Hurricane Kills

Having been professionally employed as an aircraft performance aerodynamicist, I can assure you that an aircraft’s best turning performance can be calculated, or indeed its actual turning performance at any combination of speed, altitude and climb/descent rate. Yes, actual combat had many variables, but comparisons at the same conditions are still valid.

Deighton’s figures were lifted from Mason’s Hurricane Mk.1 Profile, which assumed all three aircraft had a maximum lift coefficient of 1 – which is nonsense. So please do not quote it as relevant information. The matter was readdressed in the 1990s in the Royal Aero Society Journal, and an article produced by the staff of Manchester University. Now where did I put it…..
From memory, the Hurricane had the best turning performance and the 109 the worst.

As for the Hurricane’s kills: yes the Spitfire did fly in most of the theatres that the Hurricane did, but it was kept “on the island” for so long that (generally) by the time significant numbers of Spitfires saw service overseas, the enemy was totally outnumbered by other Alllied fighters wanting their share of the hunting, and opportunities were less than for the earlier Hurricane. As indeed were losses.

I’m not convinced that the Hurricane did achieve more claims than any other RAF fighter – dragging in other Allied fighters seem to be going beyond the original suggestion – but it is not obviously silly.

According to this site the Soviets seem to have used Spifires during the continuation war.

The Spitfires Finns claimed were probably Yaks and while I remember seeing some information the Soviets used Spits over Leningrad they didn’t engage any Finnish planes.

Martti

Does anyone know precisely how many enemy aircraft Hurricanes actually accounted for?

If you mean total of the whole war across all nation users, then I would think that is definately in the ‘unknown’ category 🙂

If you mean during the Battle of Britain period, then yes, I have seen it mentioned in a few books……can’t remember which off the top of my head though.

Wonder how you would go about including the Hurricanes kills in Russia in the total. Surely the 3000+ Hurricanes must have had a significant number of victories?

One statistic which interests me is the ratio of aircraft lost due to operational issues compared to the number of aircraft lost due to accidents, either flying/maintenance or engineering.

I have read that generally more aircraft were destroyed by the country operating them than the opposing country. Is this correct?

I realise this question could be considered dangerously on topic, but here goes.

Does anyone know precisely how many enemy aircraft Hurricanes actually accounted for?

🙂

To which there is probably no simple/accurate answer 😉

cheers baz

I realise this question could be considered dangerously on topic, but here goes.

Does anyone know precisely how many enemy aircraft Hurricanes actually accounted for?

🙂

My opinion is that comparision of performance figures is not relevant unless you are able to define exactly what parameters are/were most important at a particular time.

All your basic parameters are on that list,from it you might conclude that the 109 and spit were very close in speed etc,the 109 initial climb rate was better but the spitfire overall climb rate and operational ceiling was better.
The spitfire higher ceiling might tell you about wing loading and engine optimisation,
Hurris had trouble chasing JU88’s,esp empty returning from raids because they did not have much speed margin over a JU88 in a very shallow dive.
The 109 had an excellent engine fuel system but was under winged,cramped and with bad visibility for pilots,it’s wing slats were not linked which could give trouble during combat.
The spit had carefree handling and lower wing loading (than 109) which meant that its tightest combat turning radius would be much easier to achieve by a fairly inexperienced pilot.
The hurricane also was fairly vice free handling wise but heavier,slightly more stable gun platform than spit and prob slightly heavier weight of shot (guns mounted closer together) but it’s pilots were more likely to be badly burned by fuel ‘torching’ through cockpit if the fwd fuel tank was hit.As has been said many times it was easier to produce in 1939 and did a great job.
As previously posted many fighter kills were of the ‘hit and run’ type and these were the favoured luftwaffe tactics anyway.

cheers baz

Anyone ever seen an approximate figure of kills for the P-40? I have a feeling it’s a larger number than many people realize. It is another one that, like the Hurricane, served in a TON of different theaters of war from the beginning until the end.

My opinion is that comparision of performance figures is not relevant unless you are able to define exactly what parameters are/were most important at a particular time.

Turning circle and top speed could be what is required at a particular time, whereas another time in history requires high levels of buildability, maintainability and repairabilty, as an example?

Just out of interest the following comparative table of performance figures was put together by the Luftwaffe test centres and judged to be ‘fairly accurate’ by one of the most experienced british test pilots….
Performance figures are complex things and even this simple table shows the differences with altitude etc.

cheers baz

In alphabetical order!

