Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire WWII FIGHTER PLANE...

In one of Greg's vid, he took on the question of range. It too is worth watching. I have a quad, it doesn't matter how good the fuel economy is, it just matters how big the gas tank is.

Jorge,

no question you're experience trumps mine severely...I didn't make the grade to be accepted into Pilot training due to my eyesight..my "experience" if you can call it that, is strictly academic... ( a lot of reading over 55 or so years, since I was about 10 years old...) do not think, that I think little of the 262....but with the state of affairs in Germany and the developments in the USA, I believe the Allies would have still come up with a "game changer" themselves over the 262.... F 84 and F86 where already on the drawing board to follow...if the F 80 hadn't cut the mustard...

Even if the 262 had all the maneuverability under the sun, Germany was short well trained pilots to apply it to its full potential... hence my assessment of in the long run it didn't matter.. it was used mainly against bombers.. so it didn't have to be that maneuverable.. it just needed that to get away and dodge a sky full of allied fighters....and then it had to hope to get home to a field that didn't have other allied fighters lurking around their home field... I have several times, that the German's lost more 262 on the ground, than they lost in the air...only about a 1000 of them made it into service.. another "potential' handicap of a 262 was its armament... yeah hit had very hard hitting 30 mm cannons.. but the A/C only carried 100 rpg for the lower two cannons and 125 for the upper two each...it ran out of ammo faster than it ran out of fuel...

When I worked at the Smithsonian in High School, I had an ID card that allowed me into Silver Hill MD any time I desired to go out there.. that was a WW 2 logistic base that was given over the Smithsonian after the war ended...I always called it their garage..
they have all the planes brought back from Germany to test after the War.... I have sat in the cockpit of the ME 262 B they had out there.. the two seated night fighter version... even if I thought the A/C was crap, after sitting in the cockpit of one, you'd think it was one of the coolest things under the sun....they also had a DO 335 out there, that I've been in that cockpit also.. that was a pretty cool plane also if that would have come on line in numbers...also heavily armed...stepping up to two engines was the quickest answer to where engines had been pushed to their maximum potential.. hence it was moving to the jet engines..

and then technology was maximizing that by the mid 50s... the Golden Age of Aviation..

But I go back to Management and Motivation or Espre de Corps of the pilots and how well they were trained...
when you compare Naval Aviation in the Pacific, Vs the Army Air Corps Aviation in Europe, its no real contest..

compare the use of the Douglas SBD vs the Army use of the A 24s....the Navy used it to very good effect, despite its short comings...while Army use of theirs was a disaster.. that has been evaluated as the management of the use of it by the Navy in the Pacific and their superior training of Naval Pilots along with a higher morale and Espre de Corps of their pilots...

same thing with the S2B vs the A25s... most of the Army's A25 sat on airfields and just rotten in the Sun....
But the Navy pilot put the "Beast, Second Class" to good use, despite its short comings...

I am an Army Guy, but I concede the Navy has had better trained pilots from the first days of Military Aviation...its just a fact...

Read a little on the P 47 N....and what they called its 'Wet Wing".....

They'd load those things so heavy, it wasn't unusual for one or two to crash into the ocean on take off after we had captured Iwo and Saipan... for a newly arrived pilot...

Also on long escort missions P 51 was so overloaded with fuel, it was said they had minimal maneuverability until they burned off the fuel tank behind the pilot's seat.. 85 gallons or so...

the 56th FG was the last P 47 unit in the 8th Air Force.. right thru the war... at times they were loading them with a 150 gallon center line mounted fuel tank, and two 75 gallon tanks.. one under each wing.. plus internal fuel... for just ferry range.. they would load three of the 150 gallon external fuel tanks/ drop tanks...

Garber/Silver hill was amazing. Toured it several times and was asked to be a docent but life was simply too busy to take that on too. Last tour I did there the Enola Gay was finishing up restoration and they had us all run our hand down the forward fuselage, which was just the part forward of the wing. They were testing some coating designed to not show fingerprints on the polished metal and figured 4 tours a day was enough to test.




We still have better pilots. We use them to dock the ships. Our Aviators are better too.

My father was in WW2. He joined about a month before Pearl Harbor happened. Then spent 4 years in combat on the Phillipine Islands. He used to tell the story that they were all tuned into the engine sound of the Mitsubishi Zero, he said they could tell the difference between the Jap planes and the American planes miles before they got overhead so had time to hide. It was a nasty time for him.

A naval aviator does everything a air force pilot does and then has to return to a moving pitching deck the figurative size of a postage stamp and execute a controlled crash landing. Any aviator who successfully qualifies for carrier landings has my admiration.

Good post. Tks.

On the topic of German night fighters in action I can think of no better work than Len Deighton's "Bomber", a fictional account of a single RAF Lancaster raid over Germany in June of 1943. Fictional but loaded with technical details gleaned from hundreds of interviews with actual participants on both sides.

https://www.amazon.com/Bomber-Len-Deighton/dp/1402790546

For example if a Ju88 night fighter lost an engine, the crew would have to bail out because the drag imposed by the aerial array on the nose rendered the aircraft impossible to fly in anything but a circle. 'Nother example, at the Dutch Aerodrome featured in the novel, bird strikes on takeoff at night could pose as much of a threat as the RAF Gunners on the Lancasters.

My father's platoon was strafed by a ME262 at the very end of the war and had to jump into a ditch. He said it seemed pretty dang fast at the time.

