Hurricane & Spitfire control characteristics

[NZtyphoon]

Originally Posted by VO101_Tom

Hi. I don't have any problem personally with you guys, but I know what your opinions about Kurfurst (I know him), you (and some other ppl here) have prejudices against him. He is supported the German side, it's true. But he don't falsify the documents, don't lie, only his opinion does not always correspond with the generally accepted thesis. If he had a personal conflict with someone, it is not my business. But the data that are copied here as well, these can not be found wrong. The test reports and the game is really different from eachother.

You haven't experienced the nastier side of Kurfurst here, on other forums, or on Wikipedia so it would be fair to say that there is another side to this; Kurfurst has (almost deliberately) provoked a great deal of animosity against himself and any views he supports, which has led to some prejudice against the Bf 109. Fair enough though, no further attacks on the source.

However, the data he has presented here, although genuine, is skewed against the Spitfire because it represents one aspect of a complex whole. By maintaining that flight reports about rogue Spitfires with badly adjusted ailerons - reports that are described by Geoffrey Quill - are representative of the flight characteristics of all Mk I Spitfires with fabric ailerons, is drawing an extremely long bow, as is presenting a Rechlin report about a captured Spitfire which may or may not have sustained damage to its ailerons or other parts of the airframe which helped skew the report. I know there have often been complaints about presenting A&AEE or RAE reports about captured 109s because of the state the airframes may have been in. Alfred Price suggests that there was often a certain amount of propaganda involved on both sides, so a degree of caution is needed when using WW2 flight test reports about an enemy's aircraft to generate objective data about that aircraft.

Geoffrey Quill noted that one of his major frustrations with the early Spitfires was the heaviness of the fabric ailerons at high speeds, another problem being, as he explained, the sensitivity of the fabric ailerons to slight variations of tolerances in and around the wing structure and on the aileron itself. The adoption of the metal covered ailerons did away with many of those variations and were on the vast majority of Spitfires.