"Comfort" in cockpits of BOB adversaries

Originally Posted by Trumper

The pilot in the video is the ex BBMF leader Paul Day.

,probably has more flight time in a WW11 fighter than anyone else ,[maybe John Romain excepted] and you call him a twat and biased.
If you actually listen to what he says ,they are facts.
Cockpit is small/cramped
Canopy is heavy and difficult to get open [Black 6 crashed and the pilot asked the fire crews NOT to cut the airframe to release him] as he could'nt get out any other way had to be lifted.
http://www.warbirdsresourcegroup.org...es/lrg1545.jpg
He praises the controls,throttles,panel and the layout so not really totally biased against at all.
I think you need to listen more carefully and make a less biased statement yourself.

..since when having more flight time in a WW2 fighter than anyone else means you're not a xxxx?!

Ok, let's put it in this way: I met the man in person in a couple of occasions and both times he talked, behaved and addressed people like a xxxx, is that better?

As for what he says on the video, the patronising tone in which he's giving his comment on the bf109 is as useless as his judgement: these aeroplanes were developed for combat duty, and as such the bf109 design was far superior.
Yes, the cockpit is way more crammed, but for EVERYTHING ELSE the bf109 is by far better than the Spitfire. Just to give you a couple of examples: the Luftwaffe tended to select small size men for their fighter crews, a choice that meant a better tolerance of G-loads and ease of movement in a machine that was deliberately small; second thing (and this is something that your friend here forgot to mention) the spitfire was designed with engineering farts like a fuel tank behind the cockpit panel with no adequate firewall, which meant that many Commonwealth pilots suffered severe burns because of this "uh, whoopsie!"..

[Jaws2002]

Originally Posted by Sutts

He isn't saying the 109 is a hopeless war machine - just that he'd rather have more room, much better visibility and a better chance of surviving a ground flip if the choice was his to make. You can't argue with the facts.

My point is, he is "evaluating" this two aircraft based on today's "requirenments". Most of his points are about the comfort and safety, wich in a world war two type of strugle for national survival don't mean squat.
In the case of a ground flip actually the extremely solid frame cannopy of the 109 was a lot safer than most late war bubble sliding canopies.

You analyse fighting machines based on their fighting qualities, not based on pilot comfort. Pilot comfort on a short range fighter are way down the list of requirenments.
There are plenty fighting qualities of the 109 (climb, dive, negative G, Cannons, small, hard to see) that make the 109 of that era a very dangerous oponent for anything in the skies.

This is like some of the "reviews" you see online for fighting guns today.
Oh, the stock doesn't look good, is not very ergonomic, the plastic feels cheap, the collor is off...... It's a fighting gun, damit! Is the fighting qualities like reliability, accuracy, easy to learn and use is what matters. Not the color of the paint.

Originally Posted by kendo65

From previous experience Sternjaeger has a slight 'bias' issue himself


...and generally prefers not to hear negative opinions on German aircraft and the Luftwaffe, though he usually ascribes those opinions to being due to 'propaganda' and not to the speaker being a 'twat'.

Under an engineering and military point of view there's very few remarks that can be made to German aircrafts of ww2, still I don't think they're the best, simply cos they were hard to handle at landing or takeoff, an extremely delicate phase for a combat pilot.

The best by far was what the Americans put in the sky, what really annoys me is hearing all this celebration for a machine like the Spitfire.. if you talk to people in the warbird circuit (which I regularly do..) you will hear them say that yes, the Spit is wonderful for acros, but to bring it to battle.. uhmmmm a bit flimsy...

[addman]

The 109 cockpit is cramped to anyone except a child. I'm sure even the german pilots back then thought the same. To it's defence I'd like to believe that being rather squeezed in there made one feel more in symbiosis with the plane, like an extension of yourself. The feeling I got from watching that clip was very claustrophobic especially the lack of room for movement. I'm quite small by western standards (171 cm) but that cockpit would probably be small for me too. The 109 is one of my favourite WWII aircraft but that doesn't make it perfect ....that's also why I like it.

[Voyager]

Originally Posted by Sternjaeger

seen it before, the guy is a right tw@at and totally biased. The cockpit of the 109 was surely smaller, but the layout was superior and so was the distribution/quality of the controls and instruments.

This again is a classic example of how people shouldn't always listen to pilots' opinions, because believe it or not they're human beings like us, with flaws, preferences and what not..

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)

[Fritz X]

Hm, I for myself don't find the Bf-109 video appearing to be too biased... The last comment about not choosing it to go to war, especially when your enemy is a Spit on the other hand seemed to be unnecessary, though...

But his major complaints about the cockpit seem to be outright true. Just to compare what former RAF fighter and test pilot Eric Brown wrote in his book "Wings of the Luftwaffe":

"The cockpit was small and narrow and was framed by an unpretty canopy, which was heavy to open from inside and was fitted with rather primitive sliding windows. The frame of the windscreen was rather narrow and didn't block too much of the pilot's sight, but the overall space was so limited that the movement of the head was heavily limited, even for a rather small pilot like me."

This extract is a translation by me, since I only own a German copy of the book.

The plane being described there is a Bf-109 G-6/U2, by the way.

[Dietger]

He pointed out good and bad things about the cockpit, and it really makes sence what he said about it.
But.

He is biased.
He simply hate the German equipment. His remarks, all over, make it clear.

But what the the Hell? You dont have to love everything you came across in your profession, right?

That guy is obviously a British snop, absolute ok for me.

PS. Jaws got some good points here. Its called WEAPONS-PLATFORM, not your granddaddys lovlely armchair......
PSS. And whats wrong with a big gun between your legs???

[JG4_Helofly]

Well, I can confirme that the cockpit of the 109 is very small, since I had the chance to sit in a 109 G and a fw 190 A8. So I can only compare these two planes. The problem was that it was very narrow and the pilot had to be small in height, because with canopy closed it was impossible to sit normaly. I had to lean my head forward. ( I am 180 cm in height)
So yes, it's not the most comfortable place.

[Richard]

I sat in a F6F Hellcat and a P51 Cockpit once, (I'm 1.77m tall) both were pretty comfortable to me, The Hellcat cockpit feeling slightly bigger (to me) , I guess that the F4U Corsair had a similar cockpit size to the Hellcat as well.. So if I had to fly for 7 hrs straight, I think I'd pick the Hellcat, but there's no doubt that 109 'pit was a tight squeeze.

[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