Dave Southwood can't really answer the question witch was the best fighter. He's flown a lot of them.


http://s1200.photobucket.com/albums/bb322/IIJG27Rich/?action=view&current=DsveSouthwood.mp4

How about the Brewster Buffalo?

That little stubby fighter is the bomb in IL2. I'm surprised that the Dutch weren't able to fend off the Japanese in the East Indies with it.

Witch fighter? You mean the plane the Night Witches ( Russian female pilots ) flew? Oh, you mean 'which' fighter!!

I'm not surprised, the Dutch did not have a large force at all. They were desperately outnumbered at the time. Otherwise the Buffaloes would have done much better. The CW-21 also would have done extremely well but only a few flew and most were destroyed on the ground. The Dutch did not have enough of anything, at any time.

What he does say is enlightening, the Zero Killer is easiest to fly, the Mustang is the fastest and the Spit V+ is the most competent Dogfighter (or at least the one he prefers). It would be interesting to know what Aces scored from several types of Aircraft and any preferences they expressed about their favorite mounts.

Then someone would come along and #%&*$# all over their opinion and tell them they were wrong...

If you have the patience and love aeroplanes this is well worth listening to

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuifkBWyGsw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAlmtSSuIb4&feature=relmfu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLrpcamspLw&feature=relmfu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knpPSijxy...notation_192972

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZ-tqYIYZZU&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INAxuIaua-E&feature=relmfu

I can't vouch for which is the "best,"since that opinion is extremely objective (subjective? someone help me out here??), but my personal favorite fighter of WWII is the BF-109, either the F or G series. It was simply a jack-of-all-trades; it wasn't extremely fast like the Mustang or Lightning, it couldn't turn extremely tightly like the Spit or Hurricane, it didn't have the firepower of the Focke-Wulf, etc., but it did every one of those at least competently. Most other fighters had a certain tactic to use, be it strictly BnZ (FW, Lightning), TnB (Spit), or others. It could adapt to almost any situation and come out victorious, if the pilot was competent enough. I think (and this is JUST an opinion) that if the Germans weren't so heavily outnumbered from '43 onward, the air war would have favored the Germans by a much bigger margin.

Anyway, that's my $.02. Cheers!!

I agree with a lot of what you are saying here. By late 1944 1945 there were a lot of young kids flying 109s and 109s took some time to learn. So you have a bunch of greenhorns flying in something that takes time to learn let alone fight well in. Most of the aces are gone because after 800 - 1000 combat missions your luck is just going to run out one day. A crazy accident with a young Heinz Schmidt 175 victories was actually shot down by a friendly pilot. Hartmann didn't start until 1943 and by the end of the war had flown over 1400 missions. I remember hearing something an American P-51 pilot said about a mission. There were 1000 B-17s being escorted by 800 Mustangs. That's almost a waist of a lot of fuel on the part of the Mustangs. One last thing. There are two things the 109 always did do very well and that is climb and stay in control in the air at least on the ground it tended to be a bit of a death trap if you didn't know what you were doing.

I think it all comes down to how you like to fight, Boom and Zoom or Turn and Burn. I like to BnZ and fight in the vertical more so than TnB. So a TnB plane would not be my first choice. Six of one half dozen of the other.

So much depends on what the "job at hand" was. The P 39, for example was deemed useless by the Western Allies because of it's lack of high altitude performance, but many Soviet pilots preferred it to any Russian built fighter, since it was so well suited to the type of combat on that front.

Yes I pretty much hate going up against any thing Russian with a good Russian in it hehehe. Aerocobra included. If you read any books like Helmut Lipfert's witch is pretty much fighting fighting fighting many of them are twisting turning buckets of sweat making battles and 50% of the time the guns miss fire. Very exiting stuff. Plus they're always on the move never staying in one place.

Not if you consider that one of the reasons a lot of daylight bomber missions were flown was to get the LW up to shoot down.