FlyingIron Spitfire Microsoft Store version is wrong,'1.0.4'

[AntillesFlyer 58]

15 hours ago, Chock said:

Stats like that can be a bit misleading since they were an average and also include the fact that many aeroplanes were built prior to a lot of things being known about aerodynamics and the strength properties of various materials, and so were quite often prone to coming apart in the air. So it isn't always representative of combat losses, although as you say, it is still a high attrition rate, after all, dead is dead regardless of the details. A good example of that is the sesquiplane design of the Nieuport Bebe, which was very nimble, but it was prone to flutter on the lower wing owing to it only having one attachment point for the bottom of the interplane strut, and this meant it could shed its lower wing in a dive.

German pilots were envious of the Bebe's reputation for being nimble and so they encouraged German aeroplane manufacturers to copy its sesquiplane design, which they did on the Albatros D.V - earlier Albatros variants had been a normal biplane with twin interplane struts and the inherent box-section strength that engenders. This led allied pilots to refer to the newer D.V as the Vee-Strutter. But of course in doing that to their design, German designers unwittingly imbued the D.V with the same propensity to experience flutter in a dive and shed its lower wings as the Bebe had, so it had to have an additional supplementary strut put on it to become the D.Va. But that was not before a lot of pilots had died, taking the knowledge of what had occurred with them to the grave, until a lucky few managed to get back with only partial wing failures so they could actually report what the problem was. This sort of thing is known as tombstone technology; you can see the D.Va's additional bracing strut on front of the bottom of the interplane strut on this picture:

Many WW1 pilots didn't know how to do a spin recovery either, which was another reason for a lot of losses, as was the fact that WW1 pilots were rarely issued with parachutes which might have saved them if they had suffered a structural failure at a sufficient altitude. A lot of the time, WW1 'instructors' were simply combat-fatigued front-line pilots who were being 'rested', as if teaching people to fly in structurally questionable aeroplanes could be regarded as restful! So instruction for new pilots was not always what it might have been back in WW1. 

The average of combat losses tends to make it seem like it was incredibly deadly to get in an aeroplane at all periods in the first world war, and whilst obviously it was hardly the safest activity known to man, the statistics are that on both sides, there were numerous periods where the enemy had far better aeroplanes, and this advantage tended to swing back and forth over the four year period. Thus there could be a bad time to be commencing combat flying if you were on the side with the inferior aeroplanes and this would make the average life expectancy really bad, but this would be a good time to do it if you were on the side of the force with the superior types, where the life expectancy would actually be pretty good.

If on either side you could make it past a few weeks and learn how to stay out of trouble, providing you were fortunate enough to have a machine which was reasonably sturdy, you'd be in with a fair chance of beating the odds, or at least staving them off somewhat. The most successful Allied pilot in WW1 - Edward Mannock - was careful to stay out of trouble when first posted to a combat squadron, taking his time to learn the best way to go about things, but in the environment where many people were of a 'press on' attitude and also because Mannock was not what you would call 'posh', he was accused of being a coward by several people for initially hanging back to learn his craft. Of course when he became a successful fighter pilot, people were lining up to join his squadron and fly with him because of the success his tactics pretty much guaranteed, but for quite a long time he was regarded as an outcast. He is notable for refusing to join in the toasts to 'worthy enemies' which frequently occurred at RFC dinners, famously having said that he 'wouldn't raise a glass to that son of a b****' (and that's the clean version of this tale), when someone proposed a toast to Von Richthofen at one such gathering, which is something else that tended to find him at odds with the more 'jolly hockeysticks' types who were fairly common in the RFC and RAF.

It's worth noting that when he became a squadron commander, Mannock was fairly insistent on newly-posted pilots being kept out of trouble and mentored by himself or others, rather than simply being shoved into the meat grinder to little purpose. So your survival as a fledgling combat pilot was also dependent on who you ended up flying with at what squadron you were posted to. So as with most things in war, a lot of it is simply down to luck too.

