Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Messerschmitt Bf 109 | Better than the Spitfire?" video.

Small came at a steep price, though - the takeoff and landing characteristics were atrocious due to the narrow undercarriage and many planes and pilots were lost that way, and the cockpit was one of the most cramped and uncomfortable fighter cockpits in all history - many pilots complained about how it increased fatigue and made turning to look to the rear much more difficult.
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The carrier version of the 109 would have been a nightmare, and I can't imagine it would have worked very well in actual wartime service. The Seafire had serious problems as a carrier aircraft for the same reasons. There have been very few really successful carrier-based combat planes that were not designed for that role from the very start.
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@MeBallerman One small correction: in a modern car with an engine designed to use high-octane fuel, you will get better performance using high-octane fuel without having to do anything yourself to the engine, because if you use lower-octane fuel the car's computer will sense the lower octane and restrain the engine's power to avoid damaging the engine (down to a point, too low and the computer won't be able to compensate and the engine will be damaged), whereas if you use high octane fuel the computer will sense that and allow the engine to run at full power. But this is ONLY if the engine is designed to benefit from high-octane fuel. My car, for example, according to the owner's manual, gets full performance using 93 octane, lessened a bit using 92 and 91 because the computer is limiting the power, and is only supposed to run on 89 for short periods and below highway speeds and not at all on 87. In WW2 you had to mechanically alter the engine to restrict the compression ratio if you were going to run lower octane fuel. If you don't, you don't get more power, you get pre-ignition, which does not increase power because the piston is still in the compression stroke when the fuel ignites which means the expanding gases work against the momentum of the turning crankshaft. And, of course, causes severe damage to the engine because of the pressure spike. The Germans didn't run high octane because they weren't producing it - AFAIK only the US and UK were, and some was supplied to the Soviets through Lend-Lease. High-octane was (and is) more expensive to produce and, more important for the Germans, you get less of it from a given volume of crude than you get if you're producing lower-octane gas.
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At Duxford I was able to climb up on the wing of an airworthy 109 with the canopy open and get a closer look inside the cockpit than I'd ever had before. Sadly, they would not let me climb inside.
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Better? I think it's too close to call. But what isn't close at all is that the Spitfire is the most beautiful machine ever devised by the hand of man, and the 109 is not.
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@chippyjohn1 The 109K-4 was not better than the Mustang. They had different strengths. But the Mustang could fly from England to Berlin, engage enemy fighters, and have plenty of fuel to get back home. No 109 had anything remotely approaching that capability.
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@garyseeseverything8615 The Merlin didn't "need" high American octanes. Both engines had improved performance with higher compression ratios made possible with high-octane avgas. You might as well say the 109Ks were inferior because they needed MW-50 injection. In both cases it was a strength, not a weakness. Also, they developed a carburetor that was less prone to choking, and then moved the fuel outlet on it to eliminate the negative g problem altogether. The 109's biggest weaknesses were very short range, which the Spitfire and Hurricane shared but of course that was much less a problem for the British in 1940, and that it was extremely difficult for novice pilots to fly, in particular because of its atrocious behavior on takeoffs and landings. A lot of planes and pilots were lost that way. That wasn't so much of a problem in 1940, when the Luftwaffe had had years of peacetime growth to train pilots, but it was a serious drawback later in the water when replacement pilots had very little training. The Spit was not great for novices but not as bad as the 109. The later F4U had similar issues, but the US was able to afford the luxury of more extensive training for new pilots before putting them in frontline fighters. Also the pilot in the video notes, the 109 also suffered from an excessively tiny cockpit, which made for a nice slender fuselage and the tiny airframe you're crowing about but at the cost of greatly increasing pilot fatigue and the ability to turn to look to the side or rear. I've heard or read dozens of former 109 pilots complaining about it, as well as modern pilots who've flown the 109 and other aircraft from the war. I honestly don't know how a 6 foot pilot could even jam himself into that tiny space, let alone fight effectively in it. (The Spitfire had a small cockpit as well, but by all reports it was not as cramped as the 109 and had slightly better ergonomics. I've seen both up close and the 109 definitely looks more cramped. But for real comfort on long flights, give me an F4U or better yet a P-47! Or for German iron, a 190. Messerschmidt may have been a genius at designing the fastest possible plane, but Tank had a better understanding of the all the intangibles that made an effective combat plane.) That's not to say it wasn't a great fighter, one of the greatest of all time, but I think you're overlooking its weaknesses.
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@garyseeseverything8615 That math is VERY far from simple.
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@starsailor49 More like the other way around. Zhukov and Khrushchev both said in their memoirs that the USSR couldn't have won the war without the massive Lend-Lease supplies they received from the US and UK. The Red Army may have driven to Berlin in T-34 tanks but its fuel and supplies, much of which came from the US, were carried in American trucks and its soldiers subsisted on American Spam.
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@jacktattis "Just in food you owed close to 1 billion USD and never paid a cent." How much is keeping the IJN off your doorstep when the UK couldn't be bothered worth? (I will never say that Australian and NZ contributions to the Pacific war were not vital. But the US Navy was the only navy in the world capable of stopping the Japanese in the Coral Sea.) And yes, assuming that's what you're asking, I am American. And had several relatives in that war, including an uncle in New Zealand and another in Burma.
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@antonioherrera2476 Germans who based their work on an American who invented the first liquid-fueled rocket.
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@jonwinfield9193 If they had to use it at 40 below zero, they'd become PPSh fans pretty quick.
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Pshaw. You want a roomy cockpit, fly a P-47. On long flights the pilot could hop out of his seat and run laps around the fuselage to stretch his muscles. 😉
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@DevSolar It's not an urban legend, it's something commented on by many former 109 pilots as well as postwar pilots who have flown several different WW2 fighters. The pilot in this video mentions it. The undercarriage was also relatively weak for a WW2 fighter. If you look at the F4F you'll see a much better design where the landing gear is also contained entirely in the fuselage when raised but has diagonal supporting braces for the struts so the angled struts didn't collapse on a hard landing the way the 109's often did. But the 109 designers were obsessed with minimizing size and weight whatever the cost, and the result was a plane that had an unusually high record of operational losses of both planes and pilots. And the cockpit is the tiniest I've ever seen, I can't imagine how anyone of even slightly larger than average build could stand being crammed into it for hours, let alone fight at 100% efficiency under such cramped conditions. For me is is literally nightmarishly small.
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