Quote:
Originally Posted by timej31
I am sure if we could go back in time and we were actually there and were all part of this, and we each had our plane we'd know what's up. What turns better and what is faster. What to do in a given situation. Because we have it at our disposal at any time we wanted to see and test.
|
Not really. You'd get to fly the type of aeroplane you were given and for most people that would be it. So you might know
quite a lot about for example the performance of the Hurricanes your squadron flew, but you wouldn't know very much about the performance of the Bf-109.
People would hear things on the grapevine. Some bits would be closer to the truth than others. Obviously a significant proportion of people who discovered the enemy's performance advantages didn't live to tell anybody about it...
During the Battle, quite a lot of RAF pilots said in their combat reports that they were fighting the
He-113 rather than the Bf-109. So much for "knowing" about the enemy's performance...
In fact, it was quite possible to fly a whole tour without seeing an enemy aeroplane at all, especially for Allied pilots later in the war. It's also worth observing that pilots who were trained during the war didn't necessarily get an awful lot of hours in which to experiment with the limits of aircraft performance, because the priority was operations rather than training. And the priority of operations was to attack ground targets and conduct reconnaissance. Fighters only exist to interfere with, or prevent interference with, the aeroplanes attempting to perform this useful work. AFAIK the average pilot in a WWII airforce was not a fighter pilot, though he might have told the girls otherwise.
Later in the war, more concerted efforts were made to convey the strengths & weaknesses of enemy aircraft to pilots, though of course this intelligence information was imperfect.
Since the best tactic to employ against an uncooperative enemy aircraft is entirely a question of
relative performance, it follows that aerial combat was mostly a game of extremely high stakes poker.
For this reason, it was an extremely bad career move to actually get into the sort of fight whose outcome depended upon aircraft performance; the vast majority of aces scored their kills by exploiting their opponent's lack of SA and shooting them in the back rather than by getting into aerobatics contests with them.
Of course, if you score most of your kills by bouncing the enemy then you don't know or much care about the turn performance of his aeroplane; you care more about the operational habits of enemy pilots, such as the speeds, altitudes and types of formation in which they are inclined to cruise.
So even the best WWII fighter pilots probably knew considerably less about his opponents than the average sim pilot does.
A consequence of this is that sim pilots tend to make a bigger deal out of small performance differences.
If I feel inclined, I can spend a week or two testing the performance of all of the flyable aeroplanes in the sim. I can discover the 5% performance difference between aircraft x and aircraft y, and I can exploit that performance difference in combat with considerable confidence, leading to many forum posts about aircraft x's performance advantage over aircraft y.
IRL, production tolerances and pilot skill would render this sort of 5% performance difference entirely irrelevant; the absence of a refly button means that winning "most of the time" just doesn't cut it. Mixed reports of the outcome of turn fights would filter back to the squadrons, and the consensus would probably be that turn fighting was a bad idea in general, and an especially bad idea against aircraft y, because the success rate wasn't great.
It's very hard to get away from the fact that the massive psychological differences between fighting in a real war and playing with a flight simulator have a correspondingly massive impact upon the way that people fly, fight, and even
think about their aeroplanes.