6 hours ago, Dillon said:

This is terrible news especially when you look at Just Flight making the Arrow three times now.  I was put off by this at first but after having the Turbo I'm glade they did it.  I won't by slower one their about to release but the Turbo is amazing in areas like Yellowstone, Glacier National Park, Banff, and the California/Nevada desert.  So with the precedent set by Just Flight I find it odd Aeroplane Heaven would fold to pressure like this.  They put in allot of work and their bird is truly different than FlyingIron's version.  This is why I always say especially in this day and age you can't bend to the will of the mob.  These are misinformed people and at the end of the day ruin things for the rest of us.  We need to petition Aeroplane Heaven to release their SpitFire, we can't let this stand.

Someone pointed me to the official statement by AH.  It is what it is I guess... 😌😶

Edited June 12, 20214 yr by Dillon

16 hours ago, Chock said:

Back with the should a warplane have warlike things on it subject, I must admit, I do find the notion of politically correct warplanes kind of funny

No wonder I turned out so badly. Too much time in my youth building PEGI 18  Airfix kits of WW2 planes, tanks and battleships. I trust the PC mob have managed to get them rightfully banned. As for the Spitfire it's a clear symbol of our imperialist past and causes great offence. The mere sight of one, even without guns, is so disturbing to some people that their mental health is placed in danger. Ban them all.  Ban everything.

They will end up banning history thats more than 10 years old in the fear it will afend.

We here in the UK had 7 months of lock down and the none stop, what about my metal Health!!!!!!/cry….

Well in WW2 there was no SkyTV no Netflix or any TV. But don’t worry if you were a man you was away from home and simply hoping to get home. But what about there metal health  from years of that…no wonder 1,000,000,s took to the streets protesting that there  mental Health  was so bad and when would the gym,s open again? …..O wait there was no gyms, but again them people had a back bone and thankfully were not made of snowflakes. 
 

Can you image asking 18-19 year old now, get in that spitfire and if your lucky you have 6 months to live! , Sky news filming every beach landing and calling for Churchill to resign because 10 soldiers just got killed due to bad heath and safety management. 
The bravery of them men and women is beyond belief. We simply own them our lives. I want my spitfire to look like a spitfire not some PC limp version. I also want a 109 to look like a 109. It was what it was. If you don’t like it just be thankful because the out come WW2 is the very reason you live in a free world that you enjoy now.

Edited June 13, 20214 yr by Nyxx

Just shows you what sort of meatheads is running MSFS

2 hours ago, Nyxx said:

Can you image asking 18-19 year old now, get in that spitfire and if your lucky you have 6 months to live!

Six months??? The newbies were lucky to survive their first mission!!! Tell that to the current 18yr-old snowflakes!

If you delve back even further to WWI, the attrition rate for airmen was even worse. Their lifespan was measured in hours, not days.

2 hours ago, Nyxx said:

 Can you image asking 18-19 year old now, get in that spitfire and if your lucky you have 6 months to live! , 

Yes, I can. Our armed forces, today, in 2021, are not short of brave young men ready to die for the country. And some do.  And to be clear I am not speaking of France only.

Edited June 13, 20214 yr by Dominique_K

2 hours ago, Adamski_NZ said:

Six months??? The newbies were lucky to survive their first mission!!! Tell that to the current 18yr-old snowflakes!

If you delve back even further to WWI, the attrition rate for airmen was even worse. Their lifespan was measured in hours, not days.

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.

Edited June 13, 20214 yr by Chock

And it's easy not to realise that most pilots in WW1 were drunk as a Lord when they went into the air. Several very large glasses of whisky or whatever being ritually consumed before a mission and in cases of severe mental stress far more than that.

The same is true for soldiers going over the top. A quarter of a pint of very strong ration rum was not issued to twenty year olds out of kindness.

Edited June 13, 20214 yr by jarmstro

Lol. We’re into the realm of Black Adder and folklore now.

1 hour ago, DD_Arthur said:

Lol. We’re into the realm of Black Adder and folklore now.

If that comment is referring to my post what I said is absolutely true. Most pilots flying in WW1 would not pass a modern breath test. They flew drunk. I'm not passing any moral judgement just stating a fact.

Edited June 13, 20214 yr by jarmstro

9 minutes ago, jarmstro said:

If that comment is referring to my post it is absolutely true. Most pilots flying in WW1 would not pass a modern breath test. They flew drunk. I'm not passing any moral judgement just stating a fact.

Well if that is true, I think it is absolutely appalling - they will get someone killed acting like that!

2 minutes ago, bobcat999 said:

Well if that is true, I think it is absolutely appalling - they will get someone killed acting like that!

Well they killed themselves mostly. I blame the lack of  Hi-Viz jackets...

Edited June 13, 20214 yr by jarmstro

3 hours ago, jarmstro said:

 what I said is absolutely true. 

Well...that's  your truth. 

Have you actually had any military service?

‘’Well...that's your truth.’’

Oh I can believe it. I was not around then but I suspect that ‘’Don’t drink and drive’’ was not much of thing back in the 40’s, much less don’t drink and fly. The bottle was the throttle.

7 hours ago, DD_Arthur said:

Well...that's  your truth. 

Have you actually had any military service?

Attitudes towards personal responsibility were very different back then. There was no stigma attached to alcohol (or smoking) as there is now. The RFC was just a part of the army and shared its culture. There were no controls placed on officers drinking other than self control in order for their duties to be carried out. I stand by what I have said. Most British pilots flew under the influence of drink just as soldiers went into battle having swallowed a ration of strong army rum.
 

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.

Edited June 14, 20214 yr by jarmstro