Hi Widewing,
>Despite his tremendous piloting skill and his countless hours flying the Lightning, Tony discovered he was overmatched against the combat pilots.
But it speaks for his test pilot qualities that he cooly accepted the fact and rationally analyzed the reasons :-)
There's a similar story told by Adolf Galland, who had a test pilot with a Bf 109 visiting their airfield on a ferry flight before the war when they were still flying He 51 biplanes. The test pilot agreed on a staging a mock fight and had his Bf 109 outflown by the obsolete biplanes! Galland of course admits that this was only possible because this test pilot had no training in air combat and didn't know how to use the strengths of the Bf 109.
>Nonetheless, test pilots generally lacked even an inkling of an idea what combat flying was really about.
Well, at the Joint Fighter Conference, the situation was a bit different from the mock fight mentioned by Galland. The Bf 109 vs. He 51 encounter took place in the pre-war era, when ideas on air fighting were vague and untested, and the Bf 109 as a fast monoplane designed with little regard for manoeuvrability represented a paradigm change, so the test pilot would not only have had to match the fighter pilots tactical skills, but actually to exceed it to make full use of the new monoplane. Additionally, military pilot training was a bottle neck in Germany owing to the Versailles treaty, so few test pilots had any military background.
When the Joint Fighter Conference took place, techniques and tactics had been long established, the aircraft manufacturers had been in continual contact with the services who were using their products in combat, and exposed to their demands and design requirements for several years. The aircraft manufacturers and their test pilots might not have known how exactly to use their products to win an actual fight, but they certainly knew very well what the combat pilots expected from a successful fighter aircraft, and so the test pilots' votes still carry considerable weight.
In fact, if I compare the results of the JFC to professional (business-to-business) customer satisfaction surveys, it shows the same vagueness with regard to the individual questions, but modern-day surveys generate quite significant results anyhow, and I'd view the Joint Fighter Conference in a similar way. Only one vote for the P-38 as "best fighter" is highly alarming - we'd have to check how many pilots actually flew the P-38 to how relevant the number is, but if it was flown by more than a handful, there's a message in it.
Of course, the focus of the Joint Fighter Conference was the future development of fighters - they were not assessing how the types performed in service, but rather how they were expected to perform from 1945 onwards. Still, the P-38 was not the only 1943 fighter evaluated at the conference, and the balance in ranking compared to the P-47D and the P-51D is not just a bit in favour of the latter two, but quite dramatic.
Regards,
Henning (HoHun)
