
Would rather own a Spitfire...of course.
A super-rare Spanish copy of the Messerschmitt Me109 fighter of Second World War infamy, which was flown by both British and German aces, has gone up for auction. The Hispano Buchon, a licence-built copy of the Messerschmitt Me 109G, is the only surviving two-seat model in the world. The aircraft was flown by both Luftwaffe …
Not if you want to live you won't, they had a nasty "sabre dance" like stall problem on take off, killed a lot of pilots including two experten recently - it was so unusual it took powerful computer modelling to work out what was happening.
Back in the day no one had the foggiest how to solve it - pilots were just taught to climb out very shallow - otherwise it'd lose air flow, stall and drop out of the sky backwards, not a survivable experience in most cases.
'I seem to remember that some Spitfire's also has a problem if the throttle was opened too fast the engine toque would just flip the plane over'
I think that was possible with the Griffon powered ones, the main area of risk was if you decided to abort a landing attempt and go around, if you slammed the throttle open you'd find you were likely to find yourself upside down, slow, and very close to the ground. See also the Sea Fury.
The later versions with either engine would try to flip on takeoff unless you fed the throttle in slowly as you accelerated; in the case of the Griffon engine the torque was enough to require full deflection of the rudder even at half power from a standstill. Apart from the extra grunt, the Griffon versions could also trip up the unwary pilot transitioning from the Merlin as the engine turned the opposite way, requiring the opposite rudder when accelerating from low speed.
Something cool for the garage, you say?
A Volksjäger of course.
A killengine made for kids.
Then I will get someone to paint Asuka Shoryu Langley on it, just for fun.
This film may be of some interest...
https://www.secretspitfires.com/
https://www.secretspitfires.com/showtime/
At the time of writing, there's still time to reserve a place for this screening...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/18/the_register_lecture_the_secret_spitfires/
Not so. Bayerische Flugzeugwerke AG (known as BFW) was renamed Messerschmitt, after chief designer/new owner Willy, in 1938, so all post-1938 design prefixes changed from Bf to Me.
The Buchon design was based on the Me109G, which dates from 1942, hence it's an Me. It would be a Bf if it was a 109A-E, the first Me being the Me109F.
Here endeth the mid-20th-century German aircraft design nomenclature lesson.
Wrong.
For some unknown reason the bf109 and if I remember rightly the bf110 were both referred to in that way officially until the end of the war. The Me210/410 was designated after Dr Willi (and he probably wished they weren't) but it wasn't backdated for some reason.
The only bf109 you'll find with an Me109 build plate would be some few that were repaired/refurbished on the eastern front. In Estonia I think.
If any survive they'd be rarer than dodo's teeth.
Nope, ME was applied to all new aircraft post 1938, e.g. ME210, ME410 etc. Bf109 & indeed the Bf110 were pre 1938 and kept their original prefix, they were commonly referred to as ME for later models but officially it's Bf. I've seen the serial plate on a 109G, it says Bf109.
Alas these things come from a time before the computerised records and instant worldwide communications we have today. They were also hand made and subject to on the spot improvisations. During the war they’ll have been MacGyvered and cannibalised to keep them in the air. The chances are that all the above is true depending on where you were in the world at the time and whether or not the communication to name things differently had filtered down to you. When the builder finally did get instructions to change the name, he probably thought "Oh, I'll just use up the remainder of this box of serial plates before getting some more made".
If they offer you the model with the Heinkel engine run away - flying deathtrap. Having flown both some German pilots are said to have preferred the Buchon (with a late model pressure carb Merlin) to the original.
I'd suggest the fairings (bulges) at the back of the cylinder banks are for the timing chain runs for the overhead cams.
The standard motor for these was an inverted v12 DB6xx often latterly fitted with MW50 and or the ha-ha Gerat (ha-ha device) which provided nitrous oxide or laughing gas boost.
