Originally posted by JDK
Very interesting point there. Personally I think Mitchell was a great seaplane designer (which, before the Spitfire, is what he was best known for) and got lucky with the Spitfire in terms of it’s aerodynamics. As an aircraft intended for production, it was awful, and K5054 needed to be redesigned for production.
I suspect the fault lay more with Vickers or Vickers-Supermarine board being very conservitive in what was going to get developed rather than Joe Smith’s approach – but that’s just a thought.
Hawkers, on the other hand, developed from one design to the next very, very sucessfully. Their only(?) hiccup was the Typhoon’s wing and tail, which was a concequence of pushing the envelope rather than a lack of ‘good design practice’.
Some here are better qualified to comment, and I may be wrong with some of that, but it’s an interesting area…

I am not better qualified to comment than you, but a few things come to my mind having read this:

I think Spitfire was developed throughout the war because no other operationally useful British fighter.
Stating that during WWII Hawkers developed one successful fighter design after another sounds a bit unusual to me.
As distinguished as it was, the Hurricane was obsolete compared to the 109 by the time of the Battle of Britain, and it had virtually no development potential. Typhoon/Tornado, intended to become the standard RAF fighter from ca. 1940 were both failures in their intended roles (no intention to get into details why this was so, just stating facts from the RAF viewpoint).
The first usable Hawker fighter was the Tempest, but this entered service too late to really affect the war.
All in all, there was no other way but to develop the Spitfire, and fortunately for the RAF the Mitchell design had the necessary development potential.
If you look at the Spitfire/Spiteful development it is clear that introducing a completely new design, or even a much modified Spitfire version had always lower priority than hasty stop-gap modifications. So, even if Mitchell was still alive, there was little chance of a new Supermarine fighter replacing the Spitfire during the war.

And about developing one design from another: if you look at the lineage of F.7/30 to Swift, there is no distinctive break. This is not to say that the Swift had any parts from the F.7/30 (or even that Spitfire 24 had any parts from K5054), but that the development was a continuous process.
When it comes to Hawker, I don’t think the Tornado/Typhoon had anything to do with the family of the inter-war biplanes plus the Hurricane. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think work on the Tornado/Typhoon was from a scratch, not by developing the Hurricane. On the other hand, if you just mean the long line of successful (?) Hawker fighters, you can go as far as the Harrier. They all had some input from the genius of Sydney Camm, but they were not from one and the same development line.

V.

Originally posted by Eric Mc
Pre-1914 there was no USAAF OR USAAC. The first miltary air arm in the US was the US Army Aero Service, and I don’t know what year it was formed – 1908?

Since the first recognised helicopters (fully controllable in forward, sideways and backways flight) did not fly until the late 30s (Focke Wulf and Sikorsky) would the vehicle you are referring to be considered a true helicopter – as opposed to something that tried to lift itself vertically off the ground?

Eric,

I think we have a misunderstanding here:

My reference to 1914 (and Distiller’s reply to it) referred to the first air-to-air combat, not to the USAAC helicopter.
Also, I do not think Sikorsky’s helicopter mady and fully controllable flights in 1930s, because it did not make any free flights before 1940 (all before that was tethered).
Focke-Wulf never built helicopters either – they were Focke-Achgelis.
As for ‘first recognised helicopters’, the funny thing is that as far as I know, there is no such thing. Unlike the balloons or aeroplanes there is no such things in the annals of aviation as ‘the first recognised helicopter’. And most certainly there were fully controllable helicopters long before WWII (‘fully controllable’ in the same meaning as the Wrights’ aeroplane can be considered a fully controllable one).

V.

With all those wartime memoirs and novels around, I am a little shy to say that my all time favourite is Ernest K. Gann’s “Fate Is The Hunter”. Am I alone?

V.

Re: ………….>>> A “Historic Aviation” QUIZ <<<……………

Originally posted by Distiller
6. What was the first helicopter in service with the USAAF?

Define ‘in service’. The USAAC ordered their first helicopter design long before WWII (not that I remember its name, nothing to do with Sikorsky anyway) and I think it even flew

9. When did the first air-to-air combat take place?.

Is 1914 accurate enough?

11. Name three multi-engine triplane aircraft.
Trebor Trabant (never heared of it, but …!)

Never heard of a Trabant?
But the triplane bomber was called Tarrant Tabor…

12. Name a multi-engine aircraft with foldable/stowable wings (for shipbased service).

Was de Havilland Sea Mosquito pre-1945? The Sea Hornet wasn’t, I think. But how about the Airspeed Fleet Shadower?

V.

Originally posted by Mark V
Sorry Mate, squadron badges were not worn on uniform in WWII (it would have been giving too much away to the enemy if captured)!

I have no knowledge of badges and the like at all, but I certainly have seen WWII period pilot photos with the 601 Sqn ‘Winged Sword’ pinned to the uniform. Weren’t there others like this?
V.

Originally posted by Kfir
ive got it how i want it at the moment, and when its finished ill post a screenshot here.

Kfir, what I failed to mention was that the Spitfire silhouette in your work looks rather weird. There is something wrong about the proportions to me, the rudder is wrong in shape (I doubt if there were many Mk IXs with this rudder shape at that time), and the nose does not look right, either.
Also, I don’t think the ‘FU’ code had a black outline (that’s what it looks like in your profile). It was just the narrow bit of the original camouflage around the codes when they were not overpainted with the black-and-white bands.
V.

My brief captions:

92) Po-2 LNB (‘light night bomber’)
93) R-Z (R-3?) or R-5 variant
94) Il-2
95) Pe-2
96) Il-10 – see no. 27
97) SB – see no. 21
98) Boston – see no. 15
99) ANT-25 – see no. 12
100) DB-3 – see no. 11
101) T-100 – see no. 6
102) Yak-9P & Il-2 – see no. 5
103, 104) Tu-4 (or might be a genuine B-29) – see no. 4
in the last shot the two blokes are spoiling a close-up of the La-7 in the markings supposed to be those of Ivan Kozhedub – see no. 46

Arthur? paulc?

V.

PS. Great job Mark. Na-zdarovya!

21) is SB variant, universally misspelled as SB-2 (I know)
25) is I-15 variant (I know)
V.