DazDaMan in the red corner and hpsauce in the blue corner.

This discussion/argument has been going on for over 68 years now, so gawd knows what either of you expect to learn from it now?

When you’re both dead and gorn, there will probably be another pair of twits arguing the same point, so why bother?:confused:

Gather ye all your references, research every book and snippet of information ye both can find and when fully armed with all the gen, put on the gloves and come out fighting.

If I live long enough, I’d love to be the referee.:p

I’ll take the real fighter pilot’s word over the armchair/academic pilot’s any day.

This bit suggests I’m rather wasting my time. I have tried to underline the distinction NOT between “real pilots” and “armchair pilots” (whatever they are), but between the individual pilot’s experiences – often recorded well after the event, and liable to all manner of subjective filtration – and the collective experiences of combat pilots, aircraft designers, test pilots, engineers, etc etc, as collated, analysed and weighed in the balance by a respected historian. It is precisely because Deighton offered a new and more factual analysis of the BoB than hitherto, inverting (or subverting) many cosy received opinions/myths in the process, that his book was so well received. Fighter pilots “know” lots of things, such as the best way to fly combat formations – so many RAF units continued to fly in antiquated, cumbersome, highly visible pre-WW2 vics even after the BoB, rather than adopt the combat-proven vastly more effective “finger four” of the Luftwaffe, presumably because they “knew” the old way was best…. I dare say all too many pilots who “knew” they could out-turn a 109 died being proved wrong.
I shan’t flog a dead horse any longer. Best wishes.

One final point:

I recommend a glance at pp106-107 in his book, with a graphic diagram showing the theoretical turning circles of 109, Hurricane and Spitfire; as he says, the short wingspan and high wing-loading of the ME put it ahead, but against this one had to consider its weaker mainplane and tail.

From Alfred Price’s “The Spitfire Story”:

Compared with the Messerschmitt Bf109E, its main dogfighting rival during the Battle of Britain, the Spitfire I was marginally faster in level speed below 15,000ft, and marginally slower about 20,000ft. The Spitfire could out-turn the Messerschmitt at almost any altitude or speed, but the latter was the superior aircraft in the climb. In truth, the differences between the Spitfire and the Bf109 in performance and handling were only marginal, and in combat they were almost always surmounted by tactical considerations…

Regarding the last sentence, most forget the fact that there were very few actual dogfights in the Battle itself – it was mostly “shoot-and-scoot” tactics. Thus rendering the argument of turning circles null and void.

Not at all, simply trying to extract some kind of referential backup for your very general assertions.

My “general assertions” are gleaned from having read several “authoritative” works on the Battle of Britain. I have read plenty of accounts by actual fighter pilots of the period (Paul Richey, Geoff Wellum, Duncan Smith etc). My library also includes numerous documentary films and programmes where pilots, both modern and wartime, have commented as such. As Firebird stated: take your pick of source material.

And since the Deighton book is a historical work, with an intro by no less than AJP Taylor (one of the premier English historians of the 20thC…) it is itself based on a wideranging list of other works – his bibliography extends to forty-plus major works plus documents, periodicals and so on, including e.g. The Rise & Fall of the German Air Force (MoD), The Luftwaffe War Diaries (Becker), Inside the Third Reich (Speer), The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany (Webster/HMSO), and “fighter pilot stuff” by e.g. Deere, Galland, Townsend…

And?

You’re doing it again! Sorry, but sweeping assertions such as “universally accepted” just don’t cut it – if you’re convinced I’m wrong , and I’m perfectly prepared to be shown as wrong, then you ought to feel obligated to cite respectable, credible evidence that demonstrates Deighton’s sources (technical, historical and pilot-originated) to be incontrovertibly mistaken.

See above.

I hadn’t heard of it, but will look out for it.

Do. You won’t regret reading it. I’ve read it twice now.

Don’t be so defensive! By “minor works” I don’t mean fighter pilot memoirs are duff or bad, just that they don’t count as authoritative works of history.

No, they probably don’t, but you forget that these are the men who took these aircraft into combat, regardless of which side they were on. I’ll take the real fighter pilot’s word over the armchair/academic pilot’s any day.

The Most Dangerous Enemy might have been written by an academic, but he’s gone an awful bloody long way to prove the point of just how close things really were in those days.

I think you’re being remarkably aggressive.

Not at all, simply trying to extract some kind of referential backup for your very general assertions.