And just as an aside - if someone makes another Meteor based car it *isn't* a merlin. A Meteor is a n/a merlin block with a totally different (2 valve) head design that'd be hard pressed to make 650hp displacing 24 litres. A Merlin is either 1 or 2 stage supercharged with a "4 valve" head displacing 27 litres. I know, nerdtastic but it bugs the hell out of me.
As there are nerds here, I'll ask: I've never managed to work out why "we" consistently used V12s the "right" way up, and the Luftwaffe consistently - so it seems - used inverted V12s. Are there advantages to inverted beyond the view from the cockpit - but then you need longer undercarriage; I'd have thought having a single sump is better, but OTOH do you get more reliable valve lubrication if it's all inverted? But what prevents oil pooling in the underside of the pistons besides their violent motion?
The packaging is better with the sump/crank upwards (the widest part of the engine is towards the widest part of the fuselage. It's a reason why flat-12 and wide V were used in formula 1 - easy to build aero around.
The reason you don't get hydro lock and a very expensive set of flying piston rods is the DB engine was a dry sump design - car engines are wet sump, invert one while it's running and expensive things happen quite quickly.
Specific to the 109 it also allowed a 20/30mm motorcannon to fire through the hollow crank and for two 151 to be placed above the flat deck of the "sump". The toasty motor kept the guns warm (its - 30c at 35,000ft) & the narrow mounting of most of the weapons (compared to a spit for example) made it much easier to put shells through a target in a nice tight pattern. Win-win unless you were the other guy.
However it wasn't all sweetness and light. The canopy opened to the side, so forget about getting out in a hurry, the undercarriage had all the design flair of an Austin Allegro (although it's understandable why it was done that way, to save weight) - and the wing tabs turned the thing into basically a giant 1700hp vibrator on fast sharp turns (to the point that some pilots wired them shut). A good pilot was roughly on parity until about late 43, an inexperienced one would be dug out of the permafrost after about a week.
The engine had mechanical fuel injection so it could be bunted when a Merlin would half stall in a cloud of black smoke (partly solved by miss shillings orifice). But being early FI and being 6 litres larger than the Merlin it drank fuel and gave only a 20 minute combat radius over the UK.
Being higher compression than the Merlin - they didn't like artificial petrol either and there are many unexplained accidents were aces just disappeared or had engine failure possibly attributable to fuel that would make 2** cut with Guinness seem like a good idea.
Incidentally if anyone ever tries to sell you purple petrol I'd not bother - they used to use it in racing cars post war but don't leave it overnight - it dissolves the fuel tank.
It's partly for packaging reasons and partly also accessibility and survivability. It's easier to replace fluids from an external tank with a feed pump than spend time mucking about and armoured lines and tanks are lighter than armouring a whole crankcase - you can also have aux lubrication circuits when you need them.
IE almost all aero prop engines have two entirely separate ignition systems (as did the BRM V16, bad idea). Mostly they run on both (which also aids power) but if one distributor or magneto went south, you've still got a running engine. The A10 ground attack aircraft has no less than three hydraulic-electric control circuits, AND a fully manual rod & joint type which one American was very happy for when her plane got badly shot up - she managed to get it back home but I'd imagine she wasn't feeling all that happy about 48 hours later - a lot of pulled muscles, manual means manual on those. No hydraulic pressure probably means no flaps or brakes either..
'Specific to the 109 it also allowed a 20/30mm motorcannon to fire through the hollow crank and for two 151 to be placed above the flat deck of the "sump".'
Minor point, the cannon didn't fire through the hollow crank, because several times a second there's a con-rod passing through the axis of rotation. It did go through the centre of one of the gears in the camshaft drive drain and between the two banks of cylinders before passing out the centre of the prop, which wasn't directly attached to the crankshaft due to the need for reduction gearing.
I'd be more worried about Mossad than Donnie Dickwits little minions. The CIA tends to think planning and subtlety are for other people (course it doesn't help when your British contact is a certain Harold Adrian Russell Philby..). Mossad are scary even in comparison to spetnaz/oznaz.
"....and one nice straight run over Trumps next Inauguration...*"
Do not forget that he has now instructed the pentagon to arrange a military parade.
