Hauksbee

Eight and 3/4 minutes of beautiful rolling, twisting, turn-and-burn flying.

I agree. Though I think Disneyland's castle owes more to Neuschwanstein in Bavaria.

Amen to that! And the same back at cha' Widow.

I'm just using the standard ones that come with TrackIR, but check with Olham when he's back from vacation. He's sent me some in the past when I was having trouble with TrackIR. I know that he experiments with different curves.

Another effect I'd never heard of. Is it the outside/inside temperature differential fogging/steaming up the glass?

HOOORAH!!

Jim: What is "aileron snatching"? I've never heard the term.

You will recall the respect that Waldo and Ezra Stiles had for Ernst Kessler? Here's the man himself (Udet) in fine form.

I know you've often said that Christmas is not your most favorite time of year, but, I still wish immense amounts of Christmas cheer for you this year. And...all the rest of you lot.

Well researched, Olham! It would be interesting to know how they got away with it.

Hmmmm...not sure where I read that, so it would be hard to fact check.

Russian technology: True; they realized that aircraft would be serviced in the field by young men without much education. Clipped the whole wing off: Wow! I'll have to watch that again. So it wasn't a cannon shot. It happened so fast that I just assumed... Too much a turn fight: I wondered about that too. Still, so many commentators say that the Spit and the 109 were very closely matched. Then they'll say: 'but the Spit had the edge in a turn, and, the 109 was a bit better as an energy fighter'. An edge? A 'bit' better? How much is a 'bit'? I wonder what that translated to in real life?

...and, in a post-war move that has never been adequately explained, Udet was allowed to circumvent the stringent Versailles Treaty prohibition on military aircraft and had his own Fokker D.VIII which he used to tour air shows.

I really thought the Spitfire was going to take it. He kept making small hits on the 109 and I thought he would wear him down. Then his wing came off. 'Hard to say if the wing hit the 109. At the end though, he was missing one aileron and the opposing wing looked very chewed upon. But he was still flying. I guess we must assume he made it home. This shoot-out reminded me of something I'd read about duels between Mig-15's and F-86 Sabres. It said that many a Mig arrived back home riddled with .50 cal. bullet holes, but the Sabre was a heavy, very complex piece of machinery, and getting tagged with a single cannon round usually put it out of commission.

Any landing you walk away from is a good one.

Right. The Chicago Air Show had to make a choice that year between inviting Ernst Udet or Gerhard Fiesler (designer of the Fiesler Storch) Fiesler specialized in aerobatics done slowly and near to the ground. Pretty dangerous stuff. Udet favored the screaming power dive. Thrilling, but on two occasions vibration caused the fuselage to fail and the tail assembly to tear off. Udet got the nod. He was already aware of the U.S.Navy's dive-bombing studies. When he arrived in America he was offered a chance to try out the new Curtiss Hawk. He was much impressed and told Goering that Germany needed one of these to study. Goering bought him two, but the price was Udet had to join the Nazi government. It cost him his life.

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. .

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.

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.

This guy (whose name I never manage to catch) does really great, short summations about a wide range of WWI subjects on YouTube. 'Worth checking out. . Billy Bishop

No, BIG is OK. I can just drag the picture to the desktop and 2x click it there. A question though, on the Dr.1 picture above. Are the rectangular box things the magazines for the machine guns? .

I think they did. Standing up got you shot. (Ilearned this by watching "Black Adder")

Maybe there were a lot of patrols out in No man's Land that night.

Good point. I am not certain where I read that Ford wanted to license the Junkers design and, being rebuffed, the Trimotor was his revenge. It was some time ago, but I suspect it was in Martin Caiden's book, "The Saga of Iron Annie". Caiden, a part-time aviation historian, bought and restored a Ju-52 (right down to its original Luftwaffe battle dress). Also, it's the only book exclusively dealing Ju-52's that I can recall having. . In the Wikipedia excerpt that follows, the authors claim that the Ford Tri-motor owed more to Junkers. In another Wiki article (on Anthony Fokker: not quoted here) it's related that Fokker moved to the United States in 1926 and formed a subsidiary company. One of his earliest designs was "The Josephine Ford", named after Henry Ford's granddaughter and was used in Admiral Byrd's flight to the South Pole. This would indicate that Ford and Fokker were on pretty good terms...which Ford and Junkers were not. I've not been able to find any reference to Ford trying to get licensing rights, but he was not above plagiarism. . From Wikipedia: The story of the Ford Trimotor began with William Bushnell Stout, an aeronautical engineer who had previously designed several aircraft using principles similar to, and originally devised by Professor Hugo Junkers, the noted German all-metal aircraft design pioneer. In the early 1920s, Henry Ford, along with a group of 19 other investors including his son Edsel, invested in the Stout Metal Airplane Company. Stout, a bold and imaginative salesman, sent a mimeographed form letter to leading manufacturers, blithely asking for $1,000 and adding: "For your one thousand dollars you will get one definite promise: You will never get your money back." Stout raised $20,000, including $1,000 each from Edsel and Henry Ford, In 1925, Ford bought Stout and its aircraft designs. The single-engined Stout design was turned into a multi-engined design, the Stout 3-AT with three Curtiss-Wright air-cooled radial engines. After a prototype was built and test-flown with poor results, and a suspicious fire caused the complete destruction of all previous designs, the "4-AT" and "5-AT" emerged. The Ford Trimotor using all-metal construction was not a revolutionary concept, but it was certainly more advanced than the standard construction techniques of the 1920s. The aircraft resembled the Fokker F.VII Trimotor, but unlike the Fokker, the Ford was all-metal, allowing Ford to claim it was "the safest airliner around." Its fuselage and wings, following a design pioneered by Junkers during World War I with the Junkers J.I and used postwar in a series of airliners starting with the Junkers F.13 low-wing monoplane of 1920 of which a number were exported to the US, the Junkers K 16 high-wing airliner of 1921, and the Junkers G 24 trimotor of 1924, all of which were constructed of aluminum alloy, which was corrugated for added stiffness, although the resulting drag reduced its overall performance. So similar were the designs that Junkers sued and won when Ford attempted to export an aircraft to Europe. In 1930, Ford countersued in Prague, and despite the possibility of anti-German sentiment, was decisively defeated a second time, with the court finding that Ford had infringed upon Junkers' patents.