fw 190a5 flight model

[MaxGunz]

Same reason why Gaston's claptrap fails, lack of full information.

In the meantime Freddie has joined Gaston in claiming that none of their BS has ever been shown false. It goes along with Gaston claiming that there is no historic information that counters his view. They have 2 standards and the old crank-loser's tactic of waiting months or longer after getting beat; put the same BS up again as if nothing happened before.

I see "wing bending" getting dragged in again. Please, QUALIFY THAT!

How many remember the "stress risers" championed by Gaston in post after post. Not a solid value to any of it and then the term got looked up. Gaston pushed a non-applicable term that has NOTHING TO DO with aerodynamics as if it does, complete with BS diagrams that NEVER QUANTIFIED A THING as some magical force that keeps planes from turning. Oh yeah, he really knows his BS and at least one player not only eats it but says how good it tastes!

FW190's have higher stall speeds than Spitfires. No amount of playing with partial factors and effects changes that. If -ignorance- was all you need to fly then those two would be posing for photos by the Mars Rover.

[Gabelschwanz Teufel]

There is plenty of information. Much of it is speculative, subjective and very selective.

[MaxGunz]

Originally Posted by Gabelschwanz Teufel

There is plenty of information. Much of it is speculative, subjective and very selective.

Full information allows repeat of the event without choosing one of many possible widely different interpretations.

[Gabelschwanz Teufel]

Indeed

[Glider]

Originally Posted by K_Freddie

Yeah, and those reports are not relevant to the envelope Gaston is talking about.. You really showed us haven't you !!

A matter of fact that none of you have come up with a decent counter argument, or proof therof, beyond reasonable doubt that Gaston is talking tripe.
You all revert back to aerodynamic formulae and charts, most of which are from pilots that you wish to discredit, so where does that leave your argument.
While aerodynamics does play a significant role, most of you are not willing to remotely admit that there might be a problem with the data, in the area that is in discussion.

If I were a test pilot, I'll be crying with laughter.

Interestingly I have not gone back to aerodynamic formula or charts. All I have done is go back to what Gaston has put forward as his evidence and offerred to debate his theory using the data that he claims supports his theory.
It is notable that he has not taken up that challange. The question I put to you is why hasn't he taken up the offer which is more than fair.

Just to remind you. He has said that 95% of all combats involve sustained turn and that the combat reports support this statement.
My challange is that he picks any combat report, from any of the lists of combat reports and we will analyse the ten either side of the report that he has chosen and see the percentage.

Why do you think he hasn't taken up that offer. Or indeed can you see what is wrong with that offer

I await your observation with interest

[MaxGunz]

Personally, I found that flying sims, once I got past rookie level, gave me a lot of insight into what many combat stories and Robert Shaw were saying.

When you include superior energy and tactics, like what accounts of FW-190's vs Spitfire V's over the channel tell, even EAW delivers.

But don't just take my word for the modeling in IL-2 when there's been a whole trail of aerobatics pilots and at least one test pilot say it's good.

The actual historic test data of the real FW's have been used is both table-driven and model-driven flight sims (as opposed to arcade games) and the FW's behave pretty much the same on turning, they won't turn inside Spits with both planes at low speed and co-alt but they will at higher speed, see IL2Compare for an idea where.

Look up clean stall speeds; FW at 110 mph to 130 mph and Spitfires at 80 mph to 95 mph. Spits have the power to sustain over 3 G's, I expect the FW to be in the same range but have to be faster to do it *or* simply use the vertical and occasionally be able to pull lead instead of the constant lead you can hold when turning inside a target. You don't have to have the better turning plane to get inside a target, you just need more energy.

[Glider]

K Freddie
I am still awaiting your views as to why Gaston refuses to debate his theory using the evidence that he says supports his case.

[Herra Tohtori]

I have yet to understand why wing bending would significantly affect the turn capabilities of these aircraft. It's like saying you can't measure a flag pole's height by putting it flat on the ground, because then you're measuring its length instead...

Logical parse-errors aside, what I can glean from the thread is as follows:

Apparently, Gaston's claim is that since no wing bending tests have been done to measure dynamic wing loading on these aircraft, we can't make accurate predictions about their turn performance.

However, the fact of the matter is this:

-Wing bending can not decrease the aircraft's mass.
-Wing bending can not increase the maximum lift produced by the wing.

Latter point can be proven by

a) assuming that the wings do not deform significantly when aircraft is flown within the flight envelope (and over-g tends to permanently deform the airframe, often fatally)

and

b) in a dihedral setup of wings, when the wings bend upwards under load, the lift can only decrease as the total wing span decreases.


Since the aircraft's weight is not affected by any wing deformations (how could it?) and the wing deformations cannot significantly alter the lift capabilities of the wing to positive direction, it naturally follows that wing bending does not have significant effect on the aircraft's lift to weight ratio at different angles of attack.

A simple fact of rotational physics is that for an object to stay on a circular path, a centripetal force (lift) is required to accelerate (g-forces) the object's mass towards the centre of the circular path.

The equation for this force is simply F = ma and no nonsense about wing bending will change the fact that you need certain amount of LIFT to turn an aircraft of certain MASS at a certain rate and turn radius.

You can increase turn rate and decrease turn radius by either increasing lift, or decreasing mass. I think we can all agree that the weights of WW2 aircraft are fairly well documented, so this entire argument can be condensed to the following statement:

Gaston's claim is that the FW-190 Anton models produced significantly more lift than aerodynamical models and testing suggest, especially on low speeds (which, incidentally, is where any wing provides the least lift, if you know anything about aerodynamics).

What this magic mechanism would be, he neglects to comment on. The problem, here, is that aerodynamics is a very well documented science and going against it would require a bit more than cherry-picked pilot reports interpreted with a hefty bit of bias.

Additionally - and even more confusingly - since Gaston's claim is that this magical increase in lift at low speeds would have made the FW-190 a better low speed turn fighter than Spitfires and Bf-109's, it logically follows that this magic lift increase would not appear on other contemporary aircraft which the FW-190 is compared to.

Which, I need to impress, were not fundamentally different from the FW-190 regarding their wing profile. In fact majority of the WW2 fighter aircraft used vastly similar wing chord profiles, which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who is familiar with the term "convergent evolution" - there were certain key designs that were used by almost everyone because they were the best, and most successful. The FW-190 was an advanced design, but it did not include Haunebu technology or any other occult magic to match it to anyone's interpretation of what its capabilities were.

It was a machine of finite, and variable capabilities, and the pilots who flew it and survived were capable of making it perform to its best. At certain flight envelopes, at certain times of the war, it would definitely outperform, outfly, even out-turn its adversaries. But a blanket statement that FW-190 Anton series were better at sustained low speed turns than Spitfires defies any logic and the combined might of applied sciences.

But if there's something I've learned in my time on the Internet, it is that you cannot change the mind of a true believer. The best you can hope for is to prevent them from converting others, and the way you do this is to expose their claims for the baloney they are.


Overall, this conversation should be analyzed with the help of this little video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUB4j0n2UDU

[MaxGunz]

I believe that those who 'get it' will understand and be better at flying and combat whether virtual or real while those who don't will be finding fault with whatever doesn't meet their poorly founded expectations.

Learn the differences in planes, put them into practice, and those war stories will become more clear and less a puzzle to be re-arranged to spell out how really little you understand.

[Gaston]

Originally Posted by Herra Tohtori

I have yet to understand why wing bending would significantly affect the turn capabilities of these aircraft. It's like saying you can't measure a flag pole's height by putting it flat on the ground, because then you're measuring its length instead...

Logical parse-errors aside, what I can glean from the thread is as follows:

Apparently, Gaston's claim is that since no wing bending tests have been done to measure dynamic wing loading on these aircraft, we can't make accurate predictions about their turn performance.

However, the fact of the matter is this:

-Wing bending can not decrease the aircraft's mass.
-Wing bending can not increase the maximum lift produced by the wing.

Latter point can be proven by

a) assuming that the wings do not deform significantly when aircraft is flown within the flight envelope (and over-g tends to permanently deform the airframe, often fatally)

and

b) in a dihedral setup of wings, when the wings bend upwards under load, the lift can only decrease as the total wing span decreases.


Since the aircraft's weight is not affected by any wing deformations (how could it?) and the wing deformations cannot significantly alter the lift capabilities of the wing to positive direction, it naturally follows that wing bending does not have significant effect on the aircraft's lift to weight ratio at different angles of attack.

A simple fact of rotational physics is that for an object to stay on a circular path, a centripetal force (lift) is required to accelerate (g-forces) the object's mass towards the centre of the circular path.

The equation for this force is simply F = ma and no nonsense about wing bending will change the fact that you need certain amount of LIFT to turn an aircraft of certain MASS at a certain rate and turn radius.

You can increase turn rate and decrease turn radius by either increasing lift, or decreasing mass. I think we can all agree that the weights of WW2 aircraft are fairly well documented, so this entire argument can be condensed to the following statement:

Gaston's claim is that the FW-190 Anton models produced significantly more lift than aerodynamical models and testing suggest, especially on low speeds (which, incidentally, is where any wing provides the least lift, if you know anything about aerodynamics).

