask" the inevitable extra drag needed for that extra load on the wings...

And now you're back to the old "Stress Risers" without actually using the words This Time Around. But it's the same unsupported stuff as before.

What is your SOURCE? Do you hold a model plane and imagine this while making zoomy sounds?

By saying "wing bending cannot create extra lift", you are confusing cause and effect... The cause of the extra lift is obviously complex if it was hidden for 100 years (but it isn't so outlandish if you include the "gradually increasing" assymetrical inflow of air in a turn, which is not duplicable in wind tunnels)...

Obviously. They could predict what happened quite well without knowing the secret Gaston Force that does absolutely NOTHING. Since it had NO EFFECT they never knew it wasn't there! Oh, those Idiots!

If your ideas were right then perpetual motion would be possible.

[Herra Tohtori]

I will create a free-body diagram of the (relevant) forces affecting a flying aircraft in a turn when I have time for it.

I'll just note a few key factors here.

1. Maximum power of the engine is irrelevant at slow speeds.

If you were familiar with definitions of work and power you would understand this; I can show you why this is so but I don't know if you would understand the mathematics (it's reasonably simple but it does involve some grasp of differential calculus). For now, suffice to say that when an aircraft travels slower, the engines do less work per unit of time, which means by definition that their power output is reduced. Aircraft engines reach their peak power output only at maximum speed of the aircraft (same actually applies to automobiles!).

2. There is a component of thrust that is directed toward the centre of the turning circle.

This can easily be defined as

Fc = F * sin α

where F is the thrust of the propeller disk, and α is the angle of attack. Let's assume that α cannot be larger than critical angle of attack; α ≈ 15°

At critical angle of attack (maximum turn performance at any speed), the thrust toward the centre of the circle would be

Fc = F * sin 15° = 0.25 F

Hence, we can say that at most, only about quarter of the total thrust of the engine is directed inward and thus assisting in the turning radius. This, however, applies to all aircraft, not just FW-190 so it doesn't really help your point... especially as we get to point three.

3. Since we now know the assisting centripetal component of the thrust force, we can determine the assisting centripetal acceleration:

a = Fc / m = 0.25 F / m

since F/m is the thrust to mass ratio of any aircraft, we can DIRECTLY say that the thrust to mass (more commonly incorrectly expressed as thrust to weight ratio) does affect the turning performance.

Moreover, this simple exercise of physics shows us that aircraft turn harder when their engine produces more thrust.


Confusingly (or rather, not) we know that Spitfires have better acceleration and climb rate than FW-190, which means Spitfires have better thrust to mass ratio.

Which means that the expectation of the theory is that Spitfire engine can assist in turns more effectively than that of FW-190... which doesn't really help your case.


4. Quantitative analysis

How, then, does this centripetal acceleration produced by the engine thrust compare to the centripetal acceleration produced by the lift of the wings?

Well, again, simple exercise. If we assume that at certain speed v, the aircraft would be able to do a 3g turn, that means the wings produce enough force to produce 3 g's worth of acceleration (they can easily produce much, much more force up to the limit of their plasticity, in which they deform permanently, but since the discussion is about low speed performance let's keep it at that flight regime).

By contrast if we look at the maximum acceleration that the engine thrust can produce, we can immediately see that the thrust is about an order of magnitude smaller force than the lift of the wings. It's difficult to actually determine the thrust of these aircraft; however we can get some results by looking at how well they climb vertically. None of the WW2 aircraft can maintain their velocity (or increase it) in vertical climb; this means that the propellers produce less force than the aircraft's weight - their thrust/weight ratio is smaller than one.

At thrust/weight ratio of one, the engine could give the aircraft exactly 1g of acceleration. Since these aircraft get nowhere near that, let's be generous and assume the acceleration at standing start could be.. let's say 0.5 g's (it is probably less than this, but oh well...).

Now we can determine the centripetal acceleration by thrust:

ac = 0.25 a = 0.25 * 0.5 g = 0.125 g


What does this mean? Well, if a gliding aircraft at speed v can pull a 3g turn, with full power it could pull about 3.125 g turn (increasing it's turn rate and decreasing turn radius).

This applies to all powered aircraft, and the defining factor is the aircraft's thrust to mass ratio - or, unloaded acceleration by engine thrust alone.

Multiplying this by the sine of angle of attack you can directly get the assisting centripetal acceleration.

a(engine) = 0.125 g

a(lift) = 3 g

we can see that the assisting engine thrust is, at best, about 4% of the lift.

At high g-load the ratio further decreases because you can't pull critical angle of attack at high speeds - which means that most of the thrust is directed forward.


Now, if you're looking at two different planes with different thrust/mass ratios - yes, the plane with better thrust/mass ratio will provide more assisting centripetal acceleration.

However now you need to consider that the thrust/mass ratio of these aircraft had relatively small variations. What you will find is that the overwhelmingly deciding factor in turn rate is the lift/mass ratio rather than engine thrust. You might find small differences in the assisting thrust - let's say that one aircraft's engine might assist at 4% of lift, while another aircraft's engine might assist turning at 5% of the lift... but this would already mean a quite hefty 25% thrust/mass ratio difference!


Here we have shown that the engine thrust is primarily responsible for maintaining the cornering velocity (overcoming drag), and wings are primarily responsible for actually turning the aircraft.

I don't expect Gaston to really comprehend any of this, this is more for the benefit of others.

I'll make that free body diagram as soon as I can... now I must get going to school.

Toodles!

[FC99]

I have asked years later of the site owner, surnamed Hitech, to tell me where to find this thread, titled "FW-190A veteran experience" (it went on for about 4 pages the last time I saw it): He actually claimed not to remember it... It is of course deleted from the archives, and he knows nothing about it...

