Spit IIa

[TomcatViP]

Originally Posted by RAF74_Winger

For a wing with washout, max turn performance might not occur until some portion of the inner part of the wing is stalled and the wing as a whole has reached CLmax.

W.

only a minor portion

Regarding buffeting it is a highly unstable flight regime by def. Generally a localized buffeting zone is set artificially during the design phase to warn the pilot that is entering the stall flight regime.

The buffeting is caused by a major recirculation of flow above the wing. Thus being unstable by definition. The Lift force ad pitching moment oscillating around a certain value cause the "shaking". Aeroelasticity plays also its role here needing more washout to give a safety margin (and more drag) (see http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/planes/q0099.shtml)

Winger , I can put my tail plane on top of a 10m pole above the fuselage and will still experience wing buffeting.

Regarding the F18 without going OT, if I wd hve been at Northrop I would hve design the buffeting point before the LERX vortex start to interact with the wings flow. A pilot would know then when he is entering high AoA flight regime. What I mean here is that the buffeting zone might be wider than in a conventional aircraft due to the interaction of conventional wing behavior and LERX.

http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/planes/q0176.shtml

Regarding the Spitfire, the wider wing chord being rather flat (the max camber line being slightly frwd than conventional design), the pitchng moment is rather stable with AoA. This is good if you want to fit a variety of diverse equipment in a fighter aircraft but nasty when it comes to deal with a stall regime (IvanK that might give you some souvenir of teh Fr delta fighter spin )

In particular once such aircraft is committed in a spin, it is more stable here than an other aircraft with shorter wing chord and more rounded airfoil (there I wld like readers fans of RoF to think abt the barn door wing profiles of British WWI planes).

That said, it is mandatory to warm young pilots about the nasty behavior of such an aircraft in the spin. Then they will be more cautious in fight and the "turnability" of a Spitfire will vary greatly with the experience of its pilot.

That's all we said here as I can understand with Crumpp writing and I think this shld be in the sim (I was saying very much the same thing years ago with IL2).

Obviously an experienced fighter pilot will laugh of "the danger of being in a spin". But wait... Germans have shown the world twice that you don't win an air-war with experienced fighters pilots. That's all abt teh Legion Condor and the Hurricane, the experteen and the P51 or the WWI JastaCirkus and SPADs.


Note :
Writing this, I remember a Spit WWII WCO commenting the guncam footage of various pilots that were convinced they have hit their prey and demonstrating to them that they hve missed mostly because their plane were always drifting. This tells us a lot of how they were flying those planes that required much more attention than conventional aircraft when manoeuvring aggressively (of course not more than the early supersonics)

PS: it's a great discussion we hve here