I appologize Widewing, I did make one mistake, it was not you who criticized Yenny for making a gentle reversal instead of a gut-busting turn on the merge with the La7, thus there is no contradiction there. Though apparently your advise to extend about 1K beyond the merge and reverse in an E conserving manner is seen as lame tactics by some...
As I see it, the La7 would have been doing the D9 a favor by diving away as soon as the D9 zoomed, since the La7 really had enough speed to catch and kill the D9, if only the pilot had known it. The D9 can catch an La7 in a dive, and that would have allowed the D9 to begin working the La7 from the offensive position, OR, climb at leisure to an alt where the Dora outperforms the La7 and see if it tries to come up, his choice.
I could tell the speed because Yenny posted the same film in .ahf format. The La7 was about 10mph faster than the D9 on the approach to the merge. There was
no energy advantage to work at the beginning, no real way to immediately go offensive. Yenny's strategy of trying to drag the fight up to an alt where he has the horsepower advantage is reasonable. Truth be told, he didn't really have enough speed to do what he did with the La at that alt, if you look at the relative airspeeds, the La could have watched him, done an E-conserving reversal, followed him up and shot him. What Yenny did basically worked as a bluff, and the La7 didn't call it. That was MY problem with the film, whereas what he did might have worked to build a usable E advantage against a P-51 or Jug, a savvier La pilot would probably have just shot him. But, seeing as how he didn't even hold a speed advantage on the merge, seeing as how the La7 holds most all the cards at that altitude co-e, and seeing as how enough people were ripping on Yenny in the first place, I didn't emphasize that part. It was the La-7's fight to loose, and he screwed up, why don't we rip on THAT guy awhile? (On second thought, lets not, enough of that crap on BBS already.) Yenny did about he could do and suceeded. We don't get to see repeated attacks from him because he killed on the first thing resembling a shot opportunity the other guy gave up. Like I say, if someone is not supposed to even try a climbing spiral, lets remove it from the ACM websites...
One difference between a D9vsLa7 fight and a A5vHurri fight is that an A5 carries a sizeable E advantage over a Hurri if both are just running along co-alt at their top speeds, and also carries a very large advantage in ROC and acceleration which allows very agressive tactics with little chance of the Hurri equalizing E. Plus, if your gunnery is phenomenal enough to practically guarantee hitting the target on every pass, you are not me and are not as worried about what turn the fight takes immediately AFTER you've made your pass, if that makes any sense. Aggression is fine but I know from experience it is also easy to blow every advantage with one pass by diving in at a clumsy angle instead of having abit of patience.
So, how could you tell that the La-7 had more speed than the Dora on a You Tube video?
The big difference between my 190A-5 vs your Hurri IIC and Yenny's fight was that I was engaged, making repeated attacks. "Pin them, bleed them, kill them". Yenny prevailed only because the La-7 elected to try climbing to the 190. Had the La-7 unloaded and accelerated away, he could have reset the fight. I never let you go, I stayed on you all of the time, and I was being leisurely about it. I made 11 attacks in 5 minutes. That's a vast difference compared to Yenny's duel.
What I didn't say to Bosco123 is to stay engaged, keep the other guy defensive. Unlike the Hurricane, the La-7 can light the burners and get some separation if you give it too much leash. Because of that, you need to stay close enough to prevent the La-7 from building E. You do that by constantly making it maneuver by attacking at every opportunity.
Yenny was not aggressive, he was perfectly happy to let the La-7 pilot fly dumb. If the other guy was smarter, he would have reset the fight and forced another merge, and repeated it until Yenny made a mistake or one of them ran out of gas.
Here's the film you mentioned.. http://home.att.net/~historyworld/film46_0000.ahf
There's little in common with Yenny's duel.
My regards,
Widewing