Quote:
Originally Posted by cheesehawk
I think it might be a sensitive subject, but when he was shot down, does he remember hearing the hits against his aircraft? Could you hear hits or the guns firing over the engine noise?
Sorry, watched the vid after I posted my question. Ask instead could they hear their own guns over the engine? What was his impression of the P-40 compared to the Hurricane/Spitfire. Were there any quirks to that plane they viewed as "what the heck are the bloody Yanks thinking?"
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Hi Cheesehawk
1) He told me that the US planes had much more comfortable cockpits than the Brits. He loved the Spits very much but the very uncomfortable cockpit was a negative to him, sometimes they did long range ops of 3 hours and then it was very bad.
2) He told me performance wise the Spit was far superior to the Tommy (as he calls it) Mid '42 in North Africa there were very few Spit squadrons (think they were preserved to save the motherland?) The mainstay of Allied fighters was Hurricanes, Tomahawks and Kittyhawks all very much inferior to the 109. Cecil's 5 SAAF squadron suffered exceptional high casualty rate.....in 3 weeks, 3 successive OC's were KIA and Cecil told me he was not aware of any of his pilot mates that were not shot down at some stage.
3) The one thing where the Tomahawk was superior to the Bf-109 was the manoeuvrability in turning; but as he said the 109's never "tangled" with them, they came down in high speed sweeps and then climb up above them again, being much faster with far better rate of climb.
4) Regarding the guns; two of the .303 Brownings were accessible to be manually cocked by the pilot in the cockpit: these two fired through the prop space. He said on many occasions the browning firing sync mechanism went faulty and then the prop blades got damaged by bullets, causing a terrible vibration that shaked the whole plane.
