On 2007-12-15 19:54:18 -0800, Dudley Henriques said:

wrote:
A buddy of mine recorded some History Channel show and I watched it.
The show was "Dogfight", and this episode was on P-51s fighting
ME109s, FW190, ME262s, and some Japanese planes.

In one recreation, a P51 pilot has an unusual ME109 chasing him. The
plane is actually out performing his P51 -- that wasn't usual with
109s. I don't remember exactly how long the ME109 was on him, but it
was about to be able to lead him just enough to take him out
(according to the P51 pilot, and, how he knew that I don't know). I
liked that they actually interviewed the P51 pilots who described what
was going on.

Anyway all of the sudden the P51 pilot tries a trick: he pulls the
stick back hard against his gut, at the same time jams hard bottom
rudder, the 51 spins out, sort of flat, and as it swings around the
pilot hit the fire button and laid out a stream of .50 caliber through
which the German flew and was knocked out.

I want to learn how to do that trick!

It's a pretty cool show, amazing CGI recreations. I slow motioned the
maneuver -- all the control surfaces looked right at each stage.


Snap Roll. Isn't the best idea in the 51 but doable if you get the
speed down below corner. Depending on the GW; down around 250 maximum.
It will snap before it loads all the way up to max structural g which
is mandatory unless you want to leave the wings and the fuselage as 3
separate parts in the sky.

Bertie's right. The show models are good but not totally realistic.
I've seen some slew moves on the program that you would really need
vectored thrust to perform.

As to the 109 out performing the 51. The 109 in skilled hands was a
deadly opponent at low to medium altitudes. It really boils down to
what I like to call "The difference between the cockpits", or how good
one pilot is vs how bad the other one might be.

That was really the key for the Allies. I was not the planes, it was
the pilots. Japanese losses were so high that they looted all the
training schools for experienced pilots and sent them to the front.
Germany simply kept their best pilots at the front for the duration.
That is a great way for a few guys to rack up impressive totals as aces
(Germany had about a hundred pilots who had shot down more than a
hundred planes), but they never pass their knowledge on and attrition
eventually takes most of them out. The Allies continually rotated their
best pilots back to the training centers.

Sure, the 109 in skilled hands was a deadly opponent, the operative
phrase being "in skilled hands." Germany simply ran out of skilled
hands. Erich Hartmann may have survived the war, but he lost far too
many of his comrades in arms. Who knows what Marseille (for example)
would have done if he had lived? His training program and theories of
strategy and tactics were innovative for his day, to say the least. If
he had been sent back to a training school, things might have gone
harder for the Allies.

It is the same thing that the airlines are doing today: cannibalizing
all the instructors and worrying later about where the next generation
of pilots is going to come from. You wonder if the airlines will reach
the point where Germany was, trying to win the war, so to speak, with
just one pilot.
--
Waddling Eagle
World Famous Flight Instructor