NothingNow
Banned
Massive bribes. Like buy the city of Miami circa 1986 a year's supply of Cocaine Massive.And I am curious as to why the West German Air Force decided to use the starfighter as a fighter bomber...
Massive bribes. Like buy the city of Miami circa 1986 a year's supply of Cocaine Massive.And I am curious as to why the West German Air Force decided to use the starfighter as a fighter bomber...
I heard that too.
Never have seen anything confirming it.
Can you imagine poking along at 60K and 1,800MPH and having someone DIVE past you?![]()
Calbear, earlier you mentioned that the Ki-44 should not have seen service. Can you clarify on this? The Shoki had good armament, speed and climb.
Actually, the Ki-84 was a pretty good plane that had development issues, which were understandable given the state of the war.
I pretty much said it in the original post:
Ki-44, a Japanese contemporary of the P-47 and FW-190, with 2 .50 cal machine guns and a gas leak.
The aircraft was a death trap, drastically under armed for a 1942 introduction, no protection to speak of, and can be seen as a poster child for everything that was wrong with Japanese aircraft. It entered service at the same time as the P-47 (8 .50 cal), F4U, F6F (6 .50 cal), and Fw-190A (2 .30 cal and 4 20mm cannon). A day behind and a dollar short.
The first models of the Ki-44 had two 12.7mm and two 7.7mm machine guns. It was progressively upgraded until carried two 20mm and two 40mm cannons in late-war models. And as far as I know, it had no reliability issues.
That's not to say that it didn't have certain problems, such as high wing loading and taking a relatively high number of man-hours to produce, but it was still a highly capable interceptor.
They only produced abot two dozen of the heavy cannon armed aircraft. The rest were vastly under gunned and they were still fire hazards.
German beer hall joke:
"Anyone want a Starfighter?"
"Buy an acre of land and wait!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Lockheed_and_the_Starfighters
Which is one way to ignore that the fact that mediocre pilots flying demanding planes in poor weather equals high accident rates.Of course, despite all the belief that Germans are better at everything, the Italians managed to fare far better with the F-104.
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Are u saying that Canadians are mediocre pilots too??? We lost so much f-104 ...Which is one way to ignore that the fact that mediocre pilots flying demanding planes in poor weather equals high accident rates.Of course, despite all the belief that Germans are better at everything, the Italians managed to fare far better with the F-104.
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Which is one way to ignore that the fact that mediocre pilots flying demanding planes in poor weather equals high accident rates.Of course, despite all the belief that Germans are better at everything, the Italians managed to fare far better with the F-104.
![]()