WW II plane buffs?

Comrade Raptor said:
And it's worth noting that subject selection and quality have never been better.

I wouldn't live long enough (and I'm not old) to finish just the goodies I've seen in the last five years. 1/32 scale has taken right off, with all sorts of unusual subjects. 1/350 scale ships are booming. Even 1/35 armor, which finally features multiple Neubaufahrzeug tanks.

The days of the model section in mass retail seem to be at an end, but I've never seen such lush gardens of kits.

There was even a 1/48 Ju-87 "A" a little while ago! An "A"! I never thought I'd get to see a big-trousered styrene Stuka in any scale.
Click to expand...

I agree. I think about what was around when I first started modelling thirty years ago, and look at what is available today and it is hard not to think the hobby is in a kind of golden age right now; just in a different form to what was thought of as a golden age in the decades previously.

Speaking of Stukas, the kanonenvogel pictured earlier in the thread is exquisite. I've done one recently as well, but nowhere near as good as that!
 
BaaBaa said:
Were those the Buchons that they used in "The Battle of Britain"?
Click to expand...

Yes, along with the CASA built Heinkel 111s (also merlin powered) and Ju-52s. IIRC all three types were still on the active inventory of the Spanish Air Force at the time, and loaned to the production company for the duration of filming.
 
I Ratant said:
.
The Allied plane designers went to those same extremes, but most never got beyond the paper stage, and remain unknown in their archives.
Click to expand...

I suspect that towards the end, the Germans more or less skipped the paper step and threw planes together from available bits and pieces. You can certainly argue that one thing that won the air war for the Allies was not that they could build great planes (because the Germans could do that too), but that they could build enough of them.

One blue-sky design that made it was the Lockheed L-133... a seriously state-of-the-art pusher, which lost something in translating into metal, but was sure a fanciful and unlike most of those late war German designs, almost practical.
And the motor for it would have been a quantum leap in jet motors.
Click to expand...

Very pretty. I suspect it was genuinely ahead of its time, that is, the technology was not available to build the engine (it was barely adequate to build what jet engines they had; the reliability was appaling), and the canard configuration would have needed a control computer that could not yet be built.

Hans
 
MRC_Hans said:
I suspect that towards the end, the Germans more or less skipped the paper step and threw planes together from available bits and pieces. You can certainly argue that one thing that won the air war for the Allies was not that they could build great planes (because the Germans could do that too), but that they could build enough of them.



Very pretty. I suspect it was genuinely ahead of its time, that is, the technology was not available to build the engine (it was barely adequate to build what jet engines they had; the reliability was appaling), and the canard configuration would have needed a control computer that could not yet be built.

Hans
Click to expand...
.
Yes, but that get did the funds used to develop the P-80.
Many of the fanciful last-gasp designs in Germany would be difficult to get to operate today with all the electronic aids that make some planes flyable now, those aids being totally unknown at the time.
And, the lack of a research area that wasn't infested with those Luddites in their P-47s and P-51s, shooting down everything that tried to fly... :)
 
Alex Cured said:
Interesting. I thought pre-war governments were concerned about German military build ups, so I wonder how that came about? (Perhaps the then British governments were in reality as happy for their technology companies to sell to whoever, as the current one seems to be)
Click to expand...

As I recall, they traded a handful of Kestrels for a Heinkel He 70 to test engines with.
 
BaaBaa said:
Were those the Buchons that they used in "The Battle of Britain"?
Click to expand...

Yes. And some years ago I was aboard (on the ground) the CASA 2.111 that was once Franco's private transport and was used in the filming as well. It was a Spanish-built, Merlin-engined version of the He-111. Sadly, I believe it's since been destroyed in an accident.
 
MRC_Hans said:
I suspect that towards the end, the Germans more or less skipped the paper step and threw planes together from available bits and pieces. You can certainly argue that one thing that won the air war for the Allies was not that they could build great planes (because the Germans could do that too), but that they could build enough of them.
Click to expand...

Despite Allied bombing of factories, German production of aircraft was at it's highest in 1944. Not as high as the U.S., but still quite high. It wasn't the lack of aircraft that plagued the Luftwaffe, but a lack of adequately trained pilots. The Japanese suffered from the same problem as the war went on. The shortage of pilots meant that replacements had to be rushed into combat and were much less likely to survive their first few missions. Plus, they couldn't afford to remove experienced pilots from the front lines in order to have them train new pilots, which is what many experienced U.S. pilots did after the end of their tour.
 
Foster Zygote said:
Despite Allied bombing of factories, German production of aircraft was at it's highest in 1944. Not as high as the U.S., but still quite high.
Click to expand...


A lot of those aircraft were bombers, however, and not fighters, and even of the fighters many were the Me 109, which by late 1944 was arguably an outdated design that could no longer be upgraded effectively any further.


Foster Zygote said:
It wasn't the lack of aircraft that plagued the Luftwaffe, but a lack of adequately trained pilots.
Click to expand...


Most definitely. And the key decision there was change in fighter escort policy at the beginning of 1944. Instead of fighters having to stay close to the bombers the entire time, fighter groups would escort bombers for a designated period, after which they were free to aggressively hunt down Luftwaffe fighters wherever they could be found. That, combined with the attacks upon oil, is what doomed the Luftwaffe as a daytime force.
 
Foster Zygote said:
Despite Allied bombing of factories, German production of aircraft was at it's highest in 1944. Not as high as the U.S., but still quite high. It wasn't the lack of aircraft that plagued the Luftwaffe, but a lack of adequately trained pilots. The Japanese suffered from the same problem as the war went on. The shortage of pilots meant that replacements had to be rushed into combat and were much less likely to survive their first few missions. Plus, they couldn't afford to remove experienced pilots from the front lines in order to have them train new pilots, which is what many experienced U.S. pilots did after the end of their tour.
Click to expand...

