Well said...

The Mustang was (is) a fine mount, and while it shares the mantra as
the "best" fighter with others, each fighter had to be flown in it's
design environment.

It was best (designed to be) long range fighter ESCORT, which it
excelled at.

Down low and in the dirt, many other planes could out gun, out turn,
out climb and out dive it..

One of the best tactics for a P-51 pilot if caught down low was to
get outta dodge.. Some of the enemy pilots called them "runstangs"
(I forget the translation)

But 15000 ft, while other planes started to wheeze.. the stang could
still breathe, and , clearly in it's design element, was the ride to
have...up at that alt....

As a "dogfighter" ? (within the definition) .. nope...

Dave


On Sun, 16 Dec 2007 15:44:56 +0000 (UTC), Bertie the Bunyip
wrote:

wrote in news:4a4b3843-18c7-4881-b8b8-
:



I don't know if there were any higher performance versions of the
ME-109,


There were. there were long wing variants built later in the war
specificially for high altitude ops.

but the TA-152 could outperform the Mustang. It was a souped
up version of the FW-190.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focke-Wulf_Ta_152


Well, the figures don't tell the whole story. while speed and rate of
clinmb certainly would have given an advantage, as a package, though,
it's much harder to define what makes one airplane superior to
another.Performance can be a lot more than numbers at the end of the
day...


For instance, there was a loonie Swedish count in the 1960s who
symathised with the Biafrans in their war of secession from Nigeria (
the short story here is that oil was discovered in Biafra and they
diecided to take the money and run, having been a seperate nation inthe
first place, only paired up with the rest of Nigeria by arbitrary
colonialist redefintion of nations)
Anyhoo. this guy and some of his buds gathered up the best airplanes
available to the, the Bolkow Junior, manufactured in Sweden as the Malmö
a midget little box of a thing with a Cont A75 in the nose,put some hard
points on it and off to Biafra they went. They proceeded to decimate the
Nigerian Air Force, which at that time had the very latest Russian
stuff, Mig 21s, 17s, etc by flying at treetop level to their bases and
launching their little match head missiles at them while they were still
on the grond. they'd then race back to their own lines at treetop level
at 75 knots and any Migs that got airborne found it impossible to get a
bead on them.
Eventaully, all of these mercenaries were killed (IIRC, there were
another half dozen airplanes and pilots brought it over time, also lost)
but the damage they inflicted on the vastly superior forces of the other
side were astonishing.
Just as well the NAF didn't have 150s, eh?

OK, this is an odd example, but it goes to show in a bizarre kind of way
that numbers in a performance column don't tell the whole story.


Bertie