Originally posted by MrRiplEy[H]
Brooke are you saying that you entered a shallow turn, fell below stall speed and couldn't recover by firewalling the throttle and giving a bit of stick input? I can do it 10 out of 10 unless I'm full flaps inverted below stall speed.. i.e. really trying to get into trouble.
You are talking about two things. First, you said that you thought the flight dynamics of AH was off because the planes didn't seem to handle angle of attack correctly. I disagreed and replied as to how to be sure, in the game, of observing what seems to me to be perfectly realistic angle-of-attack behavior.
Second, you showed a Spit enter a spin at low speed and low altitude and crash before it could recover. I told you that I've done that in AH on occasion.
True, usually stalls in AH are no problem. But I've gotten into spins at times in AH that I couldn't recover from in time (i.e., before ground hits me), and once in a very great while into a spin that takes me 10k or more of altitude to recover from. I wasn't doing anything too bizarre at those times either. What happens after a stall depends on a lot of things (power setting, airspeed, what rates of movement are on the various axes, aircraft attitutde, etc.). There are times in AH that you can enter a spin and not be able to get out of it in 500 ft, even though spins aren't usually a problem.
Also, like some of the others posting here (Morpheus and HiTech), I've flown real planes, at times in aerobatics, spins, slow flight, etc. I haven't flown WWII aircraft -- only Cessnas and once a SIAI Marchetti SF260. I find AH to have excellent flight modelling by my experience. Let me tell you that, if you are good at air combat in AH, you will likely be good at air combat in a Marchetti.
One thing to keep in mind is that behavior right near stall is a highly nonlinear dynamical situation. It is a much more difficult realm to model, and there is much less actual flight-test data on it (especially for things like spins).
Even different planes of the same model can have somewhat different behaviors. I flew a Cessna 152 once that, unlike all other 152's I ever flew, had pretty bad slow-flight behavior. Slow flight is where you get on the back side of the power curve. You slow down to near stall, increasing angle of attack, then keep adding throttle to keep from descending. You end up with high power, with your plane mushing through the air at a very low speed. All the other 152's I flew did this without trouble. If they started to stall, it would mush gradually into the stall and stay flying straight ahead. One 152 I flew, though, was obviously not as aerodynamically balanced. It would get near the region where others would still be fine, then suddenly shudder and stall off quickly to the left, entering a spin -- not much warning, you just had to do a normal spin recovery. And even in that Cessna 152 (a paper kite compared to a Spitfire), that process used up probably more than 500 ft.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if a rebuilt WWII airplane had some stall behavior that would be much less forgiving than what is typical of its model.
So, to summarize, I think AH's angle-of-attack modelling is fine. I think it's stall modelling is fine. I see no disparity between (1) some real-life Spitfire stalling out in a turn to the left at low speed and low altitude, entering a spin, and not being able to stop it before losing 500 ft. of altitude and (2) AH's stall/spin model.
