Bf 109 gear: How bad was it?

during World War two why did the german messerschmitt bf-109 have such a narrow undercarriage when it was such an obvious flaw that's the question I will attempt to answer in this video so welcome back to military aviation history I am your host Chris you might know me as Bismarck and some weeks ago actually came out with my inside the cockpit on the messerschmitt BF 109e films at the deutsche museum for graphs twice i'm in the first cut of that video I actually had a section about the B of 109 skier because it has such a notorious reputation nowadays but that scene didn't make the final cut many because it was too long and went off topic so I want to tackle the gear today when it comes to this topic the first thing we should recognize is that when the P of 109 came out retractable landing gears was the newest of the new one everybody wanted one except of course for those making up the inevitable counter movement now the Soviet I 60 Nestle credited with being the first noteworthy mass-produced aircraft in the same weight class as the B 109 to have a retractable gear due to the corresponding reduction in drag it's easy to say why so many companies aiming to achieve government contracts for military aircraft wanted to use them at the same time it took another five or so years for the practice to actually become largely standardized mainly because of the added complexities with such gears that they put on the aircraft designers to understand why the 109 gotta gear it's had you really need to look at the Y at the design history of the aircraft this doesn't necessarily start with the 109 itself it actually doesn't do it all we need to set a stage for the nineteen forties first this is a little excursion but please bear with me for on this one many will point for example to the b f1 or 8s message his inspiration for the many aspects of the BF 109 including the gear after all the year 108 was the first Messerschmitt designed to have a retractable landing gear it's only natural we start there then no wrong if we do that we are getting way ahead of ourselves in order to understand how 1:08 influenza B of 109 you need to look at the 1920s and 30s and how they influenced the B of 108 now retractable landing gear Oh as far back as 1911 when Glenn Curtis designed D is a 1 Triad a seaplane which also featured a moving year supposedly because it could operate on air sea and land the name triad was chosen for the plane but a retractable undercarriage did not really become common for a long time if you look at comparable planes during the 1920s and 1930s before the P of 108 and beautiful 9 were produced you will find a plethora of single-engine aircraft many of them follow similar design friends and the most obvious one is that they are biplanes and tail draggers looking closer at the gear you'll also notice that the vast majority exceptions apply of course it's interwar period after all they tried nearly everything but the majority of them feature quite and narrow undercarriage in fact this is something we already see during World War 1 or before the distance between the wheels is very often little more than the horizontal cross section of the fuselage even as fixed-gear started to wander away from the fuselage itself they stayed relatively close and of multiple just what's dispersed part of the impact force away from the wing into the fuselage there are multiple reasons for this but the main ones are simplicity design requirements and the brunt of takeoff and landing that forces you to put them there on the very old machines it took a very special arrangement sometimes seen in some of the bigger machines for a plane to move the gear towards the wings during World War one or after it even in the 1920s and 1930s most designs stay true to this philosophy although the gear was now often set at a greater angle away from the fuselage so as not to be so narrow with time some planes with single gear struts set these in the wings they existed like the p26 the hinge you want to free the the 21 but they are not as common and generally the strut was a lot closer to the four slash then later designs were moving the point here is that aircraft designers were used to a short distance between the wheels with the struts connected to the fuselage rather than the wings and used this configuration well for good reasons the main reason was of course that viable retractable gears were not yet designs but such gear also produced disadvantages first the mechanism was complex and a malfunction in a retractable gear would result in a damaged or lost plane a fixed gear doesn't have that risk even if you used a retractable gear you are forced to move a lot of weight into the wing which well the you know that would have to be significantly strengthened that offers the complexity and the weight and the costs and beyond the complexity and beyond the costs you have issues with aircraft control more weight mean in the wings means that you are affecting the handling of the aircraft now during the interwar period a retractable landing gear was not I shall say that important just yet you're still able to get a lot of performance leaps well maybe not leaps but steps ahead in the right direction with upgrading the engine and getting sort of conventional designs that exist at a time like biplanes to optic performance by playing around with the aerodynamics or by well putting a bigger horsepower engine into the machine but at some point you're gonna get diminishing returns and we've seen that in the 1930s when some new ships from the biplane to the monoplane and the retractable landing gear reduces a lot of extra track and now suddenly you can get a lot more bang for your buck you've now seen that narrow undercarriages during