Quote:
Originally Posted by TomcatViP
BoB museum or the Shuttleworth collection had one I think some years ago in flight condition.
I don't think that CAM ship needed any boosted or special aircraft to be proteced.
Remember that they needed to down reconnaissance Condor that were monitoring the convoy.
I have in memory the story of Hurri being converted from coastal command (and those were not new Hurri) and then moved on teh CAM ship mission.
Also there was only a handful of pilots qualified for that particular exercise (something like 22 - not sure). I read the story of one that did 3 mission (bailing out two time in teh sea and being knocked down once while running to his plane during an alert).
Can't remember the title but as I think he was an ex wingman of Bader, probably the story might be somewhere in Bader story.
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AFAIK this is a complete list of CAM launches:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAM_ship
Quote:
Originally Posted by TomcatViP
Anyway, giving the weary airframe and the dangerous mission with flight in bad weather (when the U-boat were attacking with the Condor coordinating or recognizing the target for the wolf pack) it's un-likely that they played with some tricky eng mods just to gain 20 sec in a climb to cloud base as was alrdy pointed out.
3000ft/min is a huge climb rate. The 109 managed to maintain that one during the war despite her overweight and still was considered one of the best climber at the end.
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Late war fighters were generally somewhere in the 3500-5000 fpm range. For example, here's some data for the 109G from a source not exactly noted for "blue bias":
http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.o...tt-german.html
The P-51 wasn't really known for its climb performance, but its low level ROC in WEP is over 3000 fpm at combat weight for all models at 5000 feet:
http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.o...ical-chart.jpg
Meanwhile, the mighty Spitfire IX would exceed 3000 fpm
at 20,000 feet at +18 psi in 1943:
http://www.spitfireperformance.com/spitfire-IX.html
Quote:
Originally Posted by TomcatViP
I am sry to be so contradictory.
Nice to see you back Vip !
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Thanks.