I guess everything the "real deal" had to say just exposed too harshly how current simulations, his and others, were a big pile of claptrap...

But apparently, after all my threads, the Aces high FW-190A got quite a bit better... :D
Please, post this on Aces High board, I'd like to read Dale's comment when he realize that his FM is "Gaston approved" :grin:

The structural limit before permanent deformation on these fighters was typically a factor of two, so way beyond the assumed loads: 14 Gs on the Me-109G and 13 Gs on the P-51, so there is plenty of room for the structure to bend more than the assumed 6 or 7 Gs of assumed actual wing bending load.

Structural limit for deformation is the one listed in manual, for fighter planes, safety factor was typically about 1.5 so plane with 8G limit will be expected to survive 12G. Between 8 and 12G plane will suffer permanent damage and in case of repeated over-stressing it will break even at values under 12G.
You can see in attachment where is the expected wing failure for one WWII fighter.


I don't expect Gaston to really comprehend any of this, this is more for the benefit of others.

There is no aviation board where Gaston didn't post his alternative aerodynamics theories, if he was capable of learning anything he would learn it long ago. He is not even funny anymore, it's just sad.

[Treetop64]

This is entertaining. Even in college, I've never seen anyone who believes their own BS as much as Gaston.

http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/upfiles/smiley/Crazy-1271.gif

[Rot Bourratif]

Trolls...

Ah well, I remember having to give up on a mechanical science forum because of one of those.

He kept arguing that imperial measurements were far superior to metrics and people were foolish enough to argue with him.

There is only one response to Trolls: ignore them.

Here is some counseling:

http://www.wikihow.com/Recognize-a-Troll-on-the-Internet

http://trollpolice.com/trolls-and-cyberstalkers/

~S~

[Woke Up Dead]

So Gaston, if I understand correctly, your theory is that these previously unnoticed and/or not measured and/or unmeasurable forces you describe are so significant that they make the P-47 and the 190 into good low-speed turners, even though all the known, measurable, and measured forces predict the opposite to be true. Correct?

[Glider]

Gaston
Please don't quote me as agreeing anything you say, without me first, actually agreeing.

No need to do vast research, just pick one combat report from any list and we will see what happens in the ten either side.

Nice, simple and easy for anyone to check.

I strongly suspect that you have not found a suitable example and are going to try and blind me and everyone else with vast amounts of data that will mean nothing

[Igo kyu]

No need to do vast research, just pick one combat report from any list and we will see what happens in the ten either side.
He's writing his own list with hand-picked examples (which will all appear to agree with him), he almost said as much in that post.

[MaxGunz]

Based on criteria of fitting the hypothesis in some manner.

Don't say "any" list because you won't get just any list.

Just because there's accounts on a web site doesn't mean there's been no selection of which accounts are presented. Just for example: the pilots who did not come back did not make combat reports. That alone is data selection.

[MaxGunz]

I'm not sure if he's saying the FW190 doesn't turn well enough or if it turns too well.http://www.rxor.info/01.jpghttp://www.rxor.info/22.jpghttp://www.rxor.info/8.jpghttp://www.rxor.info/03.jpghttp://www.rxor.info/23.jpghttp://www.ryzu.info/9.jpg

He says historically the FW out-turned the Spitfire at low speed something on the order of all the time. That's while avoiding details like were they co-speed or co-alt, a 50-150 ft drop can do wonders for a turn. ;)

This is a plane with 1G stall 110-130 mph (depending on weight) going to turn better than a plane with a 1G stall 80-95 mph. That's the first order difference and it gets wider when you start to turn. The Spits are able to pull 2G's at speeds the FW's can't begin to turn without losing alt. And the difference gets wider with speed. You have to pull more G's at speed to turn tighter, if you go slower your lift will wane faster than the speed reduction would effect any tightening. Go slow enough and you fall. So where under 300 kph will the FW find some turn advantage given both planes in similar, directly comparable situation?

[JtD]

I wish that someone claiming he's researched a plane for fifteen years would at least be able to spell the designation properly: Fw 190 A. I'd excuse a FW 190 because early documents also show the capital W, but there's never been a FW-190A, or a Me-109G, for that matter. German plane designations never used a minus between manufacturer and number.

[lonewulf]

I wish that someone claiming he's researched a plane for fifteen years would at least be able to spell the designation properly: Fw 190 A. I'd excuse a FW 190 because early documents also show the capital W, but there's never been a FW-190A, or a Me-109G, for that matter. German plane designations never used a minus between manufacturer and number.


Although, to be super picky, as far as I'm aware, there never was a 'Me-109 G' or a 'Me 109 G'. The correct designation is Bf 109 G.

[Glider]

I wish that someone claiming he's researched a plane for fifteen years would at least be able to spell the designation properly: Fw 190 A. I'd excuse a FW 190 because early documents also show the capital W, but there's never been a FW-190A, or a Me-109G, for that matter. German plane designations never used a minus between manufacturer and number.

I would be interested to know how someone who has studied aircraft and their tactics in aerial combat for 15+ years, had no idea what a stall turn was and thought that a horizontal turn was a vertical manoeuvre.

But maybe I am being picky

[Herra Tohtori]

Although, to be super picky, as far as I'm aware, there never was a 'Me-109 G' or a 'Me 109 G'. The correct designation is Bf 109 G.


Both designations exist and have been used in official German documents.

Before the war, the aircraft type codes were designated by their manufacturer rather than designer. The 109 was designed by Willy Messerschmitt (primary designer, obviously) but originally manufactured by Bayeriche Flugzeugwerke AG, which made it's designation "Bf-109". Same applied to the Bf-110 which was also designed in the inter-war period.

