dogfight

wrote in news:f28fe8d7-a571-4199-ae26-7a76108c2ca8
@t1g2000pra.googlegroups.com:

Snap Roll.

I can't find the maneuver as it was depicted in the show either in my
Aerobat manual or in Neil William's book.

The snap roll in the Aerobat manual is what I was thinking of when
Bertie mentioned snap roll -- essentially an accelerated spin in the
direction of flight which involves inversion about the longitudinal
axis. Maybe there are other versions of snap rolls that don't "invert"
you about the longitudinal axis. I dunno.

Couldn;t find it on the history channel website.

Let me describe the P51 maneuver this way: Imagine a car driving along
a gentle curve being chased by another car -- the first car hits a
patch of ice and does a rapid 360, recovering in the same direction as
it started.

That's pretty much what the plane did (although it climbed some during
whatever kind of stall this was). Anyway now imagine the headlights of
the spinning car are machine guns: as the spinning car gets to about
270 degrees from original heading and the chasing car is starting to
go past the guns start to fire, continuing to fire as the first car
spins back to its orginal heading, nailing the second car the whole
way as it goes by.

The P51 was never "upside down" as you'd expect in a snap roll. Maybe
a spin out?


Doesn't really sound possible. About the only way that could happen is if
his speed was very, very low and it was some sort of precession manuever.
That's pretty unlikely. It could have been a sort of flat spin manuever.
During a snap roll, though, the pitch is pretty dramatic and if you were
trailing an airplane doing one, you'd only see it's upper side. I'd say
this is probably what he did for at least part of the maunever and the guys
doing the animation just couldn't grasp the way it works real life.
I watched one of them with an exchange between a Wildcat and a Zero and the
Wildcat pilot's description of what he was doing contained more info for me
than the animation, though the animation did help map it out.
I saw another one where they were talking about a scissors manuever. I
think it was between an F4 and a Mig 21. Again, the animations were sort of
faithful to the narrative, but just didn't make 100% sense.

The closest thing to the spin out you're talking about is a precession
manuever, though. I'd guess it's more than possible to do something like
that in a Mustang, but it would almost certainly involve a lot of roll as
well as yaw..

Bertie

Bang -- down went the 109.

Speaking of airframes coming apart, I don't recall ever reading about
such things happening in WWII dogfights. It seems it would given the
complexity and fear of the situation. Did it happen much? Maybe that
kind of thing wasn't reported because it's not exactly a heroic end to
an aircraft / pilot.

I understand disintegration was far more common in WWI.