As someone who is slightly enthusiastic about the Spitfire, I was more than a little sceptical about this:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-sp...-saved-britain
and decided to waste a bit of time digging into the truth of the matter. Much to my surprise, there's a book about the question and this, rather neat bit of work
https://www.aerosociety.com/media/48...suggestion.pdf
I knew about the He70 fast mail plane:
but was assured, as a teenager in the ATC, that it was just a superficial coincidence. Suddenly I discover that it's certainly not a coincidence, even if it was correlation rather than causation, because both designers were heavily influenced by Ludwig Prandtl's work on wing theory during WWI which demonstrated that an elliptical wing was the most efficient way to generate lift. This was first demonstrated by the Baeumer Sausewind in the early twenties:
Sadly, while apparently very efficient and economical, the Sausewind also demonstrated another feature of the perfect elliptical wing: the whole wing stalls at once, making landing and high G manoeuvres more exciting than most pilots would desire, a problem never really solved without some compromise, even in the Spitfire.
I remember reading that some PR Spitfires had a lethal stall and, suddenly putting two and two together, I suppose that means that the deliberate wash out added to the standard Spitfire wing at a cost of some drag, was removed to improve high speed and high level performance at the expense of nasty stall characteristics. I love making connections like that, but I do wonder if the people who are rebuilding this:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-a8646841.html
are aware of this 'feature'? I assume there was a pilot's notes for this model, but with such a limited run, I wonder...
*edit* And on checking, these:
http://zenoswarbirdvideos.com/Images...PIT9MANUAL.pdf
are the notes used for the PR model in question and while they note that the ground attack version gives less warning of a stall, they don't mention the PR version...
Anyway, it's given me an evening of pleasant discovery, so I just thought it would be nice to share
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