The most obvious period where there was a significant imbalance was in 1915, when little had been developed in the way of tactics and the Germans introduced the Fokker E.1 'Eindecker'. The E.1 was basically a fairly mundane reconnaissance aeroplane which was in most respects a pre-war Fokker M.5 which then became rather deadly by having a synchronised machine gun added to it which could be aimed and fired by simply flying up behind an enemy aeroplane, until you were a few yards away and then it would be pretty much game over. If at the time you were a German pilot and were lucky enough to be issued one of these things, you were pretty much guaranteed to become an ace in fairly short order when you were typically going up against lumbering Allied reconnaissance biplanes with poor defensive armament and little in the way of maneuverability.

It's worth bearing in mind that in spite of the popular at the time notion of those WW1 pilots being 'knights of the air', the reality was that the most successful and enduring pilots were not the ones who charged into battle, but the ones who were sneaky b******ds who for the most part tended to go for enemy aeroplanes at a disadvantage, and preferably ones whose crew never even knew you were there until it was far too late to do anything about it. Perhaps the most famous fighter pilot of all time - Manfred Von Richthofen - was particularly adept at this, whereby he would often prowl around the edge of a whirling melee until he spotted an isolated enemy, which he would then close in on whilst they were busy watching the whirling mass of aeroplanes they had been in. It was when he was suffering from what we would now recognise as PTSD and extreme combat fatigue that he got sloppy and ignored his own rules on this that he finally met his end.

That's also how Edward Mannock was killed too, forgetting his own rules whilst out mentoring a new pilot who had recently joined his unit. Mannock was keen on stalking enemy two seaters, often doing so over a long period of time, slowly climbing up below and behind them and then titling the Lewis gun on the upper wing of his SE5a upwards to fire at the rear underside of an unsuspecting enemy aeroplane with the intention of killing the enemy pilot. Ironically, even though Mannock despised Richthofen for being a symbol of his country's enemy, he was in fact very like him in terms of personality, with a strong sense of duty and little in the way of romantic notions about what warfare actually is. In other circumstances, in spite of them being from very different social circles, I daresay they probably would have got along, which is of course the saddest thing about warfare, as this is very often the case with enemies.

You're a wealth of knowledge @Chock. I always find it fascinating to read what you have to say, as I always come across something new every time.

Thanks for taking the time to go over things in such detail. 

Brendon

[Chock 17,769]

13 hours ago, jarmstro said:

German and French pilots freely took cocaine. Pilots such as Hermann Goring became addicted and never managed to kick the habit for the rest of their lives.

Sort of true but not quite with old cross-dressing Herman. He was wounded when he was shot whilst marching with Adolf H, in their failed coup attempt (aka the Beer Hall Putsch) in 1923. word not allowed and a load of his SA mates were arrested in the failed attempt to seize power, and it was whilst old Adolf was in prison that he wrote his nationalistic racist drivel-fest Mein Kampf. That book is what ended up making him fabulously rich since when the N@zis took power, they decreed that every new mother, and newly wed couple, should be presented with a copy of the book, which the government bought for that purpose, so Adolf got a ton of royalties from this massive number of 'sales'.

Unlike Adolf and several others, Goering escaped capture from the beer hall riot and was smuggled away to Innsbuck, where his wound was treated. However since it was a pretty bad and painful injury (in the groin), he was given lots of morphine for the pain and this was over a period of about six weeks, so he ended up with a bit of a taste for it as a result of the massive amounts he was prescribed. It was this more than anything which kicked off his addiction to drugs. Following this treatment, Goering went into hiding in Vienna, so he escaped being taken into custody for his part in the coup attempt. After that, he bummed around in a few European countries until he ended up in Poland where he was, by that point, in very bad shape owing to his morphine addiction, which had made him very violent and unhealthy, it was so bad in fact that he was committed to an asylum in 1925 and held in a straitjacket in his cell, so ironically, he didn't completely escape a similar fate to that of his mates in that riot who got sent to the slammer.

Fortunately for him, it was determined by his psychiatrist that it was the drugs which were making him that way, so when he was weaned off them in the asylum, they let him out, but he had a relapse and had to return for more treatment. This might have been the end of the story for Goering, since he would often descend into similar lapses, but in 1927 there was an amnesty announced in Germany, which allowed Goering to return there and work in aviation, and by that time word not allowed was out of prison (released in 1924), and so they became pals again, and of course we all know what happened after that.