During a parade, it is common to have all parading personnel face the dictator as they march past. It is just a matter of convincing the great orange one that this includes all tank turrets as well...
I read somewhere that during the filming of "The Battle of Britain", the aircraft used constituted effectively the 9th largest air force in the world at the time. Nice factoid, if the case.
Also re the flight of Galland and Stanford-Tuck, I grew up in Namibia in the 1970s, in an area with a strong German heritage, and a number of German expats. There was an ex-services club, open to all who had served in armed forces. The Allied ex-servicemen and their Axis counterparts used to spend hours working out if they'd shot at each other when at the same battles.
Then there was Dr Strangelove.
The guys in the bomber and rigging up that set weren't allowed to get with 100 yards of a B52. So several of them having served on B29/B50 types in the AF they decided to take those configurations and work it out from there, using first principles.
All well and good - except they apparently nailed the console set up and dialogue so well, the AF had a conniption, thought they'd been spying and sicced the FBI/CIA onto the people concerned. Poor set designers had all sorts of trouble before they convinced the pointy haired generals it was just coincidence..
Course it might have been something in the water..
reminiscent of the D-Day crossword scare.
On a related note, did anyone watch the documentary on Britains H-Bomb ?? I was intrigued to see that even the crew were no allowed to see the actual bomb itself. It was loaded behind curtains while they were in the plane.
So what was so secret about the shape ???
...All well and good - except they apparently nailed the console set up and dialogue so well, the AF had a conniption, thought they'd been spying...
That would be Kubrick's well-known mania for accuracy. It came to the fore in 2001 - the spacecraft were all created after extensive consultations with NASA engineers, and the early humanoids after extensive consultation with paleolithic anthropologists at the Smithsonian (with primate behavioural specialists from the New York Zoo).
I believe the huge airforce thing is true.
They used a bunch of contemporary planes for fliming purposes, becauase they were the same speed as the fighters / bombers.
They had a couple of B17s, because they were the right speed and also because they had lots of gunports that you could mount cameras in. And there was space for equipment and people - and they could be in the middle of the action.
For the ultimate shots though (two fighters closing head-on), a B17 wasn't suitable. As it would be in the way, and crashes are bad.
So they built themselves a gimballed steadycam equivalent. And slung it on a long line dangling from a helicopter above the fighters. With cameran dangling of course...
So he hung there, in mid-air, with a fighter flying straight towards him at several hundred miles an hour. Filming and dangling and swaying and waiting for the pilot to fly round him.
Balls of steel...
Another great war movie - The Dambusters....I read that they couldn't get enough aircraft, and so they used copies of the same strip of film, overlayed on each other to give the impression of more aircraft in flying sequences. Apparently, if you look carefully, you can see some Lancasters flying backwards.
This is the same film that couldn't film any actual post-dam-bust footage, so used some existing newsreel footage of flooding in the deep south of the USA. Again, if you look carefully, the shots of the flooded Ruhr valley feature negro farmers.
Illegal to charge VAT in secondhand items ! But HMRC changed the rules to line the governments coffers so VAT registered businesses have to charge VAT on their sales, even if the item was originally sold with VAT the first time.
On the plane, its a two seater which I don't believe the Germans ever built, its running a British engine & was built in Spain, so I'm fairly certain its not a Bf or ME anything !
I've flown a Mustang, that was converted to a two seater after the war, but at least it was a pucka 1944 built warbird :) best hour of my life.
Just a moment: this tedious document says sales of military aircraft are exempt. I don't expect the auctioneer's premium is, though.
As a young lad I was obsessed with old WWII aircraft and favored the Messerschmitt and the Mitsubishi A6M Zero.
That was until I watched the TV show "Baa Baa Black Sheep" and my focus turned to the folding wing Corsair that Robert Conrad (Pappy Boyington) flew.
I even begged my father to get me a pure white Bull Terrier dog like the one in the show.