When Willy Messerschmitt founded Messerschmitt AG in 1938, he tried to get the designation changed to Me-109 and Me-110, and sometimes got his wish through, but there was no consistent policy on whether the 109 and 110 should be called Bf or Me. When Messerschmitt started producing new planes (Me-310, Me-410, Me-262 etc.) the tendency in RLM was to mark the 109 and 110 also as "Me-109" and "Me-110".

Of course, these aircraft - especially the 109 - were manufactured by several companies (Bayeriche Flugzeugwerke AG, Messerschmitt AG, Erla Maschinenwerk G.m.b.H.) just like several companies in the US manufactured planes such as F4F (Grumman, General Motors) and F4U (Vought, Brewster, Goodyear), and these sometimes had their own designations on different versions: General Motors Wildcats were marked as FM-1 and FM-2; Goodyear Corsairs were FG and Brewster Corsairs F3A.

I don't really see what the formatting of the name matters as long as we're talking of the same aircraft...

[badatflyski]

Please, post this on Aces High board, I'd like to read Dale's comment when he realize that his FM is "Gaston approved" :grin:

Structural limit for deformation is the one listed in manual, for fighter planes, safety factor was typically about 1.5 so plane with 8G limit will be expected to survive 12G. Between 8 and 12G plane will suffer permanent damage and in case of repeated over-stressing it will break even at values under 12G.
You can see in attachment where is the expected wing failure for one WWII fighter.


There is no aviation board where Gaston didn't post his alternative aerodynamics theories, if he was capable of learning anything he would learn it long ago. He is not even funny anymore, it's just sad.

Hi FatCat! :o long time heuh?!:rolleyes:

Wurger's wings broke at 14g continous and fuselage at 20g continous.
the full "monocoque" design was one of the strongest or even maybe the strongest of all planes of WW2.

About the low speed turn from Gaston theory : wtf:confused:

yes, the 190could turn faster than other planes in certain conditions, but we can't actually talk about a turn in the sense most think of (180° or higher), the 190 was able to START the turn much faster than most planes due to it's aileron effectiveness (roll rate acceleration) and as Gaston should know, a turn bleeds aircraft energy very bad, and semi laminar wing profile is not so good for low speeds, that's why you do not turn make direction changes of more than 90° in combat with a 190 and you keep scissoring and rolling keeping the speed high, if your fysical condition allows it...

A (real veteran)russion pilot said some years ago after seeing IL2: you make continuesly turns of more than 3G, in real life after a few of those turns, your muscles burns, your vision is troubled and you can't handle the stick correctly,what means you're a sitting duck in a combat area.


PS: an A8 at 6000m is faster in a 90° turn than a P51D, not because of the speed, but because the plane has a higher angle and the pilot, due to his seat pisition, is allowed to endure +1G than any other plane;)

PS2: how are you FC?:cool:

[lonewulf]

Both designations exist and have been used in official German documents.

Before the war, the aircraft type codes were designated by their manufacturer rather than designer. The 109 was designed by Willy Messerschmitt (primary designer, obviously) but originally manufactured by Bayeriche Flugzeugwerke AG, which made it's designation "Bf-109". Same applied to the Bf-110 which was also designed in the inter-war period.

When Willy Messerschmitt founded Messerschmitt AG in 1938, he tried to get the designation changed to Me-109 and Me-110, and sometimes got his wish through, but there was no consistent policy on whether the 109 and 110 should be called Bf or Me. When Messerschmitt started producing new planes (Me-310, Me-410, Me-262 etc.) the tendency in RLM was to mark the 109 and 110 also as "Me-109" and "Me-110".

Of course, these aircraft - especially the 109 - were manufactured by several companies (Bayeriche Flugzeugwerke AG, Messerschmitt AG, Erla Maschinenwerk G.m.b.H.) just like several companies in the US manufactured planes such as F4F (Grumman, General Motors) and F4U (Vought, Brewster, Goodyear), and these sometimes had their own designations on different versions: General Motors Wildcats were marked as FM-1 and FM-2; Goodyear Corsairs were FG and Brewster Corsairs F3A.

I don't really see what the formatting of the name matters as long as we're talking of the same aircraft...

I tend to agree that once everyone knows what we're talking about the official designations can be relaxed somewhat. For example, we can talk about a "109" instead of a "Bf 109". However, if you're going to go to the extent of actually criticizing someone for not strictly adhering to accepted form, then I think it is just a little rich to then refer to another aircraft type using a designation that isn't strictly correct either. The fact that the abbreviation "Me 109" is included in some official German publications is interesting but only to the extent that it demonstrates that officials and employees make mistakes and are guilty of sloppiness, just like everyone else. Once Bayerische Flugzeugwerke became Messerschmitt A.G., and all new aircraft types were designated with the abbreviation "Me", it is hardly surprising that some people started to describe Bf 109s as Me 109s. Understandable perhaps, but certainly not correct. As far as it is known, all 109 identification plates carry the designation "Bf 109", the correct designation for this type.

[JtD]

...However, if you're going to go to the extent of actually criticizing someone for not strictly adhering to accepted form, then I think it is just a little rich to then refer to another aircraft type using a designation that isn't strictly correct either...I quoted another one of Gastons errors, I wasn't referring to anything. What you say is correct, but since Me 109 was used occasionally, it's just odd not wrong to refer to the aircraft as Me 109 (like ME 109, BF 109 or FW 190).

[Derda508]

Actually in all the interviews with the guys, who flew the bird I never heard them adressing them other than Me 109. Same in all the books I read, that were written by Luftwaffe pilots (not too many, alas). My parents, who both experienced the war (my dad as a soldier from 39 to 45) wouldn´t have had an idea what "Bf" could mean, but "Me" was perfectly common. So there is also a difference between a technical correct denomintion and a popular name.

