Part of his point was that the big nose sets the canopy farther back, more over the wing, resulting in a bigger blind spot below the plane.
As for does it have a bigger or smaller forward blind spot, he did a visual comparison to another plane, but I am no expert.
I think the important point is that there is a blind spot and at least one airplane was in the blind spot of another, regardless of how large those spots are.
There will be discussion of the blind spot, but not sure how much difference that made in this case. Pilot is in a left bank so anything to the right is going to be hard to see. Plus, if the pilot was following the preceding fighters, he wasn’t even looking that way. I imagine he was looking, relative to his airplane, up and to the left for the aircraft he was following. Never would have seen the B-17 in that case.
With 5 or 6 sets of eyes in the B-17, I bet they saw the collision coming. One guy had to be up in the top turret enjoying the view of all the aircraft in the sky. Probably had time to holler a warning, but they may have well been standing still. B-17 is not exactly nimble.
I know that was part of his point, I just don’t think he’s correct. I found pictures of a P-63 and P-51, and the cockpit is farther forward in the P-63. Seems like it would have less of a blind spot than the Mustang.
https://media.defense.gov/2005/Dec/22/2000574732/-1/-1/0/050216-F-1234P-070.JPG
Agreed, but I wouldn’t call out the P-63 as being especially bad in that regard.
The orange plane looks rather peculiar for a P-63, and checking it out it turns out to be a P-63E which had a different cockpit design than the other variants. The ones with the full canopy, as all almost all other variants had, seem to place the pilot further back and right over the wings.
Yes, but it’s still don’t obscure the view any more than the Mustang’s would. That said, whether the nose of the plane contains an engine or guns, you still can’t see through it.
Well, I already made this before I saw this post. So here it is.
The P-63 pilot is seated forward of the leading edge of the wing. The P-51 pilot sits at the trailing edge. Of course, the P-51D has superior ‘all-around’ visibility with its bubble canopy; but it seems down-and-forward visibility would be less.
And the reason the cockpit is the P-63 is more forward of other fighter aircraft is because the engine is behind the cockpit and not in front of it.
In retrospect, the name of the air show “Wings over Dallas” is going to be haunted by the image of the B-17 wings separated from the fuselage.
As for the child who asked if that’s part of the show. He may have been to the Oshkosh airshow where they have pyrotechnic events that are actually greater than this crash. They represent a bombing run which would have a bomber flying over. They’re big enough that you can feel the heat from them when they go off.
I don’t think it’s any worse. His comparison to other similar fighters is misplaced in my opinion, but it doesn’t matter as I think the overall point that the B17 would’ve been obscured by the P63’s nose is valid, it’s just that a P51 in the same position would have the same problem.
The CAF does a similar display. I remember them being used when I was young, and Dallas notified us that they’d be setting off the unused pyrotechnics today at 2PM.
The video mentions the P-63’s and P-39’s poor stall behaviour. That reminded me of this:
‘30 years from now, somebody’ll call this a Frisbee.’
Historically, the B-17 crew was 10, and in the following positions.
I’d imagine that they’d still need two pilots and a flight engineer, but I’m not sure what the other two might be doing- pretty much every other position is superfluous these days.
So far they’ve only talked about the pilot and copilot. I’m not positive but I don’t think they need an engineer. I suspect they had 3 passengers on the flight. the P-63 would have been a single seat.
Iirc they still need a flight engineer to properly “balance” gasoline usage to the engines, I don’t think they can do that from the cockpit.
I now agree with you. Visibility from a P-63 cockpit is pretty poor.
Makes sense. Thanks!
A CAF He-111 crashed on take-off in 2003 but it wasn’t performing, but rather leaving for the next show.
I remember the loss of the CASA 2.111 / HE111 as it was the only flying example. According to the NTSB, they were on approach and lost power on one engine, then the pilot lost directional control. Basically, yup, they crashed, but we don’t really know why.
It could have been a stall/spin as he tried to pull up, but I suspect in this case (and in the loss of the B-17 “909”) was how little directional control there can be in these old aircraft when you lose an engine and then have to go full power on the other side. There is going to be big yaw and torque which can easily overcome the ability of the rudder to manage it. (When 909 tried to go around, they would have put power on the left side and that seems to be when the aircraft immediately swung hard into the dead engines on the right.) By all accounts, it takes a lot of muscle power on the rudder when you lose power on one side and there is no real way to practice that. It could easily surprise a pilot used to powered controls that you suddenly need to put 100-lbs or more of force on the human powered rudder pedal to just go straight.
That may have been the case in the CASA. From the NTSB report:
According to the Airplane Flight Manual, “Maximum power will probably be required to maintain flight with one engine inoperative. Maximum power at slow air speed may cause loss of directional control.”
So that’s what happened to that one. I toured it here at the Mesa CAF. It was kind of neat mishmash. Since it served in the Spanish Civil War, some of the instrument were in Spanish, some in German, and some in English. And it has Rolls Royce engines.
Yeah, shifting fuel around various tanks is definitely a flight engineer task. That’s one of the things I remember my grandfather specifically telling me he did as a B-17 flight engineer (the tanks got shot up and were leaking), along with monitoring and advising of the pilots as to the engine status.
That, and arming the bombs! Otherwise, the flight engineer was basically an all-purpose flying mechanic able to fix anything they could reach from within the plane during flight. Machine guns, bomb racks, radios, cables, etc…
I would imagine that an old plane like that probably had a flight engineer on board just by virtue of its age and its nature as a machine that took several people to fly it as designed.
I’m still not sure who the other two crewmen might have been - spotters for formation flying or something?
