Fun fact for the day: the closer you are to a spinning propeller, the more difficult it is to see. When you look at a distant airplane, its prop will be more easily visible than the prop spinning just five feet in front of your face.
And concerning the yellow tips... I don't know so much about how various forces of WWII may have painted their props, but nowadays the common practice is to paint the side facing the pilot a uniform flat black, precisely to make it less visible, less chance of distraction. Only the side facing away from the pilot is painted with stripes at the tips to make the prop more visible to ground crew.
The only time I ever saw the propeller while piloting small aircraft was when I forgot to turn off the wingtip strobe lights before entering a cloud.
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04-08-2011, 08:10 AM
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