OT-(a bit) WWII Air Tactics re-learn WWI...

[Hauksbee 103]

Another YouTube article. This one on forgetting the WWI aerial tactics, then having to re-learn all over again in WWII. In the mid-30's it was felt by many aircraft designers and tacticians that due to vastly increased speed, the era of the dogfight was over. Not unlike Vietnam-era theorists who discarded machine guns in favor of missiles. (for the same reason) This recounts how the cutting edge of superiority was passed back and forth between both sides as new technology and new planes entered the fight.

 

This is a four part series. As one ends, the next should queue up.

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Edited December 5, 2015 by Hauksbee

[JimAttrill 24]

I haven't looked at the article yet, but it seems the same mistake was made after the Vietnam war with speed being the essential.   And then the Harrier (and the AIM-9L missile) showed that manoeverability was the thing - and sometimes with modern fighters you can have both.  Unless it is the F-35 which seems to fail on all counts except profits for the aerospace companies. 

 

I was surprised at the coverage given in the videos to the P38 Lightning which was not a successful aircraft at all in Europe.   Partly this was due to the unreliability of the Allison engines.  Lightnings with two engines that still worked had to break off to escort those with one engine out back to England.  The Lightning suffered badly from compressibility effects leading to control reversal in the dive which is mentioned in the video.   I read about this in Capt. Eric Brown's book "Wings on my sleeve" where they were asked to investigate the critical Mach numbers of allied fighters (and German ones as well).  The Lightning was not known to be good for this - it had killed its test pilot back in 1939.  Unfortunately I have lent out the book which has all the figures in it, but Wiki has this to say: "The actual critical Mach number varies from wing to wing. In general a thicker wing will have a lower critical Mach number, because a thicker wing accelerates the airflow to a faster speed than a thinner one. For instance, the fairly thick wing on the P-38 Lightning has a critical Mach number of about .69. The aircraft could occasionally reach this speed in dives, leading to a number of crashes. The much thinner wing on the Supermarine Spitfire resulted in a Critical Mach number of about 0.89 for this aircraft."  (A Spitfire was later flown to .98 Mach in a dive by S/Ldr Martindale of RAE upon which the prop and reduction gear flew off.  He managed to land it although it was somewhat bent!). 

 

The 'dive flaps' on the P38 certainly stopped it becoming uncontrollable but it was not that quick in the dive.  

 

After the results of the tests by RAE the American general in charge VIIIth Air Force fighters (Jimmy Doolittle?) told the USAAF that he would only accept P51 Mustangs (which had a high critical Mach number like the Spitfire or even better) and the P38s were sent to the far east and the P47s were mostly used for ground attack. 

 

My father worked on the Allison engines in P40 Tomahawks in Egypt.  Not his favourite engine at all.  It had only one advantage in that it could be assembled to run in either direction.   This came in handy on the P82 twin Mustang as well as the P38. 

Edited December 6, 2015 by JimAttrill

[Hauksbee 103]

The Lightning was not known to be good for this - it had killed its test pilot back in 1939.

Was this from putting it into the ground, or being struck by the horizontal tail-plane upon bail out?

 

On re-learning the lessons of the past: The armchair theorists, secure in their logic, always think they have it figured out. But, as they say, 'no battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy.

[JimAttrill 24]

AFAIK the pilot was Tony Virden and he was doing high-speed dives when the tail fluttered due to the compressibility problems that the aircraft was known to have and the tail fell off.   See Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_P-38_Lightning

 

This was when they were trying to fix the dive problems using servo tabs.   Later they added the dive flaps but a bit late - mid 1944.   As Eric Brown says of the RAE investigation of critical Mach numbers:

 

"We had found out that the Bf 109 and the Fw 190 could fight up to a Mach of 0.75, three-quarters the speed of sound. We checked the Lightning and it couldn't fly in combat faster than 0.68. So it was useless. We told Doolittle that all it was good for was photo-reconnaissance and had to be withdrawn from escort duties. And the funny thing is that the Americans had great difficulty understanding this because the Lightning had the two top aces in the Far East."

[Hauksbee 103]

"We had found out that the Bf 109 and the Fw 190 could fight up to a Mach of 0.75, three-quarters the speed of sound. We checked the Lightning and it couldn't fly in combat faster than 0.68. So it was useless.

Very interesting article. I had always thought that the only two-engined airplanes that could go toe-to-toe with single engined were the P-38 and the Mosquito. Adolph Galland put the P-38 on a par with the Me-110 and we all know what a disappointment that was. And I always thought that the German's dubbing it "the fork-tailed devil' meant that they feared it in combat, but it took heavy losses at the hands  of Me-109's and Focke-Wulf 190's.