There were several quotes posted many many many many years back and these may be the same ones. They were high speed engagements and nowhere near stall speeds. At higher speeds (300+) the A-5 is very maneuverable compared to a spitfire.
Context. It's important.
So here
is the context then:
General Statement: John Weir: "[Hurricane]
was much more maneuverable than a Spit... A Spit was a higher [
real] wing loading... But the Foke-Wulf could turn
the same as we [Hurricane] could, and they kept on catching up"
General Statement: Red Fleet, 1943: "
the FW-190A will inevitably offer turning battle at a minimum speed."
General Statement: Donald Caldwell: "The pilot’s opinions of the “long-nosed Dora”, or Dora-9, as it was variously nicknamed, were mixed. The new airplane
lacked the high turn rate and incredible rate of roll of its close-coupled radial-engined predecessor."
General Statement: Russian Spitfire use: ""The Spitfire failed in horizontal fighting,
but was particularly adapted to vertical fighting."
General Statement: RAE: No major difference in turning ability between Spit Mk V and Mk IX at 15 000
or 30 000 ft: Gains of Mk IX are on the vertical.
Stability and control committee, "S.C. 1718", 24 April 1944:
General Statement: Turning
below 250 mph:
"The turns were made so rapidly it was impossible for the airplanes to accelerate, and the ability of the FW-190 to hang in its propeller and turn inside the P-47 was very evident."
General Statement: "On special Missions,KG 200": (early captured Razorback without full power available, and with needle tip prop) "
The P-47D out-turns our Bf-109G" (No mention of this for the P-51)
(P-51 Mk IV vs late Me-109Gs or Ks):
General Statement: "The 109s we encountered were obviously an experienced bunch of boys. Their turning circle is decidedly better than ours at low speed.
The lowering of 20 degrees of flaps may just enable us to hold them in the turn, although I feel they could outclimb us."
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The problem is that it is
you who is ignoring the context...
I keep telling you about a mouse hunting down and eating a cat, and you keep saying "
well it depends what was the context when the mouse ate the cat...", or, invoking pilot skills: "
The mouse was very big and the cat was very small."
The problem is, all of these quotes are a
general summaries of an unknown, and in some cases probably large, number of events, from which a condensed
general conclusion was drawn. That is a
context,
not an individual anecdote... It is "
mice generally eat cats", not "
that one mouse ate that one cat".
Compounding this further, these general "summaries" are from multiple, unrelated,
disparate sources of different nationalities: Red Fleet: "
The mouse will inevitably eat the cat from a minimum speed." Weir: "
The cat is always weaker. We Hurricanes were stronger than the cat, but even then the mouse was still chasing us." Russian flying Spits: "The cat cannot chase the mouse, so it is always better, when a cat, to run away from the mouse..." Rechlin: "
The mouse always eats the cat, at any speed."
Not a general statement, but revealing nonetheless:
Johnny Johnson: "
Being a cat, it was only a matter of time before the mouse would eat me."
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Now I know the argument of cherry picking could be made: "
But you only picked the cases where the mouse ate the cat".
I
did prune -ridiculous- test pilot accounts in favour of
experienced front line pilot accounts, the height of ridiculousness being the US Navy FW-190A flight tests: True FW-190A "experts" these fools.
Still, even if you take that as unfair pruning,
you would still have to explain why a mouse is reliably reported to have eaten a cat.
Furthermore (and I feel this should really give a clue, unlike so many discussions centering around "promoting" the
awesomeness of an aircraft), please note how I am not biased towards any particular type or nationality: I point out the superiority of the P-47, I point out the horrible FW-190A high speed vertical
and horizontal handling: Not only loose vertical loops, but loops that are still hard on the pilot
despite being loose, burning up huge amounts of speed (at the expense of the pilot) while sinking tail down: The worst of both worlds...
And I do point out the Spitfire's (and P-51) huge superiority in
vertical and
high speed elevator and pitch plane handling.
When Kurt Tank says he gets
very high Gs from the FW-190A at 400 mph,
with light elevator forces, please remember what I said about
loose loops
still managing to be hard on the pilot... Just because the pilot is suffering from huge Gs
doesn't mean the curve he is carving in the sky is actually that sharp...:
Eric Brown ("Duels in the Sky") p. 128:
FW-190A: "
Care must be taken on dive pull-out not to kill speed by sinking, or on the dive's exit, the FW-190 will be very slow and vulnerable." The answer is right there. Eric Brown,
for once, actually saying something true and useful about the FW-190A...
Yes, he did get
some things right, from time to time!
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I know that what I am saying seems like I say
the whole science of flight physics is wrong.
In fact it is narrower than that: The whole of science of flight physics
is wrong for nose-driven low-wing monoplane fighters, of 1000 hp or more, and of at least 5000 lbs in weight.
The very fact that this "
Science" thinks nose-driven or tail-pushed makes no difference should be a clue.
How can a whole "hard science" be completely wrong in one area? (It is in fact, more than wrong, it is ****) Well how about the fact that
it was only 30-40 years old at the time?
And that it suddenly dropped the study of low-wing prop fighters as soon as jets appeared?
Does that make it sound a little more likely then? Or do you really think what goes on here is as
solidly established as the relationship between cat and mouse?
Gaston
P.S. And no, none of what I claim violates any basic laws of physics by the way, at least not if you understand the difference between
Force and
Energy. The FW-190A, in all its marks, out-turned at low sustained speeds the Spitfire, in all its Marks, obviously because it got the physics right...
Nothing in physics prevents the lighter airplane from taxing its wings more than the heavier aircraft: It is not the heavier airplane that is
adding, it is the lighter airplane that is
substracting more from a
far greater than assumed total for both.
The total force on the wings, in sustained horizontal turns, is far greater than the total now assumed to be the truth (could easily be detected if the wing bending on these old things had ever been measured
on the horizontal:
It never has), because the asymmetry on the loaded prop disc sets up a tumbling of air on the back of the wing: That initial tumbling is sustained in a rotating flow, and "sucks" pressure off the back of the wing,
making the wingload total far heavier than what is assumed today for horizontal turns in these types of aircrafts. They all have the strength to absorb this extra load, being all over 10 Gs airframes.
It doesn't show up in dive pull-outs because the dive unloads the prop, nullifying the tumbling "suction" effect from fighting the frontal leverage of the prop (which wants to stay straight).
That is why the FW-190A performs so poorly on the vertical: Unloaded prop disc = Less suction advantage on the back of the wing, and this makes it match its wingloading "math" more...
The "tumbling" that creates an air pump on the back of the wing is caused by the trajectory being slightly wider than it should be (from fighting the prop leverage to tilt itself): A wider turn means
more air is "processed" by the wings, and some of it spills over the top of the wings in a horizontal spiral: This "wingtop pump" sucks more and more air as the turning goes on, bending the wings far beyond the assumed value at the low sustained speed value (3-3.5 Gs). It could be that a "soft" initial turn entry will not set up this "pump".
That is the working theory for now at least.
G.
