It's not at all true that the glide slopes are wrong in Aces High (at least for the ones that I've tested), or that real World War Two-era fighters glided like anvils. In reality, warbirds had much, much better glide slopes than you'd expect; in fact, they had comparable glide slopes to modern gliders (much better than modern civilian aircraft with engines). The P-51 was 15 to 1 and the P-38 was about the same. In fact over strong thermals a dead-stick P-38 could soar until the sun went down (literally), with propellers feathered. That's how good it could glide. The thing would have made a fantastic glider with the engines and accompanying equipment removed.
Having an engine quit at 1000 feet—facing away from and some distance from the runway—is going to put any airplane, no matter what kind of glide slope, into a sticky spot. I'd say it's impossible for any powerless aircraft to make a 360 degree turn at that altitude and still have enough speed to make it to the runway and land safely. This is especially true because from the sound of your description, your neighbor did not minimize his R.P.M., which would nearly feather the propellers and extend the glide slope. But as I said I doubt even a glider released in that position could make it safely to the runway.
What I want to know is why the heavier ones seem to do better than light ones (both here and in reality); the four factors of flight are lift, weight, thrust, and drag. With thrust out of the equation, it's up to lift, weight, and drag. The more the weight, the worse the airplane will glide (while I'm no physicist, I am certain that the belief that mass will help an airplane glide due to kinetic energy is a myth; mass will only help anything go earthwards, and hinder at all else).
Laurie must be right; in order to compensate for that weight, heavy fighters were designed with greater lift and often less drag than light fighters. I just didn't think that it would be enough to actually allow them to glide better than lighter fighters. Still, that would explain why American heavies could out-maneuver fighters half of their size and weight.
