From: Brian <brian@coombs.anu.edu.au>
Subject: Re: Worst allied fighter in WW2
Organization: Australian National University
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 17:26:18 GMT


From Brian <brian@coombs.anu.edu.au>

"Charles K. Scott" <Charles.K.Scott@dartmouth.edu> writes:


>From "Charles K. Scott" <Charles.K.Scott@dartmouth.edu>

>In article <Bzs8uq.LDr@law7.DaytonOH.NCR.COM>
>ntaib@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (Iskandar Taib) writes:

>> What is a coupled engine? Would this be the H and W cylinder
>> configurations we talked baout earlier?

>A coupled engine is two engines mechanically connected via some sort of
>fiendishly complicated gear box to drive one propellor.  They can be
>side by side or end to end.  I don't recollect any truely successfull
>designs although the Germans had one flying operationally.  It had an
>unfortunate tendency to burst into flame fairly often.  The design was
>an attempt to make a four engined bomber.  Things got pretty
>complicated due to a strange request on the part of the German Air
>Administration to have the bomber, among it's other design criteria, be
>able to dive bomb.  Try to imagine a flight of B-17's approaching the
>target then suddenly nosing over into a 70 degree dive.  Needless to
>say, this didn't work, the neccessity for engineering the aircraft to
>dive bombing specs wreaked havoc with the opperational performance. 
>Eventually the powers that be realised the folly of the demand and
>rescinded it, but by then the aircraft was hopeless.

	The He177, equipped with originally, the DB606 and then later
the DB610, was an unfortunate aircraft in several respects.  
	One was, as you relate the infantutation of the German High 
Command with Dive Bombing (which is interesting in itself when one 
considers the considerable _opposition_ which the upper echelons 
of the RLM had against the dive bomber concept in the pre-war years).  
	Anyway, one of the major problems with this aircraft was the 
engines selected to power it.  The DB606 was designed by coupling, 
in a common gearcase, two DB601's and gave a maximum power output of 
2,000+ hp at take off.  However, because the aircraft also pushed the frontiers
in many other technical areas it quickly ran into development problems.
	As originally designed, it was meant to have evaporative cooling,
but that quickly feel through and it had to be redesigned with normal radiators,
which added weight and strength problems, as well as more importantly cooling
ones which were to come back and haunt the plane later.  In addition it was
found during testing that its wings were some 60 percent weaker than needed.
	It was also intended to have remote control armament, which when that
failed to materialise caused another weight increase because of the need for
more crew to operate the guns.  Finally there were the problems of fires 
in the engines caused by inadequate cooling.  They were frequent and dangerous.

	Now onto something else I've just come across.  Others in this thread
have mentioned the Blackburn Skua as perhaps one of the worst allied fighters
of WWII.  The problem with picking on that plane is the most people forget that
the Skua was _not_ designed to be a fighter.  Its primary mission was that of
a dive bomber.  In fact it was the _first_ British designed aircraft from
the outset to be a dive bomber.  Indeed, as Peter Smith makes the point in
his book "Dive Bomber", "from the very start the Skua was designed as a dive
bomber _first_[his emphasis], and as a fighter only as a secondary 
consideration. This is a fact which is continually ignored in the post-war
evaluation of this aircraft, which is invariably judged on its fighter
performance rather than as a dive bomber.  This unfounded criticism continues
up to the present day."
	He goes on to make the point even further by quoting the specification
which it was designed against where the main details were:

1	It was to be a single-engined ship-plane either monoplane or biplane
for FAAm to operate from carriers, and its role was defined as: `(a) to
disable opposing FAA by dive bombing attacks on hostile carriers and other
vessels and to undertake such other dive bombing as may be required. (b)
to engage hostile aircraft in the air.'

(p.64, Smith, P., Dive Bomber!, Moorland Publishing Co.Ltd., Ashbourne, 1982.


	So it can be seen that to judge the poor old Skua as a fighter
is IMO misguided because it was never intended from the outset to be one.



--
Brian Ross_____Brian@Coombs.anu.edu.au________________________________________
	"Three discoveries are essential to the contented and civilised life -
sex, wine, and bookshops, by no means necessarily in that order."
_________________________________Tony Baker, Adelaide Review, October 1992____

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