[Fireskull]

Ok, watch where you are going with this now.. If you want to go messing with fm's etc, this is not the place for that kind of discussion.

Yes, indeed.

In World War Two, an areoplane with minimal reaction to recoil and tendency to recover quickly from wobbling was labelled " a good gun platform". All single engine fighters experienced at least some wobblies, depending on many factors, including the speed of the aircraft.


There was a genius British test pilot immediately after World War Two who headed a team to test and compare all available Axis aircraft to Allied planes - sorry, the name slips from me at the moment. This took several years of tests under controlled conditions. He concluded that both Axis and Allied aircraft had wide variances in the stability and recoverability after destabilizing actions, such as firing all guns. Some myths were dispelled about some aircraft which were labelled as duds and others that were crowned super-planes. It became evident that having a stable gun platform was more important to the average pilot than other major characteristics. In the hands of a very skilled pilot, the wobblies issue becomes secondary.

Some examples are:

The P-51 could wobble severely in some circumstances, however if the pilot maintained great speed as he should, the fighter would recover quickly or have very little instability. The same is true of the P-39 and many other fighters.

The Spitfire was one of the most stable fighters in combat of any of them. The Bf-109 and A6M series called Zeros also are famous as great gun platforms. Amazingly, though it looked unstable, the He-162 jet-after some redesign-was a great handling, stable gun platform.

The British test team concluded that all fighters could become unstable under certain conditions such as speed too slow, but some aeroplanes were remarkably better than others. In my humble opinion, IL-2 is modelled about right, as far as wobblies is concerned. It comes about as close as possible for a simulation.