[IceFire]

It's just the world of officialdom conflicting with what was sometimes used on the ground. Many a confused book has mixed up Spitfire official designations with log book information as sometimes the aircraft modification arrived at the field before officialdom had caught up. I.e. the Spitfire LF.IX (Merlin 66) being listed as the IX-B in log books because they needed some way of designating the revised IX.

Bf109 may have been what was stamped at the factory but in the field equipment picks up all sorts of different names. Or two different levels of bureaucracy don't talk to each other :) WWII is full of these weird little stories.

[rakinroll]

Hello guys,
I am reading the posts carefully. There are very useful infos about my favorite plane FW 190, thank you. I have a question about real FW 190 performance. How was the acceleration of FW 190 against Spitfire and P-51?
Regards

[Herra Tohtori]

I don't know for sure. It would depend a lot on the exact models in question, fuel loadouts, altitude and initial airspeed.

However: Climb rate comparison typically gives pretty good relative information about acceleration at slow speeds, because it fairly directly corresponds to thrust/weight ratio (although wing loading has some effect on it as well). If you have higher thrust/weight ratio, it means at level flight your engine provides better acceleration.

As a gut feeling I would say at slow speeds the Spitfire accelerates best. The difference between a P-51B/C/D and contemporary Focke-Wulf 190 Anton would be smaller, but I would say it's likely that the P-51 would in most conditions accelerate better.

FW-190 Dora has climb rate that is a close match to most contemporary Spitfires, excluding perhaps the Spitfire Mk.IX with 25 lbs manifold pressure, as well as Griffon engined Spitfires. The D-9 out-accelerates the P-51 at low speeds, and would come very close to the Spitfire's acceleration or better, I think. I have a slight impression that Spitfire (contemporary to a D-9) would still initially accelerate better, starting from low airspeed.


At high speeds, things get different as the planes approach their top speeds. The FW-190 Anton had higher top speed at low to medium altitudes than most contemporary Spitfires (at least until Mark IX), so at high speeds the 190 would accelerate better simply by the virtue that it would be capable of reaching a higher top speed - the Spitfire's acceleration would end at its top speed earlier than the FW-190's. At high altitudes, the Merlin engine of Spitfire would likely outperform the FW-190's BMW engine.

At high speeds, the P-51 would out-accelerate both Spitfire and FW-190 Anton, because it had the highest top speed of these planes. Or, its acceleration would continue longest, however you wish to look at it.

Again, bringing the Dora into the equation mixes things a bit. I would expect it to out-accelerate the Spitfire and 190 Anton easily at high speeds and depending on altitude it might even out-accelerate the Mustang. At high altitudes, the Mustang would accelerate the longest, reaching highest top speed. At low to medium altitudes and high initial speed, the FW-190 D-9 would likely accelerate the best out of these four planes.


Note: None of this is based on any flight performance data or even IL-2 Compare, just my impression and gut feeling about the capabilities of each of these planes.


Dive acceleration would be another thing yet again...

[MaxGunz]

Long ago there were questions about acceleration and climb with charts pulled out when Oleg commented that the chart was for a wide-blade prop while the IL-2 FW (just which one, I forget) models the thin-blade prop optimized for speed. Worst part, there were guys waving charts made of climb numbers for one plane matched with speed numbers from another, nuthin' but the best for the precious!

I don't recall seeing prop type in the official Aircraft Guide.

Dive acceleration yes but after reading Gunther Rall in Finland I think that top speeds rule.
Problem is what he was reading includes error, his P-51 did not dive any true 1400 kph. I am sure he had appreciation for how fast the ground approached so I believe when he says the P-51 and P-47 dived much faster more solidly.
And that's about how it works in IL-2. Eventually 80-100 kph faster can close a lead.

[JtD]

It's important to note that the Fw 190A was noted to have very good acceleration and to for instance out accelerate a Spitfire IX (Merlin 61) under most conditions. Imo this can be attributed to the Kommandogerät, which allowed a quicker change of power settings, so the Fw 190 was already on it's way where the Spitfire was still getting the mixture right.

[MaxGunz]

It's important to note that the Fw 190A was noted to have very good acceleration and to for instance out accelerate a Spitfire IX (Merlin 61) under most conditions. Imo this can be attributed to the Kommandogerät, which allowed a quicker change of power settings, so the Fw 190 was already on it's way where the Spitfire was still getting the mixture right.

Was that the A-6 or the A-9 by any chance? Not the A-8 in full knight gear?

Most Antons I know of can match the top level speed of most Spits and spiral climb at the same time.

[JtD]

I think the comparison with the early Spitfire IX was most probably made with an A-4.

[Faustnik]

Is torque power a big difference if climb and acceleration with the Fw190A3 and Spit Vs and IXs?

(Looking at Farnborough July 1942 test)

Thanks!

[fruitbat]

I think the comparison with the early Spitfire IX was most probably made with an A-4.

it was an A3 (Fabers).

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y290/thefruitbat1/File0028.jpg

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y290/thefruitbat1/File0026.jpg

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y290/thefruitbat1/File0027.jpg

[Herra Tohtori]

Sounds very much like what we have in game.

The main discrepancy would be the climb rate and acceleration differences between Spitfires and FW-190 models. In IL-2, it feels that the Spitfire easily climbs and accelerates better than the FW-190. That report mentions that the FW-190 is more maneuverable - except in turning circles, and that applies to both Spit Vb and IX.

However, it's hard to determine whether the FW-190 A climbs/accelerates too slowly, or if the Spitfires tend to climb/accelerate faster than they should (I am slightly inclined to the latter). The problem is that there are certain aircraft in the game that seem to climb far better than you'd expect.

