"Comfort" in cockpits of BOB adversaries

[Skoshi Tiger]

Originally Posted by BadAim

Such emotion. Should we not save this passion for virtually murdering each other online when COD comes out in a few weeks?

+1 Payback time!

[Heliocon]

Umm wtf - I thought he was very direct and honest with both his opinions and that he talked directly about issues that could be seen with the camera. I am 6,3 - I could never fit in the 109

[Moggy]

I'm sure I saw a documentary years ago explaining the size difference between the 2 cockpits. I thought it might of been Spitfire! Two seconds to kill but having seen it again it doesn't look like it. I'm sure it's in my video collection somewhere!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/battleo...in/11405.shtml

If memory serves, the Spitfire had a slightly larger cockpit but the 109 had a better engine layout and was easier for ground crew to work on.

[KG26_Alpha]

Interestingly from Two Seconds to Kill

Bader mentions the Spit wing "folding up",

I had also read about this when over stressing the aircraft due to the pilots having to be careful with the Spits in hard manoeuvres as they were able to go past the safe limits due to the control authority being very light on the stick less than 10lbs where as the Bf109 was more than 20lbs.

I hope someone will put those figures right for me but I'm going from memory.

[yellonet]

Originally Posted by Heliocon

Umm wtf - I thought he was very direct and honest with both his opinions and that he talked directly about issues that could be seen with the camera.

Yeah, I guess that most of us thought of it like that.
But Sternjaeger claims that he has met the pilot in person, so of course he can interpret what we see and what the man says much better than the rest of us.
Goes without saying really.

[Remo]

Originally Posted by Voyager

He loved the 109 instruments and control layout. What he was freaked out about was the really cramped quarters, the heavy canopy, and the cannon sitting right between the legs.

Anyways, a couple other articles on flying aircraft from the era:
The Legendary Zero (Part 1)
The Legendary Zero (Part 2)
Hurricane (Part 1)
Hurricane (Part 2)

Those were very interesting articles. The feeling I had from the existing Hurris in IL2 is quite a bit diff from the one he formed from his real bird.

But all in all , you have to give to the man , he has some balls to fly those old birds..

[Moggy]

Ahh ok lads, I didn't know about the Spitfire wing problems, makes sense though. Do you think the story about the BF-108 got around the German squadrons and somewhere along the line it was altered to a BF-109?

[Blackdog_kt]

I think the pilot's review was unbiased, right up until the point where he said "i wouldn't want to go to war in this, especially against a Spit". It's funny because he had plenty of bad things to say about the Spit too and then in one fell swoop he's making it out to be vastly superior, which is i guess why people called him biased.

His technical appraisal on both planes was very good, he just proceeded to unfortunately destroy the entire presentation by being unable to resist putting a slight jab in at the end

Also, i agree that the guy is obviously judging both fighters with the mindset of a modern-trained combat pilot and things are much better in today's aircraft, so any comparison to older ones will make them look bad somehow.

Finally, i guess he is a bit on the large side as well. I don't think that the RAF of Luftwaffe pilots of the day were much taller than 1.70-1.75m, with a few notable exceptions.
Heck, even in our airforce there was an upper limit up until we got Mirage 2000s and a lot of F16s with that recliner chair in the cockpit which makes everything comfortable and roomy
Until that point our air force mostly operated F-4s, Mirage F-1s, F-104s, F-5s, etc, from the 60s-70s up until the early 90s. During those years, any person in the military flight school was disqualified from flying fighters if he was taller than 1.80-1.85m and we're talking a mere 15-20 years ago.

If you think about how people were generally shorter back in WWII and that it was possible the shortest guys were being preferred for fighter duty, i guess that neither the Spit nor the 109 was terribly cramped for their standards. Maybe they would describe it as a snug or tight fit (depending on whether they liked it or not), but even from pilots who criticized an aspect of their own aircraft what we usually hear are complaints about ergonomics, performance or visibility. They would obviously compare different types and say that "A is roomy and more comfortable than B", but i can't recall ever reading a comment from a wartime pilot stating that a certain cockpit was downright impossible to sit in for any length of time necessitated by the type's operational duties.

Heavies like the B-17 flew with open side windows for much of the war in freezing temperatures and totally lacked any kind of pressurization equipment. I'm sure if we took a B-52 crew to give an appraisal, the tail gunner would say it's impossible to sit in that ball turret and everyone else would talk about how "lack of pressurization makes your ears bleed in altitude changes", but the guys who flew the 17 back in the time loved it.

Making comparisons is the art of comprehending relevance and dependency between things, so the context of the time a machine was fielded in combat and the background of the guy making the comparisons is important too

[Skoshi Tiger]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

IUntil that point our air force mostly operated F-4s, Mirage F-1s, F-104s, F-5s, etc, from the 60s-70s up until the early 90s. During those years, any person in the military flight school was disqualified from flying fighters if he was taller than 1.80-1.85m and we're talking a mere 15-20 years ago.

I seam to remember the reason for the rule in the RAAF being if your legs were too long it would cause a small gap between your legs and the seat. If this was the case it resulted in to broken legs if you needed to eject.

Cheers!

Look, I know I won't be remembered for my manners, but this kinda stuff is what really damages the history of aviation..

Apart for my personal opinion on the pilot (who again I suppose I can express thanks to the freedom of speech and on the grounds of my personal direct experience with the person), the approach and comments that he does have no value for the sake of a correct evaluation of the quality and flaws of the two cockpit, not to mention his final personal opinion on something that he never even flew in.

And for the intelligent folks who thinks I'm a Luftwhiner, there are other important flaws in the 109 design: a real annoying factor of the 109 (and 110) cockpit that very rarely comes up but that you will notice once we can play CoD is the shadows of the window frames around the cockpit: they move continuously and will partially cover instruments.

Going back to pilot's accounts, I would rather value the impressions and comments of Charlie Brown, who flew both the Bf109 (he's probably the only modern display pilot to have flown the G and E series) and various marks of Spitfire.