Quote:
Originally Posted by bongodriver
recovery....reshmovery and where the hell did that quote come from anyway, Spitfires did not break up in spin recovery but some did break up recovering from dives because granted the Spit was built a little delicately for it's sensitivity in pitch.
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According to Alex Henshaw about 25 Spitfires were known to have broken up in flight; the majority of those were Spitfire Vs which had been badly loaded at a squadron level pushing their cg too far back, and breaking up during dive recovery. As Jeffrey Quill explained, this helped lead to the addition of bob weights in the tail, then the larger mass balances on the elevators. Some of these are documented in Morgan and Shacklady.
Apart from that I'd like to see Crumpp provide some documentary evidence that Spitfires regularly broke up in flight during spin recovery.
OT slightly;
NACA's report on the P-47D which had some problems of its own; one of the few fighters to meet NACA standards was the
P-51H.