The sky-high aircraft and aviation thread

They may be allowed to use twin-jet planes on over-water passenger flights, but the very idea of them doing so makes certain unmentionable parts of mine pucker up worse than when I went swimming as a twelve-year old.

Almost as much as relying on a single-engined helicopter would, I suppose.

Most over-water passenger flights are done by twin-engined aircraft.

@Messerspit: Oh come on, it's not THAT ugly (nor is the base Spitfire THAT pretty). Then again, I prefer the looks of most of our period Yank planes to most of the stuff the Brits put into the air.

Hmm... Maybe I should dust off my Dogfights DVDs. Also covers a fair amount of that low-altitude flying.

I think the best looking Allied fighter aircraft of World War 2 were the aforementioned-de Havilland Mosquito, the P-51D Mustang and the P-47 Thunderbolt. The Spitfire tried too hard to be pretty.

As for the relevant loss rate between the Bf-109 and the Hurricane, well, that is true. But it is missing the point. There weren't enough Spits to win the Battle of Britain. No Hurricanes blatting down the Heinkels, the Dorniers and the Junkers, and we would be speaking German round about now. And we wouldn't be having this discussion, 8-)

So I'm not the only one who thinks the P-51D looks better, and the Mosquito is a pretty sweet looking bird.

As for the P-47? It's big, kinda ugly, and looks like it'll fuck you up. And it does.

"As for the P-47? It's big, kinda ugly, and looks like it'll fuck you up. And it does."

Yep, which is why it is beautiful.

@Good looks stakes:

Eh, I dunno - I can appreciate the Spitfire for its smooth, flowing lines (ditto the P-51). The P-47's handsome in a rough and tumble way, but is by no means my favourite. The BF-109 from the F variant onwards is also pretty nice looking, and the strangest WWII aircraft I like aesthetically is probably the I16. Dat oversized radial.

The He-162 is also quite nice, and I also like the SM.79 for how unique it is.

There are others, but that's off the top of my head.

Well, I've always liked the Corsair's inverted gull wings.

Yeah, the inverted gull wing is always pretty cool (and is part of the reason why I like the Ju-87). I'm not particularly sure what the point of such a wing is, though.

On the Corsair at least, it leaves room for a big prop to make use of all that engine power, while keeping the landing gear reasonably short.

On the Stuka... not sure.

Well, for the Corsair, it was so that its ginormous prop had enough clearance to take off and it had some added benefit for the landing gear (I don't recall what the specific benefit was, though).

The Stuka just did it because the Nazis were, for all their evil, remarkably fashionable?

edited 24th Jun '12 1:06:14 PM by Balmung

It was a way of making wings that would survive both the stresses of dive bombing and the subsequent rapid pull-ups to stop the dive bombing being an uncontrolled crash. At least that is the best explanation I can come up with, not being an aeronautical engineer...

edited 24th Jun '12 1:09:51 PM by TamH70

That seems likely, Tam. After all, they did put a lot of thought into the machine's operation during a dive bombing attack (as you probably know, they even included a mechanism for the Stuka to automatically pull out just in case the pilot fainted due to G forces).

Actually, a gull wing is probably harder to make very rigid than a straight one and I'm pretty sure the specific materials and construction techniques play a far larger role anyway. Plus there was plenty of straight-winged dive bombers that worked perfectly fine.

Anyway, Wikipedia claims keeping the landing gear short (again) and improving pilot visibility. Sounds sensible enough.

edited 24th Jun '12 1:19:36 PM by Catfish42

...Well, I just got schooled.

All later (monoplane) dive-bombers came in YEARS after the Stuka, which was the first one to solve the problem of actually being a proper dive-bomber, (the previous biplane designs had a habit of crashing) and aeronautical engineering done changed in that time, y'all. Better materials, better methods of construction and all the experience that the Stuka had given meant that the later types could have straight wings.

The Stuka was the only dive-bomber ever to have been able to do vertical dives, none of the Allied or previous and subsequent Axis types were able to do this.

See quote here: "I had a high opinion of the Stuka because I had flown a lot of dive-bombers and it’s the only one that you can dive truly vertically. Sometimes with the dive-bombers, pilots claim that they did a vertical dive. What a load of rubbish. The maximum dive is usually in the order of 60 degrees. In a dive when flying the Stuka, because it’s all automatic, you are really flying vertically. You feel that you are over the top and feel you are going that a way! The Vengeance and Dauntless were both very good but could dive no more than 60 or 70 degrees. The Stuka was in a class of its own.[25]" From Captain Eric Melrose "Winkle" Brown, whose list of aircraft flown on his own Wikipedia page is awesomesauce. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_%22Winkle%22_Brown http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_flown_by_Eric_%22Winkle%22_Brown

Plus, as a Brucie Bonus, he is Scottish. Wooot, hoots mon auch aye the noo!

Something similar was done on the other side as well, with Panzerfaust weapons being strapped to light aircraft like the Bücker 181.

That guy killed two Tiger 1s with a Piper Cub? That is unbelievable, but not as unbelievable as it never being made into a post war film starring Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda.

Heh, yeah we would (chance would dictate that neither of us would have been born anyway due to the altered timeline, but that's not my point...). Sealion would have been one of the greatest defeats in military history if the Germans had been insane enough to try it. River barges as troop transports on the Channel, I ask you...

re: the Stuka: every time it gets mocked, I'm tempted to just bring up Hans-Ulrich Rudel's combat record with it.

People say it's ugly, but people also say that its spiritual successor is ugly. I don't see it, personally. The Thunderbolt I, now...I've never liked the Jug.

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned the Spit Mk IX (I don't like the pointy tail and wings of later marques), the Dora variant of the Butcher Bird (the long nose suits it) and the P-51D (that airframe definitely looks better with a bubble canopy) are the best looking aircraft of the Second World War.

edited 28th Jun '12 6:53:17 AM by pagad

-whistles-

Those pilots are pretty impressive.

@Ju-87, A-10:

The Stuka is kind of nice looking in a funky way, whereas the A-10 looks like it means business (and delivers in spades).

The Germans weren't stupid. The barges would have been lashed together in huge rafts, and escorted across by everything that the Wehrmacht Kriegsmarine and Wehrmacht Luftwaffe had that went bang. With air superiority, or indeed supremacy, which in simple terms means "we own the sky, bitches", the Royal Navy would have suffered the same sort of kicking that the Far East Fleet got from the Imperial Japanese Navy Airforce at Singapore in our timeline.

We were lucky.

On another note, did anyone else watch the "Who Betrayed the Bomber Boys" on the Yesterday channel on Freeview? It was informative, well scripted, had Stephen Fry narrating it and the conclusions on who did the title thing were brutally straightforward.

"The destinies of two great empires ... seemed to be tied by some god-damned things called LST's."

edited 28th Jun '12 8:20:17 PM by hotelkilo

rawr wrong thread. T His was supposed to go to the history thread.

edited 28th Jun '12 11:56:33 PM by TuefelHundenIV