Quote:
Originally Posted by 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'.
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..
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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