To pick up on a few comments. Around 500 Me109G-12s (the 2 seat version) were built from 1944 all converted from existing G series airframes. They were in response to the loss of trainee pilots especially in take off and landing accidents. The second seat took up most of the original fuel tank so they were very short ranged and used for take off and landing instruction.Few retained armaments.
Bf / Me 109s did not have a successful engine mounted cannon installation until the "F" model - post Battle of Britain. The two guns firing through the prop had a reduced rate of fire due to interruptor gear. Possibly resulting in retaining 3 blade props even with the more powerful DB605. Original 109s had two blade props.
I'm not sure if the one offered for sale is airworthy. There is one other "G12" flying being a conversion of a single seat Buchon in 2013. That one has interchangeable RR Merlin 500 and DB DB605 engines. Most of the flying is likely to be carried out with the Merlin being a lot less rare than the DB605.
The inverted V engine is possibly easier to service as most of the valves etc can be reached by someone standng on the ground whereas Merlin installations required ladders and / or platforms. RR did consider an inverted V for the Merlin but legend has it that such a configuration was considered too Germanic....
BoB film used a B25 Mitchell as a camera platform rather than B17.
As well as Standford Tuck, other RAF pilots contributed including Ginger Lacey and Douglas Bader.
Hawker Typhoon for me - would love to see one of those flying, even though they are/were big noisy bastards (apparently). However, a Mosquito flying near me would legitimately make me blub if I saw one. I once worked with a baker who was an engineer on them. You would not believe the stories about fixing up a mostly wooden plane to go back to war!
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forgive me if youve heard this one
An English ladies social club is throwing a garden party and they decide to invite several distinguished veterans to speak at the event.
The first speaker, a Swedish flying ace steps up to the podium and makes his presentation about flying in the war. During the question and answer session after his presentation an older lady in a big hat asks him if he ever had a close call.
He replied, 'One time when I was on patrol I flew out of a cloud to find three f*uckers coming straight at me out of the sun!...'
A gasp arose from the audience and the moderator, concerned about the salty language, quickly stepped in to add that 'A Fokker was a type of aircraft'
The pilot replied, 'Ya maaaybeee so but dees f*ckers were flying Messerschmidts'
now Ill retire until such time as there is a suitable story to post my favorite tapeworm joke.
Ill get my coat
Q: What is the title of the world`s thinnest book?
A: "Swedish war heroes" (Alternative: "Highlights of Dutch cuisine")
Q: How do you sink a Swedish battleship?
A: You put it to sea (Vasa anyone?)
Q: How do you sink a Swedish submarine?
A: You dive down and knock on the hatch. They will promptly open it to see who is there.
Q: How do you sink that same submarine again?
A: You dive down and knock on the hatch. They will open a window to tell you that they will not fall for that trick twice.
..Now guess which side of the No/Se border I am from :)
After the war, the Spanish had continued to use Buchons and even Heinkel 111 bombers
IIRC, Spain had very few He 111, the ones used during the civil were lended by Germany but left behind afer the war. Spain made its own variant of the bomber, the CASA 2.111. Those are the ones shown in the movie "Battle Of Britain", easily spotted from He111 because of their Merlin engine.
We have a static running Merlin at the RAF Museum occasionally. The owner told me that it was originally built in WW2 for a Lancaster or Halifax, post war was fitted in a Hastings transport (derived from Halifax) and was then rebuilt as a Merlin 500 series fitted in a CASA 2.111. Must have been a rare engine to have powered types of the principal bombers of WW2 from both sides. :-)
The first time I flew into San Francisco I was thrilled (geek that I am) to see the giant airship shed that I'd just recently read about on El Reg. Later on that holiday, I chanced upon the Tillamook air museum in northern Oregon located in a similarly vast hangar (seriously - the museum took up less than half of it and didn't want for exhibits) and in there what I confidently thought at first was a 109 turned out to be a Buchon that had starred in the Battle of Britain.
Great museum btw and not a hell of a distance from the Spruce Goose at McMinnville if you're in the area...