Bf-109 G-2 has much better rate of climb (and maneuverability and acceleration) compared to Bf-109 G-6, and it's pretty hard to remain convinced that the aircraft's weight would have grown quite that much from G2 to G6. Anecdotal evidence from Finnish Air Force pilots would indicate that the pilots did not feel much of a difference between the G-2 and G-6, but as a matter of principle I don't really put that much trust on anecdotes. However, as much as I can try to convince myself that in reality the pilots may not have noticed that much of a difference between G-2 and G-6 because they would have flown them both fully with energy tactics... the matter of fact remains that when I fly them with energy tactics in IL-2, there's a very noticeable difference in zoom climb performance and acceleration, as well as turning performance. And I can't help but think that if I can notice the differences, surely the Finnish Air Force pilots - arguably the best trained pilots in the world flying Bf-109 G-2 and G-6 both - would have noticed and reported the differences.

Then again it's possible that they were simply referring to the fact that both aircraft were operated the same way since they shared the same engine and same general flight characteristics, I don't know. Without talking to the pilots it's hard to know what they mean by fragments of interviews sometimes taken out of context.

Moving on; Spitfire Mk.IX 25lbs versions have incredible climb and acceleration compared to Spitfire Mk.IX 18lbs versions; In fact the jump from Mk.Vb 16lbs to Mk.IX 18lbs version is about the same as jump from Spifire Mk.IX 18lbs to Mk.IX 25lbs regarding climb performance, and I'm just not quite sure that the maximum engine thrust would have increased that much. I suppose it's possible, though.


This, if anything, is something that makes me wonder about the veracity of some flight models. I doubt some things I see in the simulation, and some flight models actually have obvious errors in them (although those tend to be AI planes made flyable with mods), but typically I see exaggerated differences between planes, rather than complete reversals in performance. Gaston's argument that the FW-190 A series planes would have had better sustained turn performance than Spitfires would be a reversal of the planes' relative turn performance, while the differences between G-2 and G-6 are more of an "exaggeration" in my estimation.

[JtD]

Thanks for the correction, fruitbat.

In game figures for climb for both the Fw 190 and the Spitfire are very close to real life performance. Actual test figures do not quite agree with the relative performance stated in the comparisons.

Take a fully loaded Merlin 61 Spitfire, climb it at 2850 rpm / 12 lb boost (100% power, 90% pitch iIrc) and compare it with a Fw 190A-4 fully rated at 75% fuel and 85% power. Both planes with radiators open. Historically, the British achieved a bit less than 13 m/s with the Fw 190 and a bit more than 16 m/s with the Spitfire at about 4000m altitude. Not sure how they got to "slightly better".

The 25lb boost models are conservative if anything, climb rates in excess of 25m/s in 2nd charger gear having been measured in two different tests, though I know little about the exact conditions of the test. The performance in game in accordance with a very well document RAE test. In a summary, the relative performance increase between 18 and 25 lb is stated to be 5m/s in climb, which again is pretty close to what we have in game.

G-2 and G-6 are off, though.

[Mabroc]

Well, Im not sure about climb rates, they seem OK, but the acceleration of the Spitfires in level flight is waaay too good. They can do a lot of crazy turns and evasives and then go to full speed in 5 seconds. Many times I crossed a Spitfire in a head on without guns blazing at each other in my Fw-190, so I keep extending on level flight, the Spit just hard turn 180 degress and is on my tail very close, if I dont even touch the rudder controls I can extend safely in 3 or 5 m (they usually break pursuit), minor movements drop my speed too much and the Spit close in.

And this is the norm online, a couple of weeks ago I was in a Fw-190D9 at 5km altitude, spotted a Spitfire heading away from me at 1km of altitude and maybe 3km of separation, I dived, reached max speed (plane stuttering) and close on him, he saw me and started a loose (not tight 180 turn) I followed it on my dive, he finalized the turn heading straight full throttle towards a Me-110 in a strike sortie, at that point I was on his 6 but I loosed a lot of speed in the turning dive AND HE WAS OUTRUNNING ME!!!! When I reach full speed and start to close in He already killed the Me-110 and I was still 1KM from him, all the energy on me planes was wasted in a slight turn BUT GREAT DIVE, and the plane accelerated to full speed in maybe 30 seconds, meanwhile the Spit was already at max speed around 20 or 25 earlier, so he got a good separation from me.

I have fighted every allied plane with the Me-109 and Fw-190 and no other plane seem to accelerate that good, not even the Yak-3, Yak-9U or La-7. So, when you are closing on him, if the spit pilot sees you, just need to turn a little to avoid your fire, and your only move is just extend away, dont even try to adjust your fire, if you miss, he is already at your 6 at max speed and you will die before can reach you max speed again.

[Sillius_Sodus]

I've never found the Antons to be great climbers. Nevertheless, they are fun to fly and I've had my a** handed to me often by a well flown 190, no matter how good my kite is supposed to be.

[MaxGunz]

The AI-only planes fly a relaxed FM. I emailed Oleg once why not run them with small & fast table-driven FM? Then they would fly within limits and be predictable moves for AI computing. I guess he didn't like the idea. So when you hack an AI-only plane, it's a UFO.

The rest of the planes have the same FM with different parameter sets, the parameters being factors for equations not end-speed/height/etc of table-driven sims.

The FM seems to climb a bit easily. Find the slowest you can go at level flight, it will be at low power. For the P-40B I can hold 1000m alt with about 32% power pedal-dancing along flaps and gear up about 145kph. The level-flight power curve U left side only goes 32% high.