Hub Zemke said in his book if it had been up to him the 56th would have been re-equipped with P-51’s. He does not say why but i suspect it was the longer range and potential for more opportunity.

Mike,

I've got a book at home here that compares the Lancaster as a Bomber vs the Me 110 as a Night Fighter opposing it...

Written by a British Author...

He declares the Me 110 as the definite winner... a large percentage of the kills by the 110 was using what the German's Called Schrage Musik... or Jazz Music.... that consisted of two to four, 20 or 30 mm cannons, firing upwards at a 45 degree angle
with a 70 degree off set... fired from below and to the left...

The German NF pilots were schooled on the weak spot on British Bombers... on the Lanc, it was between Number two Engine and fuselage .... that was where the largest gas tank was on the Lancaster.. 20 mm cannon incendiaries, into high octane fuel...
quickly set the Lanc on fire, and many times the crew never had a chance to get out..

They would be silhouetted against the moon or search lights.... 90 days or less was about the average service life of a British bomber... shot down or shot up and making it home, Scrapped...

Allied bombers in Europe were pretty much flying gas cans with a load of bombs...

I remember in Saburo Saki's book of his WW 2 experiences... he intercepted a B17 that had just taken off for a long range mission with 4 others, from New Guinea.. 8,000 pounds of bombs and 1800 gallons of fuel.... he attacked from Below and fired his two 20 mm cannons into the bomb bay, using the Bomb Doors at his aiming point...it exploded... and he barely made it out of the way of the blast, missing being killed by the explosion...

can you imagine 8,000 pound of 500 lb bombs being blown up in front of you, and 1800 gallons of fuel exploding with them...

For the crew of the B 17, I'd bet there wasn't even a piece of body the size of a pinky finger left over...certainly no remains to find..

A very good read on Beaufigthters and Mossies is Night Fighter Navigator He spent the siege of Malta flying Beau's there. I had no idea how desperate that fight was and he gives a very good account of it and then later Mosquitos over the continent after D-Day.

I can legitimately brag that I was a fighter pilot. I graduated from Ground Attack Fighter School, and had the 1111 Air Force Specialty Code. But...

It was a phony certification, sort of. The US Army demanded that any Forward Air Controller working airstrikes over Army troops in contact had to be a rated fighter pilot to grasp the intricacies of dropping weapons near friendly troops. But the AF didn't have any spare fighter pilots to turn into FACs. So they created a "special purpose" school to magically create fighter pilots. Graduates were never intended to get assignments as fighter pilots, we were all enroute to FAC school. So we were "fighter pilots" on paper (satisfying the Army demands) for a whole three months - until we graduated from FAC school.

The school, flown out of Cannon AFB near Clovis, New Mexico, used AT-33 jets. Those were an odd hybrid of the F-80 fighter and the T-33 trainer. They had the long F-80 nose with twin .50-cals, wing hard points for bombs, but also the stretched twin cockpit of the trainer. Originally used to transition prop pilots in Korea/Japan, they had been mothballed for a decade before being refreshed for the school. There were only about 30 of them ever made, and the school had a dozen or so of them. So I can also legitimately claim (again, sort of) that I have flown the F-80.

AND, I concur that Naval Aviators have the far tougher flying job. I'm confident I could have done it, but I am very grateful I never had to.

good posts to be had here for sure. Pugs as usual gave an excellent primer on the basics, especially the "egg." Knowing your aircraft and the enemies' capabilities and limitations go a long way to keeping you alive. I flew the lowly S-3 Viking, but did attend and graduate from Fighter Weapns School at Miramar and was a DCM (defensive combat maneuvering0 instructor in the squadron. often times in the Mediterranean, we conducted Freedom Of Navigation (FON) ops (aka, trolling for Libyan Migs) in the Gulf Of Sydra. We'd fly right up to the 12 mile limit under radar following from the E-2 Hawkeyes and of course a section or two of Tomcats as BARCAP (barrier combat air patrols). Invariably the Migs would come out (usually MiG 23s or SU-22s) to intercept us. fun stuff.

We'd invariably go "beak to beak" with them for ONE turn In the horizontal) and the next thing they knew, we were on their six (we can out turn just about anything at 200KTS and maneuver flaps set). They'd immediately tap burner and go vertical which we of course could not hope to match. So, we'd "unload" (to gain airspeed) turn north towards the sea and drop way down to around 200'.

This would accomplish three things: Deny them the bottom of the "egg", make them work hard to pick us out of the radar clutter with the water so close below us and sucker them to the awaiting Tomcats who proceeded to scare theshit out of them. Ragheads were paranoid of low altitudes and I never saw one go below 3K'. And now here I sit in an office at a desk. I'm depressed...

Here too, Jorge. I have not touched a stick since 1976.

Jorge,
Did your aircraft have air to air combat capabilities?

Negative. There were tests done at Pax River Flight test for us to carry rhe AIM-9 (Sidewinder) but it was never adapted. We were just "grapes'... ;0

So you were the bait. Yikes... Did you have the ability to effectively get out of the way of surface to air missiles?

Fortunately I never had to test that thanks to Pugs and his boys, but we trained to it constantly. I can tell you I've been illuminated by SA-2,5s, 6s countless times as well as lots of air to air stuff and of course all their stuff that was on board their ships as well..

Jorge, you made my day. Grown men and their toys having a little fun w/ the bad guys.... E

We had two SAM avoidance procedures in our 140-knot Cessna bug smasher you see there under my name at left. We could:

1> Count to 10, or

2> Wind our watch.

If we completed either one...it missed.