these early years of aviation we're quite normal designers were used to them they were got used in nearly all of the designs and they also had advantages that's something now I'll explore with the B of 108 got one of the official manuals right here now this aircraft does have a retractable gear and it was one of the first to do so in Germany the gear on the 108 was manually raised at lowered the hand-crank between the two front seats could be moved forwards or backwards this input end was translated to the gear wire to drive worms which in turn drove the gear segments at the upper end of the strut and the gear itself also had an oil dam to shock absorber and if you're interested in the 108 I also have an insider carpet and not aircraft now what's important here is now well look at the position of the gear it fits into a space directly between the main plane the wings and the fuselage now we can suppose that perhaps because this was Messerschmitts first aircraft with a gear of this kind that they didn't really know about the general advantages of having a gear situated further outward swinging away from the fuselage like we see for example in the i-16 rather than towards it but no that's a possibility I don't think it really answers why the 1:08 has this design because the general knowledge already existed that if the gear is situated further out that this generally allows the aircraft to have better handling even if the gear is not retractable so that doesn't really explain why they chose to go this way the reason why they decided to have this gear so close to the fuselage in my mind was to provide a more simpler lightweight aircraft that was simultaneously easier to maintain now having the gear swing away from the fuselage would automatically associate the gear of course to be in the wing and that would require a stronger wing construction able to bear the loads and the shocks imposed on the wing especially during takeoff and landing and this increases then the complexity of the design the weight and so on thus by placing the gear or closer to the fuselage this could be avoided and the design could be simpler there was actually an additional benefit here that we tend to completely ignore nowadays with the gear connected through the actual food Lodge you could move the aircraft's main body even if the wings are detached or folded depending on the aircraft we're talking about the 108 as many planes at a time had a relatively easy mechanism to detach the wings and when you do that well the food's large doesn't need to be propped up the gear already supports us so that way considering how things are done at a time and done for good reason the one way it introduces a retractable gear without the disadvantages of excessive weight and extra maintenance hours if the wings have to be replaced in this sense Messerschmitt had actually translated the thinking of the time into a novel design and it's the i-16 really that's the rebel and not the 108 now I admit that in a civilian aircraft this maintenance advantage is somewhat questionable but in a military aircraft like the 109 when you might need to do maintenance on a wing or replace it in a sub optimal operational environment this could actually be an advantage I can think of another example of how this could be an advantage take for example the American or the United States f4f Wildcat for example you see that the plane also has that narrow undercarriage that goes into the Fuji Lodge and those that could fold its wings completely and this greatly assisted storage on the US carriers but at the same time the plane could still be moved there you go that's an advantage that generally nowadays we don't really think about that much anymore let's switch it up to the thief 109 then the 109 was drawn up in 1934 and Messerschmitts thinking for the machine was what to fold he wanted a simple lightweight design with excellent even record-setting performance and likewise the construction and the maintenance should be straightforward with the bf 109 Messerschmitt pretty much got that a machine that was mass-producible and maintenance friendly for a time the wings of the 109 were not very gear friendly in the first place and we're well essentially designed only to be able to store that gear but not much more than that now before we go on to the next section let me make something very clear the bf 109s gear wasn't great it had issues and I'm not saying that these didn't exist but it's not as bad as sometimes is made out to be that doesn't make it good it's still not that great but there is a difference between not great and fatal flaw the main problem of this type of gear is one that hounds old tail draggers compared to tricycle configurations tail draggers always have a basic instability problem especially when they have a swiveling tail wheel the quote here from aerodynamics for naval aviators page 307 the inherent stability problem exists because the center of gravity is aft of the point where the main side forces are deployed at high rolling speeds where aerodynamic forces are significant the aerodynamic directional stability of the aircraft resists the ground looping tendencies the most likely times for ground loop exist when rolling speeds are not high enough to provide a contribution of the diary dynamic forces depending on the pilot of the experiences may vary on the 109 a few quotes here from people that flew the aircraft a spring to mind the 109 had a big drawback which I didn't like from the start it was that raggedy I always said rackety undercarriage that negative against the rules of statics on the carriage that allowed the machine to swing away the BF 109s landing gear has been blamed for the swing without a cause the real reason has been between the stick