If I hold that speed and bring the throttle up, I climb quite well and very steep but can't get out of my own way for lack of speed.

The FM and data set is an approximation of flight that runs as the heart of a game with much going on. It's not going to fit charts without some stretching and balancing that all compared does have some weird spots. But they are spots, differences between chart and game rather than cracks where the game has new or different properties. I don't see any canning of stall behavior either, the FM is a very robust code and data engine.

[MaxGunz]

Some of the planes are on steroids because the reals were hotrods. The Spit 25-lb is a hotrod even more than the FW 190D-9. It's about power to weight and thrust being highest at low speed, and excess thrust being what changes your momentum. That plane is the Frankenfire, not a good meter for the name Spitfire. You want to hunt Spit VB's that crossed the channel down low and are at low combat speed climbing to get the proper FW experience. But do it in an A2 or A3.

I have video of a British ace who talked about the Spit IX's and how before it was always the Spits at a clear disadvantage, when the FW's crossed with Spit IX's and thought they were dealing with Spit V's, the Spit IX's "took the pants off the Focke Wulfs" and kept on doing so. After that when FW's spotted Spits below they took time to check.

What that tells me is that with any Spit IX you will not have an easy walk in your Dora 9. You have edge to build on.

Turn in the vertical where roll changes direction and is close to zero energy cost. use short zooms or dives to achieve change in direction and speed at the same time; from high speed to moving 60+ degrees different direction you zoom climb to store speed into height while rolling to the new vector then pull out as you approach corner speed, using gravity to assist you going back to full horizontal, drop to get your speed back.
Pulling hard turns at full speed is a non-no. Even to zoom, you can zoom in a 30 degree climb and let the plane slow down to maneuver speed, even roll and take a new direction off that at little cost in speed.

There's a flight pattern to practice that's good for learning energy. Fly tilted circles for speed along the bottom and height with fast angle change across the top. You want to top at pretty good speed to bring the nose around best. The circle is more egg shape and the egg turns every time the plane crosses the top, I bet that's how the cloverleaf turn spoken of by P-38 pilots is done, it uses the vertical.

Boom and Zoom, don't strike from direct 6. Come in from the side with high closing speed -just because of that side vector- and shoot deflection starting from 400 meters out. Your closing speed effectively shrinks that range closer to 300m, aim as if 300m shot. You will soon be 300m and closing anyway. Hartman did the real version, turning into a target he flew 50m off the wing of, turned and fired into the target point-blank and exited behind the target all in one move. Try that in sim! I start at 400m, correct aim if need and start fire again by 300m. Less than a second later I am at 200m and need to turn to avoid ramming. I am -NOT- Erich Hartmann, even in sim!

Really. side approach cuts the number of evasions. If you have a wingman about 600m or so back, that should cut his workable evasions even more.
You just have to get good at deflection shooting, a matter of practice.

[K_Freddie]

Ass-uming the pilot can take any 13 or 14 G's beyond momentarily, less than a second.

I was at a Korea vets meeting, where the old guys were talking about pulling 12Gs in P51s and not blacking out ??? Maybe we're a lot tougher down south - Something to think about :grin:
Or maybe our blood pressure goes up radically when we have to deal with crap :) :)

[Mabroc]

Good advices MaxGunz, I knew most of the tactics you explain and I follow them, been flying this sim since 2001, and many others before. My point was that after I loss all my energy from that turning dive I couldnt close in the Spit, meanwhile it just speed away after a hard 180 level turn. Yes, it was a Mark IX 25lbs but the standard VIII and IX are similar against same year AXIS planes.
They loss the energy same as other planes but regain it too quickly, being the Fw-190 much slower to accelerate (and before 4.11 they were even worst, now they are better, but 20-30khm slower at max speed) against a 109 the difference is still there but too a lesser extent. Well, gauging by experience not numbers the Spit seems to accelerate 3 times better than a 190 and maybe 1.5-2x better than a 109, alway speaking of level acceleration and same year enemies.

[MaxGunz]

You need to get numbers, record tracks, etc. Anything predictably so wrong should be recorded, analyzed, and presented with docs backing up the reasons. And then comes criticism without which you have only 1 opinion presented.. yours. Maybe someone changes their mind based on what all can see? It beats the Gaston game.

Do you know what speed you had after your turn? I've pulled some bleeders before, it's real easy to get too far inside and watch your speed go down fast. That's what practicing the tilted circle for, to teach you where the edge between just before stall is.

Make tracks so you can at least get alt/speed/etc, change the view around and see what happened more clearly.

I made tracks just to see where my shots were going and how my sight picture looked just before, my gunnery got better. Suddenly the DM's of enemy planes wasn't so tough as before.

Can you tell me the power to weight of these planes?

Can you tell me the clean stall speeds? What speed before each is no longer nose-high just to maintain alt, and what that means about acceleration? You may find a low speed zone where the FW should not do so well that no FW pilot in combat should ever get so slow.

Do you cross-control? That is using the joystick on diagonal. It makes more drag. Watch air racers, the move their sticks in + motions.

I shoot from long distance because if the target turns, I need turn much less to get a lead on his motion. I won't be able to keep that but I get my shot without losing much speed. Coming from a side, not 6, helps all that.

[JtD]

Given that at some altitudes the Spitfire climbs nearly twice as fast as the Fw 190, acceleration should also be nearly twice as good.

[MaxGunz]

Yes Freddy, bumpy air shakes planes. Safe speed is lower in bad weather.

You can probably survive a 25G impact FWIW.

That's momentary G's. Tell me about 12G turns because someone said they saw 12 on the G meter. That's cause he's twice as much as any ordinary man!

I remember the Army machinegunner who claimed that 50 cal bullets speed up after they leave the barrel. LOL, he should know, right?