So far you have sited ONE reference (Deighton’s “Fighter”)…

Until now, that’s more than you had done – see above! And since the Deighton book is a historical work, with an intro by no less than AJP Taylor (one of the premier English historians of the 20thC…) it is itself based on a wideranging list of other works – his bibliography extends to forty-plus major works plus documents, periodicals and so on, including e.g. The Rise & Fall of the German Air Force (MoD), The Luftwaffe War Diaries (Becker), Inside the Third Reich (Speer), The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany (Webster/HMSO), and “fighter pilot stuff” by e.g. Deere, Galland, Townsend…

..the Spitfire and Hurricane, universally accepted as having a BETTER turning circle than the Bf109..

You’re doing it again! Sorry, but sweeping assertions such as “universally accepted” just don’t cut it – if you’re convinced I’m wrong , and I’m perfectly prepared to be shown as wrong, then you ought to feel obligated to cite respectable, credible evidence that demonstrates Deighton’s sources (technical, historical and pilot-originated) to be incontrovertibly mistaken.

The Most Dangerous Enemy by Stephen Bungay…..is regarded as one of the best volumes on the subject.

I hadn’t heard of it, but will look out for it.

And as for “usually minor” works completed by those actual participants? Umm, that’s pretty casual considering it was they who wrote history in the first place.

Don’t be so defensive! By “minor works” I don’t mean fighter pilot memoirs are duff or bad, just that they don’t count as authoritative works of history. You neglect the fact that gifted combat pilots are rarely good writers (exceptions OTTOMH: Geoff Wellum, Johnnie Johnson, Ed Rasimus [Vietnam Thud/F4 pilot]…) and are practically never academic historians with skills to match. I too read as many personal air-combat accounts as come my way, but do not categorise them as “history”. Historians are people like AJP Taylor – an ARP Warden in WW2, not remotely like a fighter pilot – and to a lesser extent Len Deighton. I recommend a glance at pp106-107 in his book, with a graphic diagram showing the theoretical turning circles of 109, Hurricane and Spitfire; as he says, the short wingspan and high wing-loading of the ME put it ahead, but against this one had to consider its weaker mainplane and tail. The key is perhaps this: “The arguments about which type could out-turn which are usually no more than a reflection of the recklessness of the opponents a man had flown against.”

A graph in The Most Dangerous Enemy by Stephen Bungay states that the turning circles of the various fighter aircraft was calculated mathematically.

Even if you know the wing area, aerofoil profile, weight of the aircraft (which varies) and maximum permissible wing loading is it even possible to calculate the ‘best’ turning circle of a fighter?

Surely it also depends on the speed of the aircraft so the smallest radius turn will only be possible at the lowest speed…..and don’t fighters try to keep speed high during combat?

True. But in this case their data of what a turning cicle is like is coming from people who flew the aircraft and nowhere else, whether they were a test pilot or combat pilot. I agree with Daz’s point that if they wanted to research it in any other way, the researcher would have to fly in the aircraft themselves.

These academics can’t have just ‘read it in a book’ because someone had to fly the aircraft before their source wrote it down, surely.

Yes I agree, buts its up to the accademics to search out, collate, analyse and ultimately propose a conclusion based on the original and usually varied sources of information (be it memoirs, test pilot’s reports or bigraphical material). They do have the benefit of hindsight too.

Oh, come on! You’ve just dismissed virtually the entire corpus of academic historical research, leaving only those (usually minor) works completed by actual participants in historical events. So much for AJP Taylor, Simon Schama, et al…
Quite apart from the fact that it’s the historian’s/researcher’s function to bring together direct evidence for analysis and comparison, individual combat pilot accounts are notoriously prone to inaccuracy.

No matter how important the meticulous research from a historian might be hpsauce, in the case of manouvreability and turning circles surely their ‘facts and figures on paper’ can only have been provided by individual pilots who have flown the aircraft in the first place. These academics can’t have just ‘read it in a book’ because someone had to fly the aircraft before their source wrote it down, surely.

Why not read what the guys who flew both types had to say?

Douglas Bader:
“It was strong, highly maneuverable, could turn inside the Spitfire and of course the Me 109.”

Al Deere:
“In fact, the Hurricane, though vastly more manoeuvrable than either the Spitfire or the Me 109, was so sadly lacking in speed and rate of climb, that its too-short combat experience against the 109 was not a valid yardstick for comparison.”

Source:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWhurricane.htm

Which was better? I would say that they were both better than each other!

http://members.madasafish.com/~d_hodgkinson/hawker-Vspit.htm