and the seat the whole swing problem was a mere instructional mistake the pilot should have been made to adopt one golden rule the messerschmitt bf-109 must be steered to go absolutely straight during a ground run in takeoff and landing and any tendency to swing must be corrected immediately with a well-timed use of the brakes and/or the rudder the 109 had not for us maybe not for the longtime pilots of the 109 but the newcomers had problems started with the gear you know it was a high narrow gear and we had many ground loops and then the gear breaks that is not a norm this is an exception but it anyway happens with the Aero plane center of gravity situated high above the tires a swerve was that loose large centrifugal forces that caused the airplane to try to roll over the tires this is true of any aeroplane but in this scenario the usual camber of the bf-109 style squared strong directional instability requiring a different type of control strategy for takeoffs and landings tight heading control or aggressive tracking of the runway centerline can set off a prompt directional divergence better for the pilot to relax merely dampen heading changes and accept small heading errors and that brings me to my next point every single aircraft you have ever seen in your life and every single aircraft that has ever existed on this planet and every single aircraft that will ever exist will have certain flaws and certain advantages and the aim for aircraft designer is that overall the aircraft is able to fulfill its role and presents a net gain over the losses that you have to essentially except by the design itself so it doesn't matter if you're talking about the a6m2 is zero it doesn't matter if we talk about the f4 phantom 2 it doesn't matter if we talk about the Fairey swordfish it also doesn't matter if you're talking about a Spitfire that's the big book by the way that's a really good book or any of the many world war ii aircraft that the u.s. produced or the aisle tool or heck even the wolf fw 190 you know and of course you're also arrived at the b of 109 all of these aircraft have certain flaws that's just a given so let's explore that a little bit more the BF 109 was a lightweight high-performance machine similar to the Supermarine Spitfire but nowadays similar designs are sometimes remembered for different reasons for example few people criticize the Spitfire for its ground handling even though it also had some issues on the other hand the issues of ground clearance on its propellers and the center of gravity as sometimes highlighted whereas with the BF 109 this tends to be less the case with the bf 109 or me-109 same thing really Germans used both designations the fact that it was so iconic let's move that out of the way in fact that it was so iconic might lead to this tendency to overemphasize the gear problem I don't know maybe I think one contributing factor certainly to the problems of the BF 109 and why so many stories exist is that the Germans did not have a two-seater trainer aircraft we're new pilots could be eased into the handling of the 109 with an instructor onboard before they were sat in a bf109 they usually were sitting in low performance aircraft with quite docile handling characteristics typical trainer aircraft that only changed later on when the Germans rolled out with the two-seater BF 109 G 12 trainer aircraft so a lot of the issues pilots must have had initially with their new fighter aircraft were due to a problem with training and instruction which increased the likelihood of accidents but once you actually got used to the aircraft there is as of yet very little evidence that I know of that the 109 had a substantially higher accident rate than comparable machines at the time because of only the gear now a cursory glance at some of the bf109 losses actually confirms this because in some of the Akash waters we actually have the information but that doesn't really reveal anything out of the ordinary of course nowadays it's hard to pinpoint the exact cause of taxiing takeoff or landing incidents because usually very little information is given on top of the wealthy cause takeoff and landings are generally very critical moments in the aircraft's life anyway and the plane could have been lost from a simple hole in the ground over to an inattentive totally exhausted pilot who has been flying three missions a day or for the last week or so but if we look at some of these accident rates in more detail they don't really strike me as much higher than comparable machines from all four countries depending on what book you read you sometimes see that a bf109 is supposed to have suffered like 10,000 aircraft losses due to the gear this claim is sometimes brought back to China off was a world war two ace and who seems to have written this once in a letter now he was well known German ace and also served in the Bundeswehr after West Germany got a new army although it is without a doubt that the issues with the ground looping caused accidents due to the aforementioned issues with the training regimes of the Luftwaffe at the time I personally have the questions nine homes estimate a little bit 10,000 aircraft would constitute nearly 30% of all befallen ions produced if it was that bad the plane would not have been produced no matter how much you might argue that Messerschmitt could have or would have lobbied the rice looked at ministerium a plane that stands a statistical chance of becoming a write-off on every third flight will not get built now let's look at some actual numbers here in between July 1940 and the summer of 1942 the AH Quichua that'swhy suffers 350 losses with therapy of 109s mind you by the end of that statistic they are actually transitioning to fw 190s but i'm just going to