[Herra Tohtori]

Yes Freddy, bumpy air shakes planes. Safe speed is lower in bad weather.

You can probably survive a 25G impact FWIW.

That's momentary G's. Tell me about 12G turns because someone said they saw 12 on the G meter. That's cause he's twice as much as any ordinary man!

Transient lateral acceleration limits of humans vary from person to person and short spike of 12 g, I reckon it's possible but right about at the limit of human performance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8i04jBLI5I

What's impressive is if they actually had the time to look at their g-load gauges, or if they had some sort of flight recording systems (like a small needle in the g-load gauge, pushed by the indicator needle and showing the highest peak force)?

How reliable were these g-load indicators?


Did Mustang pilots in Korea era use any sort of G-wear? When did G-pants and G-suits make their appearance?

Impact g-forces are very short duration and with the right equipment (appropriate harness) you can survive impressively high decelerations. Empirical test results have shown that human beings can survive at least 45 g's of deceleration in forward/backward axis and 35 g's in sideways acceleration. Lateral acceleration limits would probably be a bit lower due to the massive stress on the neck and the spine in general, and you'd most definitely lose consciousness due to lack of blood pressure, but again I expect with proper harness and head/neck support surviving lateral decelerations above 25 g's would be quite possible.



I remember the Army machinegunner who claimed that 50 cal bullets speed up after they leave the barrel. LOL, he should know, right?

This is exactly why anecdotes are such a reliable way of assembling a mental picture of the comparative performances of combat aircraft of 60 years ago.

[gaunt1]

Hi!

Im asking this because Im not an expert of german planes: Is the acceleration of the Fw 190 ingame is realistic or not? The plane is fast, but its short term acceleration looks quite weak. I shot down quite a few 190s even in a LaGG-3S4, he couldnt get away in time, the LaGG accelerated faster, sometimes even in a dive. So it is a bit suspicious for me. LaGG-3, especially early versions accelerated sluggishly. The 190 was really that bad IRL? Correct me if Im wrong, but as far as I know high wing loading means less drag in level flight, so plane should accelerate better.

[MaxGunz]

The answer depends on the speed, same as when the US ran a test condition competition and found the P-47 they had accelerated poorly up to a certain speed where it did the smack the head on the rest thing. With that plane, you learn that speed and don't go slower in combat.

It's about efficient air speeds for each plane, high wing loaded planes are inefficient at lower speeds to gain efficiency at higher speeds.

It's about induced drag as a percent of total drag. Until you can get your nose down, just staying aloft has a high price while at top speed it is 1% to 2% of the total. So you got to get to efficient speed before you can get your best acceleration. When another plane is already in that speed zone for his plane and you are not for yours, he may leave you behind.

Nobody pwns everywhere. When short test conclusions say at all speeds; read it to say all the speeds and conditions they tested, the ones that made sense to the testers at the time. That was AFDU, the tests would set up current combat conditions, the speeds appropriate.

You still need tracks to talk about specific online events. Impressions are not always right.

[TBear]

Some things just never stop.

What are the problem trying to create "realism" in a simulator.

1. Numbers is only 90% of it, the last 10% are pilot experience. Numbers cant me made for individual pilot skill. Any pilot fly hes way and even a test pilot is stil something you cant calculate with hard numbers.

2. History. As a sim pilot you have a huge benefit. You can read and learn both sides tactics and perfect any manouver. In those day you couldnt.

3. You dont die for real of a pilot mistake. You stall and crash, you just hit re-fly. They couldnt. You can fly any plane in the game at 110% percent. They couldnt. They had to stay as close to 95% as posible to make sure they got out of the flying alone alive. Put in some combat and a bad mechanic and you have death.

Remember this is a simulation, and that gives some problems to hit a RL experience mark. Some 109`s turned better than some allied planes. In many situations it didnt come down to some math numbers, but to the individual skills.

I bet you could take a combat pilot and let him fly a 190 and then a test pilot and you would end up with something that is max 80% identical.....the last 20% is darn important...even 5 different pilots would give 5 different sets of data....what pilot have the best day must then be the most acurate...

[gaunt1]

The answer depends on the speed, same as when the US ran a test condition competition and found the P-47 they had accelerated poorly up to a certain speed where it did the smack the head on the rest thing. With that plane, you learn that speed and don't go slower in combat.

It's about efficient air speeds for each plane, high wing loaded planes are inefficient at lower speeds to gain efficiency at higher speeds.

It's about induced drag as a percent of total drag. Until you can get your nose down, just staying aloft has a high price while at top speed it is 1% to 2% of the total. So you got to get to efficient speed before you can get your best acceleration. When another plane is already in that speed zone for his plane and you are not for yours, he may leave you behind.

Nobody pwns everywhere. When short test conclusions say at all speeds; read it to say all the speeds and conditions they tested, the ones that made sense to the testers at the time. That was AFDU, the tests would set up current combat conditions, the speeds appropriate.

You still need tracks to talk about specific online events. Impressions are not always right.

Thanks for the explanation!

Now I understand why it was so easy to out-accelerate a 190 in a LaGG. It always occured between 250-350 km/h. So then the efficient air speed of the 190 is above 350 km/h.

[MaxGunz]

The 190 may be stepping the pace out before 350 even as the La 5 is farther along in his curve.

[badatflyski]

It's important to note that the Fw 190A was noted to have very good acceleration and to for instance out accelerate a Spitfire IX (Merlin 61) under most conditions. Imo this can be attributed to the Kommandogerät, which allowed a quicker change of power settings, so the Fw 190 was already on it's way where the Spitfire was still getting the mixture right.

