Quote:
Originally Posted by Glider
This is the full quote as posted by Kurfurst:-
When the Me.109 was following the Hurricane or Spitfire, it was found that our aircraft turned inside the Me.109 without difficulty when flown by determined pilots who were not afraid to pull their aircraft round hard in a tight turn. In a surprisingly large number of cases, however, the Me. 109 succeeded in keeping on the tail of the Spitfire or Hurricane during these turning tests, merely because our Pilots would not tighten up the turn suficiently from fear of stalling and spinning. ...
It clearly has two part
a) When the Me.109 was following the Hurricane or Spitfire, it was found that our aircraft turned inside the Me.109 without difficulty when flown by determined pilots who were not afraid to pull their aircraft round hard in a tight turn. So when two deteremined pilots fly the aircraft to the full the RAF fighters easily turned inside the Me109
b) In a surprisingly large number of cases, however, the Me. 109 succeeded in keeping on the tail of the Spitfire or Hurricane during these turning tests, merely because our Pilots would not tighten up the turn suficiently from fear of stalling and spinning
Where the Me109 pilot is the most determined the Me109 can stay with the RAF fighters
From this it seems that with pilots of equal ability the RAF fighters will turn tighter.
All I am saying is read the whole quote.
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The world is not white and black.
Let's talk about flying skill of the pilot: there is the general skill and I agree that the 109 pilot was really skilled, if not he would not be chosen as enemy for the test. But being a skilled pilot in some kind of plane does not mean that your as skilled in another one. For accuracy I asked to my teammate, the military pilot, and he agree with me... you need experience in THAT plane to reach the best performance. The document states that he fled it until he was used to it (how many hours? can't read by now)... but how can we know that he could push the plane at its limit like the determined pilots did in their Spitfires?
This "H + Sp > H + Bf > L + Sp" (H is a High skilled pilot, L is Low skilled pilot) as many of you want to use as proof is wrong. We don't know if the L pilots are really inexperienced... they could be expert Hurricanes' pilots flying in a Spitfire!!
So it's "H + Sp > H + Bf > (?) + Sp"
But, again, H and L can't be the pilot general skill... they must be
the personal skill in those planes.
Lets add the new variable (there A means that pilot is really accustomed to the plane, and B means that the pilot is not used to fly it)...
H + Sp + (A) > H + Bf + (?) > (?) + Sp + (?)
So we don't know the overall skill of the outturned Spitfire's pilots.... we don't know if the 109 pilot could push it to its limit.... the only thing we can know is that the determined pilots who actually outturned the 109 were experienced pilots but for sure more used to fly Spitfires than the 109's pilot was used to fly the german plane.
Now can they outturn a "Marseille"? Probably... but how can we be so sure?