Comments by "TheThirdMan" (@thethirdman225) on "The Messerschmitt Me 309; Redundant Beauty" video.

  1. One explanation for this might be the allied use of a pressurised radiator system. The Germans didn’t have these things and as far as I know, never developed them. This is can be found in Calum E. Douglas’s book “The Secret Horsepower Race”. What it means is that the Germans were committed to using larger radiators and it doesn’t matter how well you fair them in, they will always produce more drag. For that reason alone, the high end top speed figure is extremely suspect to the point that I think somebody got the numbers in the wrong order. I also notice that the 309 had a lot of dihedral built into the main plane. To my mind this suggests that there might have been some basic stability problems, particularly in relation to rate of roll, though I noticed that Messerschmitt kept the leading edge slats which, on the 109, deployed automatically. This seems kind of counter intuitive to me. I think it would have been very difficult to build a single engined fighter like this with a nose wheel. That probably explains why the fuselage is so deep in comparison with the older type.
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  2. I thought it looked like a P-63 too.
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