Why bother even entering this thread if you are just going to be an arse?
It's f4udoa with noodle envy, just read his replies. It's folks like him and yourself that post inaccurate info and when corrected you decide to insult.
Niklas posted facts. They have nothing to do how you "feel".
The real question is why do you think it is necessary to throw insults when wrong? Trying to portray the p51 as some miracle plane is wrong.
Batz
LOL, something in my post must have hit a bit too close to home. I don’t really recall providing inaccurate information in this thread (or being corrected for it). If I have, open season on me, please post it for my embarrassment instead of yours.
As for insulting someone in a post, we all can’t be as evenhanded and impersonal as Wotan is in contentious threads, now can we. I sincerely apologize to any Germanic person who was actually offended by my post. If anybody took it seriously, and not as the obvious jest it was, well, I’m truly sorry. I don’t think Germanic people actually have smaller (or larger) noodlees than the rest of Europe, red-blooded apple pie fed Americans or even Corsair aficionados. And as we all know, size really doesn't matter anyway.
As far as the general quantity and quality of the "information" offered throughout this post, with all the meandering points (from formulas for winning the war for the Luftwaffe, to murmansk convoys to drag coefficient and Meridith effect debates) being raised, just what was the question again? The NIKI thread has more focus and continuity, and that says a lot
I just see the same conjecture and scattered, disconnected factoids from the last four or five times this type of thread has run. I personally have less emotional attachment to the P-51 than I do the Bf-109 series or the P-47, P-38, F4U… a pretty long list. If it came down to it, CO-E I would probably choose the 109K-4 in a “dogfight to the death.” Just as long as I didn’t have to win a war with the airplane. I generally agree with Gscholz’s assessment:
Ah yes the 109G6 is definitively more maneuverable than the P51, except at very high speed, however the G10 and K4 are heavier than the G6. I feel (from what I've read and AH) that the P-51 would have the edge in high speed maneuvering, the 109 would be better in a medium speed fight, and in a slow turn fight the 109 would have superior maneuverability unless the P-51 uses its flaps which would give it an edge. In every speed range the 109 hold the edge in vertical fighting though, especially in a slow fight, due to its superior power.
What touched off my toung-in-cheek response was the religious belief by a few that if the P-51 had something like the Meredith effect, then the 109 must have it in spades (just prove it didn’t!) and that commonly stated flight characteristic deficiencies noted by allied, German and modern day pilots are overstated or non existent. I mean, really, did the 109 have any faults at all from a flight characteristics standpoint? Was it light on the control at all speeds, tighter turning better in a dive in addition to the clear advantages in acceleration, climb and speed in various configurations at various altitudes. Why did they bother with the 190 at all?
German engineering was/is great. But the US and UK had some quality engineering as well, which seems to be hard for some to reconcile with the mythology of the grand Nazi war machine. Forget about the extensive prewar work conducted by NACA, or the engineering genius of a Mitchell or an Edgar Schmued -- if Willie or Kurt or Ernst didn’t have a hand in it, it just can’t be first rate. With greater weight and less power, the multi-role long range P-51 performs comparably to the 109K-4 tactical battlefield fighter/ interceptor. Could that possibly be due to superior aerodynamics in an airframe developed 6 years after the Me-109. Six years that saw rapid increases in aerodynamic knowledge and fighter development throughout the world? Isn’t it enough that the 109 was ahead of its time technologically compared to contemporaries like the P-35/36/40 or the Hurricane? Does it have to still be ahead of its time 10 years and two generations of fighter aircraft later to be a great airplane?
The G6 I observed at the NASM was noticeably more bumpy than the 51 or Spit or 205 in the same room.
For a long time I had as a screen saver a close up shot of the nose section of that Duxford G-2 that crashed a few years back (Black 6?, the N. Africa machine). The bumps, exposed cowling latches, antenna, balky cockpit framing and generally loose fit of panels and cowling even in the “clean” G-2 series suggest that the Bf-109 was a plane that carried on past its prime by stuffing progressively bigger engines into a small airframe until aerodynamics finally became too important to ignore any longer. The K-4 obviously was much improved, but it would have to come a long way to match the smooth package presented by a P-51.
Charon
