You shoot down a few Spitfires 1v1 in something ungainly like a P-47 because the pilots are very new and don't know the plane has a throttle, and because anything can out-turn something going 400mph, and you put it down to "poor sucker, he really didn't know what he was doing".
Then you slowly realize that this is the stuff of players on the BBS bragging about making their bricks-with-fins "out-turn" Spitfires, self-promoting deceptive crap.
Then another day you realize that blackout-to-redout porpoising is a more effective guns defense than break turns, barrel rolls, or anything else a human is likely to actually do in the cockpit, and you hope most pilots out there never realize this fact and keep getting their ACM from Shaw and not the DA lake "gurus".
You slowly began to realize that the people talking on 200 are, for the most part, from the
smartest 20% of the population-they own, operate, and build computers, and are interested in history and aviation. The realization that this is the
upper 20% you are dealing with scares the @^%^#^%*&#@$E~~%@%!!! out of you and makes you lie awake dreading your nation's future.
Probably the most important rite of passage is one day when you realize that for the most part, you just don't care what happens in the air. You are then almost immediately able to fly 110% better than you were before...but it doesn't matter.
