I may have overread it but, when is the patch being released?

Friday

Two weeks, maybe.

It is not that I contest the basic statement of yours about the ground handling of the 109 but could you provide some links to support that over 50% of all 109s were lost during landing and take-off? Personally I would just say that I simply cannot believe that the armament ministry accepted a plane to be produced for so long with such a horrible statistic. Seems to me very unrealistic. 50% means that every second 109 was lost due to accidents during landing or take-offs. Why should any armament ministry accept such a thing? There had been enough parallel designs of fighters to phase out the 109 if it really had been so bad.

To complete the image I also think that the Spit is still far too easy for take off. It is a pain in the you-know-where to make it turn but the torque seems still quite easy and doesn't concur with anecdotal evidence for take-off imho.

About the 109's landing... Some have said there was a problem with the toe out configuration of the landing gear.

But anyway in Russia the landing fields usually were a disaster (they had to uncover the wheels because of the mud) while in the western front as Hartmann said to Hitler there were young pilots ordered to fly in every kind of weather: of course they usually failed to takeoff/land.

That 50% statistic has been bandied around a great deal over the years, but I've never seen any hard data. I think it's been over-egged, or too much is placed on the 109s takeoff characteristics.

Bearing in mind accident attrition was quite high on all sides thanks to wartime pressures of training - particularly at times of high casualties, timetables cut and students rushed throught etc -and perhaps some technical failures due to rushed workmanship or maintanence, I think you'd find any accidental loss rate, allied or axis, higher than peacetime.

However, the 109, I believe is easier to takeoff and land in both Il-2 and CloD than it's real life counterpart.

I have a rather neat quote from Mr Charlie Brown; he's a modern day pilot who flies all sorts of warbirds and has many, many hours on 109s, and NOT just buchons. So many in fact that apparently he's quite in demand from collectors who have 109s that need flying, particularly test flights after rebuild or major overhaul.

I bought a book a year ago which goes through the entire test flight program of a Bf109E - yes, I said an E - and it some excellent information that clarifies a great deal. For the moment we'll just look at the T/O characteristics; I leave the rest to Charlie:


Hmmmmmmm...... familiar, eh......?

I think I remember reading 10% loss...its been awhile though

Well, it's not that I did not read about the landing difficulties and I do not put this in doubt. I also believe that the losses due to accidents were indeed higher than in peacetime and probably significantly higher. I also read frequently that it is due to the narrow landing gear.

Mh. Now the thing with the narrow landing gear I have a problem: The Spit has a narrow landing gear too, and perhaps even narrower (the landing gear of the 109 is slightly bent outward while the legs of the Spits are just straightforward parallel).

You now may reply: yeah, the torque in the 109 was stronger. This may be true - but only during full power (not gradual power increase) take-off. Never during landing as the power during landing was usually cut down to very little or even idle.

Brown's statement says clearly that he was not familiar with the type and expected a different behaviour. Of course this may indicate that rookie pilots may have had problems to handle this crate. But I really would like to recall that many spit pilots reported on a strong tendency of the spit to break away too during take-off.

I do not contest that the take off of the 109 should not be left as it is (for reminder) but I really think that a 50% loss rate and even "only" 30% appears to me too high and probably a myth as I really cannot believe that the 109 remained the main stay of the German Air Force throughout the war with this kind of flaw.

Er,I think you have misinterpreted and I suggest you re-read. I can tell you that for all the hours that Bf-109G-2 Black 6 was in the air, Charlie Brown was behind the stick for more than half that time. He's familiar with the 109. This was his first test flight in the E. He said the almost complete lack of longitudinal stability at tail-off was familiar - i.e it was a charactersitic of the 109G and was also inherent in the E. What is different is that the E does things at lower speeds, which one can presume is from the lower weight of the E variant compared to the G.


Any WW2 era fighter is of 1000+HP on an airframe under 10 tonnes is gonna be a handful at full power and the low end of the speed range - the sheer physics of forces says so - the difference lies in the aerodynamic power of the control surfaces at these speeds to compensate or correct. Clearly the 109s are lacking. Sure the Spitfire could bite but it remained longitudinally controllable and had effective rudder down to walking speed. The fact the the 109 is 'almost completely unstable longitudinally at tail up' even with propellor driven airflow over the tail surfaces speaks volumes. Even in the air you have to work the rudder hard during maneouvres to keep co-ordinated (source: Me109 - One Summer Two Messerschmitts DVD).

When adequately trained and experienced flyers are allowed near the 109 it's a capable aeroplane - Erich Hartmann alone demonstrates this. However what this shows is that to get it off the ground and back on it again requires attention, a good experience of flying tail-wheel aircraft and of airmanship in general. These are things which a peacetime air force or one that is riding a cresting wave of victories can readily supply in the training syllabus. However, these are not characteristics I would associate with the backbone of the Luftwaffe by 1944. And the reason the 109 wasn't replaced by then is because no one in the 3rd Reich had the foresight to work on a successor back when it counted; they thought the war would be over and won by 1943!