A newbies impression of the 109 and spit

[bongodriver]

Yeah I see the 'static' stability as what nasa like to call 'stick-fixed' stability, to be honest not an issue that causes difficulty in flight, it simply means the aircraft maintains attitude when displaced or simply put its light in pitch due to no resistance, hardly a bad quality in an aircraft you are trying to point around the sky to put a gunsight on target, if it were coupled with vicious characteristics in a stall it might cause problems, but again the Spit was known to be docile.

for an aircraft to be considered stable or unstable it really comes down to the dynamic stability, if the Spitfire was dynamically unstable as I believe the Spit bashers are claiming then it would have been impossible to fly in any form of manouvering due to the increasing amplitude of displacement and the subsequent pilot induced oscilations to correct it, by all accounts there was never an issue with this and further more it's practically inconceivable that a typical monoplane format aircraft of that era with a concentration of weight in it's nose to be dynamically unstable.