Best Fighter For It's Time

"Stephen Harding" wrote in message
...
Guy Alcala wrote:

Charles Talleyrand wrote:

My question is this: Which fighter had the clearest advantage over
it's
the other fighters of it's time frame?

Not that I expect to head off the no doubt hundreds of posts that will
follow because versionsof
this question are a perennial favorite on the NG, but the correct reply
is that your question is
far too general for any answer to be meaningful.

Don't know that's entirely true. Certainly lots of gray area in such a
question,
but the Me 262 was pretty clearly a leap ahead of anything (available) in
the air
doing its job during its activity period.

Perhaps a bit less true with the Fokker Eindekker, but it certainly wasn't
labeled
a "scourge" for nothing.

Problem is, it is very rare for competing designs to be very far apart in
technology
at any given time. This is true for ships, stereos and automobiles as
much as
aircraft.

I think I might be inclined to throw in the F-117, even though it is not
really a
"fighter", as long as we limit the discussion to competing designs doing
the same
type of job. A Learjet with a machine gun could shoot down a 117 in a
dogfight, but
that's not what an F-117 is designed to do.

How about the A6M2 "Zero"? Although it didn't reign supreme for long, it
was pretty
clearly superior to everything it met when flown and fought as doctrine
dictated at
the time.


SMH

What Guy said is considered in the fighter community to be the right answer.
The reality of this oft asked question is that no single aircraft can be
found supreme throughout it's performance envelope when compared directly to
the entire performance envelope of another aircraft. This has been proven
out again and again in our modern comparison performance or delta Ps
performance testing. The answer is ALWAYS where in the envelope and/or
mission parameters is the comparison taking place?
The reasons are extremely complex, and go to the very root of comparison
performance testing, and basically involve not only design parameters, but
constantly changing dynamics as expendables are used. Most of us in the
community agree as well that even if performance is standardized, as in 50%
fuel and combat weight presented as specific units, a difference between the
cockpits (pilot factor) can nullify any and all performance data as the
comparison progresses in real time.
Nailing a "best fighter" down to one single answer is a question often asked
and discussed by "historians". You can actually get it close (enough for
government work anyway :-).......but when you get down into the guts of a
real answer, most of us in the community consider this quest a single "best"
fighter a moot discussion. But don't get me wrong here........go to the O
club on a fighter base on any given night, and you will run into a whole
flock of fighter pilots arguing like hell about just this question; but when
the bar closes, they all seem to leave scratching their heads just like the
rest of you!! :-)))
Dudley Henriques
International Fighter Pilots Fellowship
Commercial Pilot/CFI
Retired