Essential and Dispensible WW2 aircraft.

On Oct 3, 6:44 am, Eunometic wrote:

The tragedy of the Me 210 was that the problem were known even before
the moment the test pilot stepped out of the aircraft on its maiden
flight. He said that the tail needed to be lengthened by 1 meter or
so. To do that over 5million reich marks of jigs would need to be
scrapped. So instead slats were tried, these didn't work and actually
made things worse, a single large as opposed to two fins was tried;
that didn't work. When the Me 210C was ordered by the Hungarian air
force they bypassed the managerial and political problems and
incorporated the lengthened tail and slats which worked brilliantly
together.

I knew the Luftwaffe test pilot assigned to the Hungarian 210 project
until he passed away recently. He crashed the prototype due to a
switchology f*-up that at first was blamed on him, but eventually was
exonerated. He was a combat-scarred Bf 110 veteran (literally) that
was lucky to survive an attack on a HSS'd B-17 that set both his
aircraft and himself on fire. Given the choice to take over a desk or
a transfer to the Hungarian test program, he chose the latter.
According to Zittier, the uplock switch was not the German-designed
one, and as soon as he lifted off, the landing gear folded up, leaving
him out in the middle of a plowed field on his belly. Unhurt and with
little damage to the aircraft, he quickly returned to the air and
proved just how well the modifications worked. There were literally
no performance issues with the Hungarian machines and it threw a lot
of egg on the RLM's collective faces.

Gordon