Well, my point is that they could not produce all the 'genial' designs they made. The mainstay of the German fighter arm remained the ME109 almost to the end. Initially an excellent plane, but it was outdated by 1944.

The FW190 was made in considerable numbers as well, but it could not match the onslaught of P47, P51, late marks of Spitfire, and Tempests and Typhoons.*) ... And then the Germans were even mostly spared the Vought Crusaders.

Of course pilots were also a grave problem.

One might say that the Germans learned one basic lesson of war: Ultimately, the side with superior ressources wins.

Not to mention the P38 "gabelswantz teufel", hehe.

Hans
 
MRC_Hans said:
Well, my point is that they could not produce all the 'genial' designs they made. The mainstay of the German fighter arm remained the ME109 almost to the end. Initially an excellent plane, but it was outdated by 1944.

The FW190 was made in considerable numbers as well, but it could not match the onslaught of P47, P51, late marks of Spitfire, and Tempests and Typhoons.*) ... And then the Germans were even mostly spared the Vought Crusaders.

Of course pilots were also a grave problem.

One might say that the Germans learned one basic lesson of war: Ultimately, the side with superior ressources wins.

Not to mention the P38 "gabelswantz teufel", hehe.

Hans
Click to expand...
.
The Crusader was considered "the last of the gun fighters" in Vietnam, but looking at the kill record, most of those were with Sidewinders and Sparrows.
 
since the thread has drifted into the more exotic ...

I was recently reading about Operation Aphrodite. This involved B-17s stripped down then laden with Torpex H.E. and intended to be flown by radio control onto targets like the V3 weapon in the Pas-de-Calais.

Unfortunately it needed human pilots to get the planes in the air in the first place then, once high enough, control would be taken over by another plane flying at a safe distance behind and the pilots would bail. Well that was the theory. The attrition rate was colossal and include Joseph Kennedy Jr, the oldest of the brothers and the one originally intended for political greatness. In his case it seems that, as they handed over radio control, the plane exploded and he and his co were vaporised.

Well worth a read at WP (though there is at least one detail I find dubious. It claims that the planes had 'two television cameras fitted in the cockpit to allow a view of both the ground and the main instrumentation panel to be transmitted back to an accompanying CQ-17 'mothership'.' This seems implausible to me for 1944, but I'd be interested to know what other's think)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aphrodite
 
Foster Zygote said:
As I recall, they traded a handful of Kestrels for a Heinkel He 70 to test engines with.
Click to expand...

And some clearly didn't learn their lesson with the Kestrel/109, since the UK happily supplied the USSR with Rolls Royce Nene turbojets after the war had ended. The reverse engineered Nene became the Klimov VK-1, powering the MiG-15 and Il-28.
 
Huttosaurus said:
And some clearly didn't learn their lesson with the Kestrel/109, since the UK happily supplied the USSR with Rolls Royce Nene turbojets after the war had ended. The reverse engineered Nene became the Klimov VK-1, powering the MiG-15 and Il-28.
Click to expand...

I heard an interesting story about that years ago. The Rolls Royce engineers didn't think that the Russians would be able to produce their own copies without certain metallurgy data. But Russian engineers visiting the Rolls Royce factory put double sided tape on the bottoms of their shoes and walked around the machine tools, collecting samples from the floor as they did in the form of metal shavings.
 
Spindrift said:
The P-38 Lightning was a cool looking plane.
Click to expand...

I'm a little late to the party, but yeah, the Lightning has got to be my favorite WWII era plane. The Mustang and F4U are a close second.

There's a group of old-timers at a local airfield that own and operate a B-25 Marauder. It amazes me how loud that thing is when it takes off, but it's beautiful to watch. :)
 
Sabretooth said:
I'm a little late to the party, but yeah, the Lightning has got to be my favorite WWII era plane. The Mustang and F4U are a close second.

There's a group of old-timers at a local airfield that own and operate a B-25 Marauder. It amazes me how loud that thing is when it takes off, but it's beautiful to watch. :)
Click to expand...

Little known fact regarding Doollittle's Raiders and their B25s...

They were flying en route to board the carriers and prepare for the raid when they stopped at what would eventually become McClellan Air Force Base. They landed, and as soon as they got the planes to the shop for refueling and service they made it clear that the carburetor settings were not to be touched at all. By anyone. Period. (They'd been set by the factory specifically to get the Raiders to safety once they'd pounded Tokyo.)

Jimmy Doolittle himself went to check on his birds and he found a technician (unnamed) readjusting the settings. Said they were all wrong. Couldn't seem to get anything right with them.

Doolittle was not pleased, particularly since they couldn't fix the damage now done. He ordered all the planes settings reset, so they could at least stay together once things went to hell. (Good thing, too. More of the crews survived that way.)

Just before they left, Doolittle was handed a form where he was asked how the service was at McClellan. He wrote in big black letters, "LOUSY!"

'Nuff said.

Years later, he was asked about that by Air Force historians. Doolittle told them, "Perhaps that should have been in lower case."

Or not.
 
MRC_Hans said:
WNot to mention the P38 "gabelswantz teufel", hehe.
Click to expand...


The P-38 didn't fare that well as a long-range escort fighter over Europe—the colder weather caused a lot of trouble with the engines and turbo superchargers. In the warmer air over the Pacific, however, the P-38 excelled.


Sabretooth said:
There's a group of old-timers at a local airfield that own and operate a B-25 Marauder.
Click to expand...


[pedantic] B-25 Mitchell. B-26 Marauder. [/pedantic]
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom