Good 109E article

[Charge]

"Must have been a helicopter"

Must been them useless slats that enabled it to do such? 

Well, D had a Jumo. In 109E the DB added nearly 200kg of weight so I guess it would affect the responsiviness quite a bit. Also the view outside was probably much better in D than in later versions with armoured windscreen and thicker frames.

-C+

[Stoney]

For posterity, it sure would be better if test pilots just said "it took 1,500 feet to takeoff" instead of comparitive statements like that.

[Anaxogoras]

nevermind.

[Stoney]

nevermind.

What?  Its annecdotal comments like that the get us all clawing at each other most of the time.

[thorsim]

Skip like it ...

http://www.skipholm.com/willy-messerschmitt.htm

[Die Hard]

"The take-off was normal, and I estimated that the ground run was fully one-half the distance used by the Hawker Hurricane and about one-fourth the distance used by the Supermarine Spitfire."

Must have been a helicopter  

Spitfires and Hurris don't use flaps on take off. Williams used 15 degrees of flaps on take off in the 109D.

[Simba]

"The guns on this ship - five of them, all hunched on the fuselage"

On a Bf109D?  Wonder what else he made up?

 

[Anaxogoras]

I agree stoney.  My original comment wasn't about your post.

[Angus]

1/4 th of a Spitfire takeoff is just about nothing. And sounds a bit silly with an aircraft with a higher wingloading, it may be very close or maybe in the 109D's favour though, but much less power instead.
Anyway, for the horsepower, the Spit did haul more than the 109, so the anecdote sort of ... falls.
FYI, Spitfires did take off from HMS Eagle, butt full of fuel with an extra tank for a 600 miles flight. The HMS Eagle was only 200 metres long, and with a pointy front. Of course you have wind and cruising speed playing with this, but 1/4 th....it's a joke.
The article also features a part from Lindberg, and he was very much of a fan of all the Germans did at the time.
I could type up Jeffrey Quill's part meeting Lindberg before the war, as well as Gunther Rall's account of the 109D in the cockpit, etc. Plenty of anecdotes that completely oppose the one posted.
Oh, PS:
Taking off short from the HMS Eagle was none with a little bit of flaps on the Spitfire. Not possible? Guess how it was done 

[Die Hard]

"The guns on this ship - five of them, all hunched on the fuselage"

On a Bf109D?  Wonder what else he made up?

 

Two in the cowl and three in the engine. They suffered from vibration problems, so they later dropped the engine guns.

[Die Hard]

The spitfire did not have a better wing loading in 1938. The 109 Dora was very much the lighter of the two and had similar power loading. With flaps and slats the 109's take off run would be considerably shorter. Perhaps not a quarter of the spit's, but that was a subjective observation not a scientific measurement.

[Chalenge]

Since you are using the Dora to support your position I am going to point out that later models (by the time of Hartmann) were not only heavier but also had more power so the trim 'window' would have been much narrower and control forces even higher.

[Simba]

"Two in the cowl and three in the engine. They suffered from vibration problems, so they later dropped the engine guns."

Really? The literature on the Bf109D that I've read (The Augsburg Eagle by William Green) states that it was Jumo-engined and carried the same armament as the Bf109C, a total of four guns, i.e. two 7.9 MG17 machine guns mounted in the fuselage and one 7.9 MG17 mounted in each wing. Every photo I've ever seen of the Bf109D shows this armament. I'd be interested to know the source of your information (other than the flight test already quoted) so I can check it out and add to my knowledge.

The Daimler-Benz engine fitted to the Bf109E permitted the mounting of a cannon that could fire through the prop hub but it wasn't a success. The two MG FF 20mm cannon carried by the Bf109E were mounted one in each wing. The 'open-nose' prop spinner was retained because Messerschmitt had already manufactured hundreds of them and led to the assumption that the standard 'Emil' carried three cannon - which it didn't.

    

[Krusty]

Sometimes they put a 7mm in the hub for a total of 5.

Maybe he means "close in" because the spitfire's guns were waaaay out towards the wingtips, scattered.

I agree that was a relatively inaccurate statement.

[thorsim]

possibly the interviewer got confused with the armament between the 110 and the 109 ???