Yes, the only two 'modern' fighters of that era with no dive limitations were the p-40 and f-4f...

A guy named Reggie told me a story about when he was flying a Spit over the channel and a 109 jumped him. he flipped the
spit over into a dive and the 109 chased him on down. He was getting pretty low so he started a hard pull out of the
dive. He looked over his shoulder and saw the 109 try to pull out inside him. As the g's built he saw the 109 breakup
and fall into the channel. Reg was a good ol brit who had a nice plane down in Santa Paula...

--
Dan D.



..
"Big John" wrote in message ...
Dan

The P-38 had high speed dive problems. After a number crashed they
went back and retrofitted them with 'dive' brakes (narrow strips on
top of wing that could be raised to increase drag). These slowed the
bird down enough it could be pulled out

The P-47 also had some dive problems. It wanted to tuck at high speed
in a dive. To recover you kept full throttle on and when you got to a
lower altitude you slowed down in the thicker air and regained enough
control to recover.

The P-51 was red lined at 505 mph. I have had it up to that speed and
didn't have any problems recovering from dive.

I have friends who were in Europe and told of far exceeding the 505
red line when getting away from 109/190's. The 109 had a structural
problem in their tail and it would come off if they got too fast in a
dive (per word passed to our fighter jocks).

All of this in a time and land far away )

Big John

On Tue, 24 Feb 2004 11:58:03 GMT, "Blueskies" wrote:

If I remember correctly, the nose down full throttle was a tactic used to escape the zero's. They knew they would not
break the plane and the enemy often did. Same was true of the Wildcat, no limitation, plane would reach terminal
velocity...