What this magic mechanism would be, he neglects to comment on. The problem, here, is that aerodynamics is a very well documented science and going against it would require a bit more than cherry-picked pilot reports interpreted with a hefty bit of bias.

Your comments show little understanding of what I said.

I said the wings on these old aircrafts ALWAYS bend more than previously assumed for a given horizontal turn, since wind tunnels do not imitate a curved trajectory, and wing bending on these old nose-pulled types was never actually measured in turning flight (dive pull-outs measurements would not count because of the prop unloading in the dive)...

The structural limit before permanent deformation on these fighters was typically a factor of two, so way beyond the assumed loads: 14 Gs on the Me-109G and 13 Gs on the P-51, so there is plenty of room for the structure to bend more than the assumed 6 or 7 Gs of assumed actual wing bending load.

If you don't understand that more wing-bending applied differently among types can play havoc with wingloading assumptions, and is important for the wingload hierarchy between aircrafts, I don't know what to say to that... Your comment makes absolutely no sense.

Even Glider would readily agree that if the wingload is added to unevenly across types, it would change the wingload hierarchy between types, which is what this is all about...

Your comment that weight cannot be added to just because an object is in flight seems on its face nonsensical: If I press down, say through leverage, with a fifty pound force on an 80 lbs block, flying or not, it will then become (for all practical purposes) 30 lbs "heavier" than the "heavier" 100 pound block, flying or not... I cannot fanthom what you fail to get in this...

I never said the FW-190A produces more lift at lower speeds and lower Gs than at higher speeds and higher Gs: I said that the "extra" load is proportionately greater at lower Gs, because it is not changed by speed but by power, and the power stays the same since it is assumed to be at the same maximum in all turns, high or low G, for simplicity's sake...

So it is logical that an aircraft that has less of that "extra" power load (because of better leverage over a shorter nose) will benefit more at low speeds where the power is "larger" compared to the "pure weight" G loads... But at high G loads the actual mass of the aircraft is multiplied by the Gs, while the power is assumed the same, so the lighter aircraft benefits more than the heavier aircraft from high Gs, and the "power leverage load" is proportionately smaller to the "real" G load, so having a big advantage in "leverage power load" (like the FW-190) is less significant and becomes less and less significant as the turn becomes more and more tight beyond what is sustainable in speed...

At high Gs, weight matters increasingly more than power, everyone should be able to understand that... Hence the FW-190A's turn performance goes down relative to lighter fighters when Gs go up beyond a sustainable speed... Which is exactly what can be observed in innumerable combats...

There is no way, if you accept the premise of an extra load on the wing due to power, that any of this is debatable...

As for the issue of where the extra lift comes from, it is a thorny issue, but since we don't know how much those wing actually bend in turning flight (thus with assymetrical air inflow), who can say the extra lift is not there?

If there is extra wing bending, and if it changes with power level, then it means that the extra lift is there, and it is power-related, regardless of what our other assumtions are...

Note that I attribute the load to the leverage of the power coming from a long nose, so that is why more recent studies of very advanced jet fighters completely failed to uncover this extra power load... The existence of such in-flight wing bending tests seems not to overlap further back than the early jet age... Current warbird operators do not use wing strain gauges in flight, at least not routinely...

I also think that one of the features of that extra "nose power" load is that the width of the prop surface creates its turn assymetry through increased thrust in the disc's inside turn half, which increased thrust could help "mask" the inevitable extra drag needed for that extra load on the wings...

By saying "wing bending cannot create extra lift", you are confusing cause and effect... The cause of the extra lift is obviously complex if it was hidden for 100 years (but it isn't so outlandish if you include the "gradually increasing" assymetrical inflow of air in a turn, which is not duplicable in wind tunnels)...

In any case I'll be back: I am now compiling a list of P-47D combat reports to answer Glider's challenge. To be fair to him, the ratio of multiple 360 turns to dive followed by zoom seems more like 70-30 than the 90-10 I previously said, and it has to be added more than half of all the reports are a fairly meaningless jumble of actions, but I think Glider will find it hard to match the number of meaningful turn battles with an equal amount of dive and zoom, especially if dives followed by a long chase are excluded...

This compiling is very rewarding for me, as the accounts do clearly demonstrate the superiority, in low-speed turns at any altitudes, of both the P-47D and the FW-190A to the Me-109G (and the slight superiority of the FW-190A to the P-47D).

Gaston