Why do Spitfires turn better than Hurricanes?!

[Viper2000]

Originally Posted by Sternjaeger II

The Spit had the edge in maneuverability because of the fantastic elliptical wing design, but it was an extremely flimsy and delicate wing structure which couldn't take much damage.

Sorry but this is simply incorrect.

There is an awful lot of rubbish written about the Spitfire's wing. It has a pretty elliptical planform, but it also has washout, so it doesn't have an elliptical lift distribution.

In fact, if you look at the early project drawings, you'll see that it started out with straight taper and four guns.

The elliptical planform came in when the Air Ministry decided that they wanted to increase the armament, first to 6 guns and then to 8; going to an elliptical planform provided the structural depth required to accommodate the extra guns outboard.

This is covered in some detail in Spitfire The History by Morgan & Shacklady IIRC...

The real genius of Mitchell's wing design was that he realised that a low t/c would result in good high speed performance; the Spitfire had the highest tactical Mach number of any WWII fighter, and could not be out-dived by any aircraft under control until the advent of the XP-86 in 1947.

It certainly wasn't delicate: it had one of the highest limiting speeds of any WWII fighter; 450 mph EAS for the Merlin Spitfire's wing, and somewhat faster for the Griffon Spitfire (IIRC Henshaw states 520 mph; but this is probably IAS assuming about 20 mph position error; Henshaw dived Merlin Spitfires to 470 mph IAS routinely as part of their production testing, and from what I can gather this was because the position error was assumed to be 20 mph IAS at this speed). That's not what I'd call a flimsy wing.

Furthermore, we know that the absolute load factor that the Spitfire's wing could take was >>10 g; the RAE high speed flight had an unfortunate habit of breaking props & reduction gears away from their PR.XI Spitfires in high Mach number dives, with extensive instrumentation aboard, and rather impressive figures (c.12 IIRC) were recorded without structural failure (although the aeroplane was comprehensively bent and subsequently scrapped).

The main problem with the Spitfire's wing was that it was hard to build because it's a collection of compound curves. It was also uncomfortably thin for carrying the armament required. Naturally being hard to build, it was also hard to repair in case of battle damage.

But as for the amount of damage it could take, I haven't seen anything like as much gun camera footage of Spitfire wings being knocked off, even by cannon fire, as I have of other types. Of course, there's an obvious bias problem with guncamera footage, because there's relatively little German footage. But the Germans undoubtedly had big guns, so they'd arguably have more chance of dismantling aeroplanes for the camera than for example the Americans.