Slight thread drift RAF Tucano 2013 scheme based on 72 Sqn North Africa

What about in a 1 on 1 engagement? Is the Tucano more powerfull, engine wise, speedwise than the Spit?

I was trying to cheat 🙂

Dynamic

Don’t have data to hand but I would expect a late-war single seater to eat the Tucano in the horizontal plane. It’s not designed for instantaneous turning and I don’t recall any requirements in the AST spec.

But in the vertical plane. Tucano initial climb-rate is from the mid-2000 to mid-3000 fps in “standard” trim ( 2.5 tonnes, training mission, two crew ). That’s late-1930s fighter performance and on-par with this for a Mk IIA Spit. AST spec was 6 minutes to 15,000 feet and this was achieved.

Power-loading actually favours the Tucano against early-model Spits, particularly at altitude, with 1,110 shp from the TPE331. But I expect that advantage to drop-off as installed power increased in later Marks.

Structural

The Belfast Tucano is stressed to sustain +6 / -3 G every day for its 12,000 hour service life ( at training weights ).

The Spitfire, from what I can see, was specified in the original F7 / 30 for 9 G ultimate load, i.e. structure will likely fail beyond that. Probably still has the edge on paper and no-one really paid attention to G-loadings during wartime unless it came back bent. They didn’t have G-meters fitted… so I don’t know how hard they actually pushed them in combat.

A fully-fueled Tucano has a cruising endurance of a little over six hours. I think it could probably dawdle around at, say, 28,000 feet, and wait for the Spit to return to base 🙂

What about in a 1 on 1 engagement? Is the Tucano more powerfull, engine wise, speedwise than the Spit?

So, in a dogfight which would win, Tucano or Spitfire? Assuming you fitted some guns to the Tucano of course!

A fully-fueled Tucano has a cruising endurance of a little over six hours. I think it could probably dawdle around at, say, 28,000 feet, and wait for the Spit to return to base 🙂

So, in a dogfight which would win, Tucano or Spitfire? Assuming you fitted some guns to the Tucano of course!