RE: Two in a fighter. Did it ever happen?
I remember reading in the old RAF Flying Review, the great-grandfather of all the Key magazines (which really reveals what an old fart I am 🙂 ), an account by D. H. Clarke about doing a landing in North Africa in a Kittyhawk to pick up a squadron mate who had been taken down by ground fire while strafing an airfield.
On the Eastern front the habit of landing to pick up comrades was nearly routine amongst the Russians, but then much of the Ukraine was really just an enormous single landing field occasionally disrupted by villages. Occasionally, Yak pilots would remove a fuselage hatch cover and squeeze the rescued pilot into the fuselage open space instead of squeezing into the cabin. During the Finnish war there was an incident when the pick-up aircraft was a ski-equipped I-15bis, and the rescued pilot was flown back hanging onto one of the landing gear legs. Russian memoirs also recount a number of occasions when the “rescuing” aircraft crashed or got stuck in a rut, resulting in both crews being in the soup.
The Hurricane would seem a reasonable bet for doing such a rescue. But trying it in a Spitfire with that narrow undercarriage would seem liek a fool’s errand indeed. The Messerschmitt, with its narrow undercarriage and also its side-hinging cockpit cover would seem an even more unpromising choice, which may explain why I’ve encountered no accounts of the Germans trying it.
Georgii
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