Scudrunners

I think Lindberg said something like
" boost the boost and lower the revs, and you will have enough fue,l to get home to roost"

anofly wrote: ↑

Sun Feb 06, 2022 6:37 pm

I think Lindberg said something like
" boost the boost and lower the revs, and you will have enough fue,l to get home to roost"

It was probably "Lower the revs and boost the boost, and you'll have fuel to get home to roost" since it rhymes better, and pilots like to use shit that rhymes to remember stuff.

That was crazy, in the Pacific, making such long trips to and from combat.
The trip home, low on fuel and with unknown damage, would be scary as fuck.

The Germans had it right. Some of their aces were shot down several times
a day over their own occupied territory - they'd get a ride back to base, jump
in another airplane and go up again for another tussle. That's how you do it.

I flew airshows with an old German guy who was an "ace both ways".

That was crazy, in the Pacific, making such long trips to and from combat.
The trip home, low on fuel and with unknown damage, would be scary as fuck.

The more I know about flying an airplane in the Second World War, I'm just amazed anyone survived it. As scary as it would be to do some piloting, I really feel for those other poor bastards that were along for the ride.

Your only consolation was that it was slightly better conditions than the poor souls in the First World War.

The pilots of War One often died in training, which was really horrible.

They flew junk airplanes, and no one knew anything about flying, let alone
combat in the air. They probably knew a little about a Lewis gun.

Very bi-modal distribution life expectancy. Most pilots would die within 2 weeks
on squadron, a very few would live for six months or maybe a year. I would pull
those "old guys" off the line and put them in charge of training the newbies, but
I'm weird ... the knowledge of one old guy could keep 100 newbies alive.

Folks were flying spitfires in battle in WW2 with 7 hours of spitfire time... after training in a tiger moth and a few hours of harvard or something similar.
Plenty got killed landing the darn things....
WW1 fellas went into combat with less than 25 hours , and in some cases much less...

anofly wrote: ↑

Fri Feb 11, 2022 1:23 am

Folks were flying spitfires in battle in WW2 with 7 hours of spitfire time... after training in a tiger moth

I for one would like to see if my Tiger Moth skills are transferable to a Spitfire.

skills are transferable to a Spitfire.

You probably have 100x the hours of a typical new Spitfire pilot in WWII - I am sure it would not be a problem!!

They say you should never meet your heroes ... I've mentioned that I rented an hour of dual
on a P-51D aka TF-51 Cavalier, and while it was fun, it was quite a disappointment.

Don't get me wrong. It was fast and powerful and gloriously - painfully - noisy. Almost
as loud as a Moo-Too. Think of a C185 with a 2000hp LS with open headers and you're
in the ballpark.

But the ailerons got terribly heavy at speed - it badly needed servos - and the wingtips
were sh1t - it badly need redesign to stop the horrendous induced drag at any alpha,
which meant it couldn't turn worth sh1t because it bled off speed as the G came on, which
is not a good characteristic in a fighter. Not even a little bit.

The above two seriously problems made it sh1t for doing aerobatics. Really. Don't even
think about the horrendous pitch/yaw coupling from the prop.

And this was the D model?! How bad were the A/B/C models?

The NLF wing was really, really nasty. I can only imagine how many junior P-51 pilots
in WWII were pulling G and badly and deeply stalled/spun/snapped while pulling G and
trying to stay on someone's tail, that could turn (like a Zero).

The good news of this failure is that the 2nd enemy following them, that they never saw
on their six and was about to kill them, would never be able to follow such an incredible maneuver.

The P-51 was the Ricky Bobby of WWII. It went fast, but it didn't do anything else well.

Look at the wingtips of a Spitfire sometime, and think about spanwise flow and the
resulting induced drag at high alpha.

And remember, that wingtip was designed with no computers or anything, by a dead
guy in the 1930's.

Today's Fun Fact: On Steven's Creek Blvd I learned that a CBR600RR is quicker off the
line than a Hellcat, and boy are they noisy.

The guy who issued me my L29 type rating - Mike Mangold, TC hated his guts -
used to race an L29 with a big engine at Reno.



Look at the custom wingtips he had built for it, to try to reduce the drag in the
pylon turns. He had some PhD design them with a computer and wind tunnel,
which I don't think they had in the 1930's.

Being able to NOT bleed off speed under G is incredibly valuable. Thrust can only do so much.

I would pull
those "old guys" off the line and put them in charge of training the newbies,

To be fair, that's a lesson the Allies put to use in the Second War.

That's not to say training wasn't still hazardous. The BCATP memorial in Lethbridge is pretty sobering.

It was one of the few things my Grandfather told me about what he did during the war, he built and maintained many of the triangle runways. He said they drove around and cleaned the fields up of all the wrecks. Just bulldozed the worst ones into a big pit near the field. Probably a lot of parts still buried out there if one went searching with a metal detector.