I would rather say it's related to a better prop efficiency, what is awfully modelled in il2 just like the kommanda gerrât that is much too slow in response and also not able to keep revs in climb (back to response time)

[JtD]

If it was related to prop efficiency, climb would suffer, too.

[MaxGunz]

Get someone who can fly a 190 at full throttle and hold it level from 240 kph to top speed and record an online track. Get a few of those for different alts.

If the ride isn't too bouncy like the autopilots tended to do years ago then change in speed second to second will give a good idea about acceleration. But the flights need to be smooth and as flat as possible or the result will be less, and yes the way the AI's kept level dragged, fly combat like that and see how you do.

[MaxGunz]

So nobody objects to FW acceleration enough to gather data?

Of course not. In a few months or a year the "issue" will be raised again as "fact".

[Robert932]

typhoon anybody?http://www.ebrr.info/2.jpghttp://www.ebrr.info/wanhuan1-2.jpghttp://www.ebrr.info/huantest.jpg

[Herra Tohtori]

I was flying an A-5 (not the fully rated 1.65 ATA version or whatever) on Spits vs 109's server the other day, and I accelerated away from a Seafire Mk.III that tried to get to my tail... It was mostly level, though initially a very shallow dive.

I'd say that's good enough for me.

[JG27CaptStubing]

There is a lot to read through... Sorry but many have argued the current FWs are starting to match up with real world performance numbers. Who's performance numbers? There is always some sort of axe to grind here and I'm sorry but trying to burn off speed from 500 Kmh to 200 Kmh while landing is a tough task even with gear and flaps down which tells me there is something goofy about the current FM. Of course this is anecdotally speaking but when it walks like a duck and talks like a duck it’s a duck. For whatever reason I can’t seem to pull this off during a fight either.

+1

Sounds very much like what we have in game.

The main discrepancy would be the climb rate and acceleration differences between Spitfires and FW-190 models. In IL-2, it feels that the Spitfire easily climbs and accelerates better than the FW-190.


Flying Spits vs 109s: I've had Spit IXs situated below me in a FW190 A8 at least a 1000m difference both of us flat out level flight and opposite directions... Pull vertical from below and execute an immelman turn and easily catch me without me manuevering flat out. In fact I couldn't even dive away with the current version of HSFX.


I agree with some of the results in turn testing, she does turn a little better and climb a bit better. Top speed seems to take forever to get to now and you can be hunted down by Spits easily if you aren’t extremely careful. Is this historically correct? Who knows… I will leave that to the guys that want to argue performance charts and which ones are correct. The current FW we have been neutered IMO and It’s true the FW has been one of the most altered FWs in the game

[Janosch]

...
...
current version of HSFX

There must something wrong with Spit IX flight models, HSFX itself or both.

[MaxGunz]

There's something wrong if you come to conclusions without so much as a single track file.

[JG27CaptStubing]

Well the Spits seem to be flying as normal and I don't recall seeing that the Spit FM has changed. The FWs have certainly changed and it doesn't take a track to prove that. Just fly it and it becomes very obvious.

I will start to take some tracks of some of my engagments if it will help people see the light.

[JG52Karaya]

Well the Spits seem to be flying as normal and I don't recall seeing that the Spit FM has changed. The FWs have certainly changed and it doesn't take a track to prove that. Just fly it and it becomes very obvious.

I will start to take some tracks of some of my engagments if it will help people see the light.

Both TD as well as HSFX have changed the original Oleg FMs for the Spitfire family

[fruitbat]

Spits fm's were changed in 4.10 by TeamD, Fw's in 4.11 by TeamD.

(both for the better imo).

[JG27CaptStubing]

Perhaps I wasn't aware of the change back in 4.10 but since I've been flying UP now for the last couple of years I didn 't notice any changes or at least obvious changes to FMs in HSFX.

Is there any documentation on what specifically was changed? Either way the new FW has been nerfed IMO.

[Gaston]

Because it is complete physics-violating BS to say that you can from within the plane press down and make the plane heavier. You are now in the realm of violating the 2nd Law of Motion in Grand Crank Style. The classic non-demo is a 150 lb man pulling his bootstraps with 160 lbs force and expecting to lift himself off the ground.
Pressing down on a block that you are not standing on does not apply to pressing down on a plane by any means within the plane. That does not include changing the controls that affect air flow (external to the plane) which does not change the weight of the plane regardless.


.

You don't seem to show much understanding either: Since the engine is obviously grabbing a huge volume of air (hundreds of tons of curving high-speed air, while itself with a contrarian "inner" passive desire to go straight, I might add), where does your restriction stand that the applied force must come entirely from within the aircraft?

I dare say my analogy of pressing down on a flying block with a lever while standing was more apt...

In your view, the aircraft can operate without an environment... This is what spaceships do... They have space around them: That's why they are called spaceships: And the maneuvers they do do indeed come entirely from within...

But this is not how aircrafts work...

Gaston

[Gaston]

Ass-uming the pilot can take any 13 or 14 G's beyond momentarily, less than a second.


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First of all it is not 13 or 14 Gs, but 6-7 Gs plus 3 "Gs" worth of bending: So 9-10 Gs of structural load at most.

(It would explain some unexpected breakage and, interestingly enough, the failure of the P-51s guns to work properly despite likely ground wing-bending testing...

They never tested those guns in actual turning flight, and, as a result, the P-51's gun jams under G load were always triple that of the P-47: Going from 500 mrbf in early '44, to around 1000 in 1945, while the P-47 went from 1500 in early '44 to 3000 + in 1945... The improvements might have been in part due to lower late-war altitudes for both types)

In any case, those Gs are for the airframe's wing bending value, not Gs that the pilot actually feels, or are you just pretending?

Gaston