Originally posted by F4UDOA
4. The myth of torque and wild stalls and stabilty. The F4U has the worst reputation of just about any WW2 A/C for killing pilots. Reading Jeffery Ethells, The Old Fly Machine Company or the Experamental A/C Socioty would tell you it was "docile" in the stall and a joy to fly arobatics and that torque can be trimmed out easily. Remember we have unlimited lives to learn to fly these virtual machines. Real life piolts only had one chance.
And this can't be overstressed. The Corsair was called the 'Ensign Eliminator' becase, back before the little stall plate was attached to the wing, it would do some very ugly things if you made a mistake while you were a) low, b) slow, and c) had lots of garbage hanging out in the airstream (like gear and flaps) that meant you required lots of power to change either of a or b. How well did
you do the first couple of times you tried to land on a carrier? And all you were doing was trying to put the plane down on the deck; you didn't have to watch the engine controls, fly the plane,
and watch the LSO to follow his directions.
Remember the first 5-10 times you shot at someone in AH? How did you do?
That is more than most WW2 pilots ever did.
If I am remembering the statistic correctly, the average lifespan for a WWI pilot once they entered combat was 15 minutes. Think of all the famous aces from WWI who flew for years, and then consider how many pilots had to die in the first few
seconds of an engagement for the average to be that low.
I see people squeaking about how they're flying a bomber formation and someone in a fighter makes one pass on them, and suddenly two if not all three of their planes are going down. There may have been, and still are, bugs in the way damage to bombers is modelled, but I saw the exact same screaming in both Warbirds and Air Warrior about fighters making one-pass kills, and how no B-17 ever went down in one pass from a single fighter in WWII unless they completely blew away the cockpit. Well, ignoring the fact that that claim is false-to-fact, what they're not seeing is that the people
making these one-pass kills have been attacking bombers for
years, making mistakes and getting shot up when they do. They've learned what works and what doesn't. During WWII, except for a few rare experten, most of the fighter pilots attacking bomber groups were lucky if they had as much as an
hour of actual combat time. You either didn't make a mistake bad enough to keep you from getting home, or you died; you didn't have the
chance to get 'killed' fifty, a hundred, even two hundred times figuring out the best way to attack a bomber.
And that's one of the things that makes AH -- or
any air-combat simulation -- inherently unrealistic. People get shot down, and it's nothing more serious than a statistic; they (hopefully) learn from what they did wrong, take off again, and dive back into the fight. That's why the people who run places like Air Combat USA say that their customers who have played air-combat sims do better, and why the military is so gung-ho on training programs like Top Gun and Red Flag, and on developing simulators to let pilots make their stupid mistakes on the
ground where they're safe. It may take orders of magnitude more repetitions to beat the lesson through your head if you only experience it in a simulation, rather than in combat, but you're not betting your
life in a simulation. This is why the average AH player will find a lot more people playing AH who are better than they are than they would in the same situation in the USAAF, Luftwaffe, RAF, or VVS -- pilots don't
die finding out they made a mistake.
