Quote:
Originally Posted by Glider
I will reword my previous posting:-
Just an observation, but during WW2 the RAF never needed to develop a two seat Spit or Hurricane and trained many thousands of pilots to fly them. But the Luftwaffe needed to develop two seat 109's with the inevitable distruption on the design and production teams, presumably because they needed to.
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Going way o/t here...
I'd think the main reason that the British didn't develop trainer versions of the Spitfire and Hurricane was because they had powerful advanced trainers such as the Harvard and
Miles Master, which replicated most of the flight characteristics of fighters, albeit they didn't have the same high speed capabilities. One pilot who describes transitioning from the Harvard to a Spitfire in 1940 was Geoffrey Wellum; he didn't seem to have a huge amount of difficulty. The Harvard could bite pilots who got careless, but I don't know much about the Master, although it looked likely to be a good intro to the Hurricane. Interesting that it was equipped with a Rotol C/S prop. (Maybe another aircraft type for the developers???)
The Germans used aircraft such as the Ar 96. There really wasn't much call for a two-seat 109 until later in the war, otherwise the
Jagdfliegervorschulen, the basic fighter training units, used various version of the 109 and captured D.520s etc; the pilots then transitioned to
Ergänzungsgruppe which were similar to OTUs but attached to Jagdgeschwader