Goering was well known for being prone to mood swings even prior to his drug addiction; he would often fiercely berate subordinates when he was in command of his Jasta in WW1, then as if realising he had gone too far, he would suddenly turn on the charm and try to win their favour again. As a result of that, some people who met him when he was in one of his charm offensive moods would leave with the impression that he was quite likeable, whereas other who caught the rough side of him would report the opposite. Like most of the N@zi bigwigs, he was rather petty and used a lot of his status to further himself personally, often to the fatal misfortune of others, so on balance we can surmise that he was a fairly horrible person and not really because of the drugs either, but even so, Just Say Nein!

Edited June 14, 2021 by Chock

[jarmstro 2,402]

1 hour ago, Chock said:

Sort of true but not quite with old cross-dressing Herman. He was wounded when he was shot whilst marching with Adolf H, in their failed coup attempt (aka the Beer Hall Putsch) in 1923. word not allowed and a load of his SA mates were arrested in the failed attempt to seize power, and it was whilst old Adolf was in prison that he wrote his nationalistic racist drivel-fest Mein Kampf. That book is what ended up making him fabulously rich since when the N@zis took power, they decreed that every new mother, and newly wed couple, should be presented with a copy of the book, which the government bought for that purpose, so Adolf got a ton of royalties from this massive number of 'sales'.

Unlike Adolf and several others, Goering escaped capture from the beer hall riot and was smuggled away to Innsbuck, where his wound was treated. However since it was a pretty bad and painful injury (in the groin), he was given lots of morphine for the pain and this was over a period of about six weeks, so he ended up with a bit of a taste for it as a result of the massive amounts he was prescribed. It was this more than anything which kicked off his addiction to drugs. Following this treatment, Goering went into hiding in Vienna, so he escaped being taken into custody for his part in the coup attempt. After that, he bummed around in a few European countries until he ended up in Poland where he was, by that point, in very bad shape owing to his morphine addiction, which had made him very violent and unhealthy, it was so bad in fact that he was committed to an asylum in 1925 and held in a straitjacket in his cell, so ironically, he didn't completely escape a similar fate to that of his mates in that riot who got sent to the slammer.

Fortunately for him, it was determined by his psychiatrist that it was the drugs which were making him that way, so when he was weaned off them in the asylum, they let him out, but he had a relapse and had to return for more treatment. This might have been the end of the story for Goering, since he would often descend into similar lapses, but in 1927 there was an amnesty announced in Germany, which allowed Goering to return there and work in aviation, and by that time word not allowed was out of prison (released in 1924), and so they became pals again, and of course we all know what happened after that.

Goering was well known for being prone to mood swings even prior to his drug addiction; he would often fiercely berate subordinates when he was in command of his Jasta in WW1, then as if realising he had gone too far, he would suddenly turn on the charm and try to win their favour again. As a result of that, some people who met him when he was in one of his charm offensive moods would leave with the impression that he was quite likeable, whereas other who caught the rough side of him would report the opposite. Like most of the N@zi bigwigs, he was rather petty and used a lot of his status to further himself personally, often to the fatal misfortune of others, so on balance we can surmise that he was a fairly horrible person and not really because of the drugs either, but even so, Just Say Nein!

Hi Chock. A great short biography. The point I was making that his drug taking certainly started during his time as a WW1 pilot. Cocaine taking was rife in the French and German air arms and there is no doubt that it was used by pilots when they flew. Cocaine was present in the RFC as well but it would seem that alcohol was the drug of choice. Heroine was also available but I do not know how widespread its use was. But there is no doubt that most pilots on both sides were either high or pi..ed when they went into the air. And who could blame them? Few now really understand the meaning of the word cold as those pilots experienced it.  Just how much effect alcohol had to play with regard to the abysmal losses which occurred whilst taking off and landing is impossible to say but my guess would be quite a lot.
 

(Revisionist historians do not like these facts. I've had arguments where they claim that the rum ration given to troops was to 'warm them up.' Which doesn't ring quite true considering that on 1st July 1916 it was eighty degrees in the shade!😂)

Edited June 14, 2021 by jarmstro

[wim123 761]

lemme ask a question here to the spitfire gurus...

i bought it today, fantastic, yessssss, big fun, np with takeoff or landing, had one issue with engine overheating, solved that.

i have one question.

how do i find out the optimal mixture setting?

i know from A2A c172, i did it by ear, lower mixture until it sounds rough, add a lil then and its good.

so , how does it work for this really nice spitfire???

