However that didn´t kept the old Fokker 
from copying Garros plane almost exactly; Roland Garros was flying a Morane Saulnier N “Bullet”, and Fokker´s offspring was the Fokker Eindecker, they look exactly the same seen from above/bellow.
Heh, well if you look at my post count, you can guess how many topics I can show off with too.
D’oh!:smack:
185 posts since March 1999… yeah, you have a point there. 
Actually, I knew that story, but I wasn’t completely sure that it was true. Thanks for confirming it.
That’s one smart Fokker!
ACTUALLY, there were nine P-26s protecting the Canal Zone at the time of Pearl Harbor and the last one left US hands in 1943.
http://home.att.net/~jbaugher1/p26_6.html
Boresighting would also be useful when attacking heavy bombers in formation (David’s target that is “stationary or moving slowly”). Bringing one of them down generally required a lot of mass hitting a small area and to do so with small caliber (.30 especially, though also .50) non-explosive ordinance meant that the pilot would attempt to fire at the convergence range.
My only point is this. Air to air gunnery is far from precise. When you take into account the dispersion of the guns I think that boresighting guns to converge at any particular range comes under the category of, “Well, they have to be boresighted someplace and it doesn’t take much longer to converge them; it can’t do any harm and might do some good.”
Even if boresighting isn’t much use for air to air (thanks for all the info btw, David), it has to be helpful for ground strafing where you can hold your altitude fairly precisely.
About those boresighted guns:
Somewhere at home I have a fine book on P-51 Mustangs (not the subject matter here, I know, but it’s all I have), and the author stated that the boresignting was done to personal preference of the pilots: some guys set them up to converge on a single point some distance out; others set pairs of guns to converge at different distances; still others fanned the guns slightly, hoping for a shotgun effect.
If he didn’t want to demonstrate his invention on a live aircraft, couldn’t he have used a model Fokker?
I don’t know if you mean to be funny, and maybe this is a whoosh, but the point is that Fokker was asked to demonstrate that his invention gave pilots an advantage in air combat. The point of air combat is to shoot down the enemy plane. He couldn’t bring himself to shoot down a plane (with a man in it). They didn’t have drones or unmanned planes back then that he could have shot at, and of course, they wouldn’t have sufficed. The point was to have an advantage in dogfighting another plane (and planes were piloted by men).
Shooting up a model in the air was thus impossible. Shooting one on the ground was useless - all it would show was that the interrupter mechanism prevented destruction of the propellor on its aircraft. And this can be shown without shooting bullets into a plane.
Whatever the case, they got an experienced German pilot (Boelke, says vl_mungo) to show that yes, it is a useful thing in a dogfight. And Fokker went back to designing flying machines, if not actually using them to kill.
Hmm… on second thought, I’ll take ‘whoosh’, or maybe some kind of play on Fokker’s name. :rolleyes:
Actuall, in order to strafe the ground you have to lower the nose which has an adverse effect on altitude control.
There is an excellent show about a P-47 group that comes on the History Channel now and then. Ground strafing was an exceedingly hazardous occupation. Pilots misestimated their ability to pull out in time; were hit by debris from ammunition trains or trucks that blew up in their faces; and were exposed to a lot of ground fire on the run-in, all of which resulted in a relatively high casualty rate.
Heck, how those guys hit ANYTHING is beyond me.