ignore those cases for now because it's a different plane now within that list of losses you have about 40 that happened during takeoff landing and taxing and so on with 109 s where are we to assume that all of them are the result of the year which is unlikely but let's just roll with it we arrive at a figure of about 11 percent which actually is quite reasonable as an overall accident rate considering the time and that's what it is now if we compare that for example with the United States Army Air Force statistical digest as a whole we have about 5,300 fighter losses in the eto from June 1942 to May 1945 around 1200 are lost due to causes over than enemy fighters or a and this figure amounts then to roughly 22 percent sadly those cases aren't broken down because the statistical choice just doesn't do that but my assumption would be that if you apply the same criteria to these numbers as with those that we had with Yogeshwara that's why then we would arrive at a ballpark number of anywhere between 10 to 50% of accident rates that's an assumption of course you'd have to go through the actual files for the Fighter Wing's to make sure that you get the correct ratios but overall somewhere between 10 to 15% is a very standard accident rate at a time however these ratios are affected more than just the pilots for example should a lot of pilots get shot down over a smaller stretch of time the accident ratio automatically goes down because less pilots survived long enough for half an excellent and that actually reminds me it would be interesting to see if the luftwaffe accident rates go down at the end of the year simply because they lose more pilots in combat and that's maybe something to look into it at some point considering that we have established that the Beaufort nine wasn't ideal but who also wasn't as bad as sometimes it's made out to be did the Messerschmitt company ever try changing anything about their gear design well yes they're aware attempts for example the B of 109 V 23 tested a tricycle landing gear and v40 one went with a wide other carriage however a continuous problems prevented further development with the development of the 209 we also see a plane that was meant to have a white mounted undercarriage while the Brio 9 returned to the tricycle landing gear configuration none of these projects were realized I think it's important nowadays that before we judge if we judge to understand why things were done in a certain way back then when it comes to aircraft designs in World War two and why the obvious solution that we might think about wasn't followed through back then it's easier to say that something was a fatal flaw if one does not look at a situation as a whole and in this example when changing the gear well remember you're not just changing the gear not only where the tests anything but auspicious with the white undercarriages on the BF 109s the gear itself is a critical component in the design and any substantial changes to it require substantial changes to the actual aircraft itself and I'm not only talking about electrical cables here or hydraulic lines I am talking about a complete redesign of the aircraft wing the 109 swing would never have been able to hold the gear as it was it just doesn't fit and it wasn't built to hold it you need a new wing and suddenly you are no longer talking about just changing or just changing the location of the wheel and a strut as well as a few cables but about the lift producing bugger is sticking out of an either side of your aircraft now you know you're talking about a change that effects weight distribution it affects performance drag handling and so and that's before you even look at the impact this will have on production high intensity military production as we see during World War two does not just handle big design changes well you have to retrain workers retool factories reorganize assembly lines establish new production change invest more resources into the aircraft the list goes on and on and on now smaller design changes can be made on the fly like when the wind changes happen from the e model to the F model in the 109 but those are small changes compared to making a whole new wing design that can hold a gear coming up with something completely new and way more complex production is going to be severely affected for several months even and in a total war scenario that really only makes sense if the problems of the Naro on the carriage greatly outweigh the loss in factory production which it didn't I hope you guys enjoyed this look at bf 109s gear if you are patron or a channel member thank you very much for your support you make this sort of content and also my inside the cockpits here is possible because well they would certainly not be made by any of the traditional media out there if you like what you saw today please consider supporting us on patreon our channel memberships that really allows us to push out more content like this and if that's an option for you don't worry I understand please consider sharing the video and subscribing to make sure that you will also catch the next one as always I will leave you with a couple of viewing recommendations here once again my inside the corporate series right here bf-109 has been filmed as well so you can check that out and then I am adding it another look here at a German company wolf of course with the fw190 that video will be right here so as always as you go off watching dogs I wish you guys a great day and see on the sky

Channel: Military Aviation History

Views: 225,728

Rating: 4.9378819 out of 5

Keywords: Bf 109, Me 109, Luftwaffe, gear, Messerschmitt, WW2, Germany, fighter, plane

Id: AMYpcegvt50

Length: 24min 4sec (1444 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020