 

[Chock 17,769]

1 hour ago, jarmstro said:

Hi Chock. A great short biography. The point I was making that his drug taking certainly started during his time as a WW1 pilot. Cocaine taking was rife in the French and German air arms and there is no doubt that it was used by pilots when they flew. Cocaine was present in the RFC as well but it would seem that alcohol was the drug of choice. Heroine was also available but I do not know how widespread its use was. But there is no doubt that most pilots on both sides were either high or pi..ed when they went into the air. And who could blame them? Few now really understand the meaning of the word cold as those pilots experienced it.

Yup, lots of people forget that the vast majority of what are today classed as illegal drugs were in fact not illegal to possess in the UK until the early 1960s, and even then the UK had to be pressured into making that a law by the US. My mum has got a really old copy of (I think) Good Housekeeping Magazine from somewhere around the 1900s, which actually has an article in it on how to grow Marijuana, recommending it for its medicinal use, and that wouldn't have been seen as at all controversial at the time it was published; let's not forget that Queen Victoria, who was on the throne at about the same time as that article was published, was pretty keen on opium and cocaine, and that wasn't exactly a secret. Most people could fairly easily get a friendly doctor to prescribe even heroin prior to that UK legislation in the 1960s.

1 hour ago, wim123 said:

how do I find out the optimal mixture setting?

In much in the same way as you would do for any other aeroplane, i.e. the way you are doing. It's worth bearing in mind that most WW2 combat aeroplanes were, in so far as it is possible, designed to be as much a 'set and forget' type of affair when in combat as they could be. This was why they all tended to have some kind of automatic propeller pitch control system which you didn't need to faff about with unless you absolutely wanted or needed to, or if not, then they would have a pretty basic cluster of throttle, prop and mixture levers which were easy to adjust quickly with one hand since they all moved in the same arc. 

We can see how important this was on the Spitfire from the Luftwaffe's report on the thing, when they tested captured early variants not equipped with variable pitch propellers; their conclusion being that whilst it was 'a nice aeroplane', it was as they put it, 'a miserable fighting machine', since with a fixed-pitch propeller (the wooden Watts propeller found on the Mark 1), it was either over-revving or under-revving when in mock combat against a bf109E. This was also when they discovered that without fuel injection, the Spitfire could be out-maneuvered by simply shoving the stick forward on a 109E and diving away from it, then zooming back up out of the dive. If you tried that in a Spitfire, the negative G loading would make the fuel stop feeding from the carburettor, whereas the bf109 was fuel-injected and this system worked with any amount of positive of negative G on it.

Of course by the time the Battle of Britain took place, these things were no longer as serious an issue with the Spitfire, since by then it did have a better three-blade variable-pitch propeller and its pilots knew to simply do a half roll in the Spitfire to keep positive G on the carburettor to prevent the engine from choking. Later the float chamber and valve on the Spitfire's Merlin engine carburettor was modified to largely alleviate the issue of neg-G fuel starvation too unless it was particularly prolonged. Thereafter, the necessity of making a more complex fuel injected Daimler-Benz engine for the bf109, which required more finely-machined parts than was the case with the simpler Merlin with just a carburettor, meant that this had an impact on the war, where it was as much a war of how fast you could produce stuff as much as it was about actually fighting with that stuff. so simpler stuff was generally better.

What most combat pilots would do therefore with the Spitfire, and indeed most other dogfighting aeroplanes, was pick a decent mixture setting which gave plenty of acceleration for the altitude at which the combat was set to occur, and then unless they had time to faff around with minor tweaks, they would pretty much leave it where it was and let diving and zooming sort everything else out. This might seem odd to us in a world where we fly about in Cessnas and Pipers etc, and worry about the plugs oiling up over time owing to incorrect mixtures and such, but this was never a problem with the Spitfire or other warplanes like it, since the Merlin engine tends to need its plugs to be replaced after just twelve hours of usage, so they hardly have time to accrue much in the way of plug fouling build up.