>> Interestingly, Mosquitos, P51s and any other types did fall out of the sky when new.
Indeed they did. Whilst training pilots etc. was not cheap, the real need was to produce as many aircraft as quickly as possible for them to be shot down/otherwise damaged and pilot safety was not the only consideration. My father was an engineer in the RAF during the war and talked about the disposable aircraft the US produced. They were riveted together, not bolted, so as to speed up production. A component failure within the riveted area was therefore not repairable and the 'craft had to be scrapped.
Brompton: I have nowhere suggested an outright ban - or any sort of ban at all. What I wrote was "Nutters. Large numbers of elderly aeroplanes being flown too close together by people without the skill and training to do so. Even the Red Arrows manage the occasional mid-air prang. Nutters."
(And the bits I picked up from the aviation forums were (apparently) written by a display pilot. I take them with many pinches of salt, but repeated them purely for the sake of countering an argument based on exactly the same reputable source.)
The Mossie pilot would have been fine if he'd been acrobatting at 10,000 ft, he wasn't so he wasn't. Any reader of Biggles knows that during a dogfight you will quickly lose height and then will be in a far more dangerous position - where the danger becomes the 'craft, not the enemy.
Last edited by: Mapmaker on Thu 14 Jul 11 at 13:10
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