Under the RADAR: Spitfire vs Messerschmitt 109

welcome to the Royal Air Force Museum in London I'm standing in front of our Battle of Britain display the Royal Air Force Museum in London is the only place in the world where you can see four fighter aircraft which actually participated in the Battle of Britain so we've got four fighter aircraft behind me and I'm going to talk about two of them and of course the first one is the very famous Supermarine Spitfire but I'm also going to talk about its opponent the Messerschmitt 109 the Spitfire is an iconic aircraft it is loved by the public now and it was already loved well from the first moment it entered service a large part had to do with the aesthetics of the aircraft extremely clean lines now if you look behind me you see those wings they were extremely narrow but it also had a downside to it and that is the position of the guns so every hole you see here holds a machine-gun and I'll talk later about why that was a problem I'll also talk a little bit about the narrow landing gear the enclosed cockpit the camouflage color some things worked well on the Spitfires other less so so why don't we have a closer look the thin wings of the Spitfire were great for speed very aerodynamic especially at high altitude the problem was however that because the wings are so thin there's not a lot of room inside so they wanted to put machine guns in so if you look behind me you can see four holes there's also four on the other side for a total of eight machine guns but this one is really far away from the center of the aircraft so all the guns had to be angled in a certain way to well hit the target in front but at what distance should they converge well early on they were as far away as a thousand yards the pilots quickly said well that's simply too far we're not going to hit anything that way so they brought it back to five hundred yards and then even two hundred yards but a problem still remained any aircraft further away or closer you simply not going to hit with all the guns you're gonna see later with the German aircraft that they had a different solution a more ingenious and more effective way the landing gear of the Spitfire was a very narrow as you can see behind me now that meant that it was quite tricky really for takeoff and landing because with all this engine power the aircraft constantly had a tendency to swing left or right and the landing gear being so narrow meant that there was always a possibility that the aircraft could tumble over in either direction once in the air however it was a completely different story pilots absolutely loved flying the Spitfire many compared it with while fitting on a glove it just felt so comfortable and so natural for a very large part the reputation of the Spitfire comes from its wonderful flying characteristics almost as famous as the Spitfire was its engine the rolls-royce Merlin engine now the Merlin was probably the finest allied aero engine of the Second World War but quite early on in the war it still had some problems it was equipped with a carburetor rather than a fuel injection system like the Germans had now why was that important well let me explain with my hands if this is a Messerschmitt and this is a Spitfire the spirit fire would be on the tail of the Messerschmitt but what the pilot would do of the Messerschmitt was f8 in a steep dive the Spitfire tried to follow well the problem was that the gravity kept a few up and it would disrupt the fuel into the engine and the engine would cease so a Spitfire pilot had no other choice but to go on his back and dive after the Messerschmitt inverted even at low altitude a Spitfire pilots tended to be quite young and it's probably because of their youth that they dared to do something like that the solution to this actually came from a female engineer called Beatrice Schilling now there were not a lot of female engineers back then so it was quite remarkable that she was able to solve this problem and what she did was he created a little device which was put into the rolls-royce Merlin engine and that regulated the fuel so a lot of swift fire pilots were very very grateful for her invention when you look at the side of the spitfire we can see it's typical camouflage colors now a lot of the RAF aircraft had a similar camouflage scheme so you can see the green and the brown that is to camouflage against the fields below but at the bottom you can see it has a dark egg color and that is to have a camouflage for the skies in the back now you may think well skies they are not green are they well they experimented with this and they actually found out that this kind of a green color is very efficient for the gray skies which usually have over this country interestingly they also experimented with other colors and they found out that at very high altitude the best color to paint the Spitfire in was pink so there were even some Spitfires which were completely pink now a beautiful camouflage but you can also see that it's actually disrupted in a few places so you have the RAF roundels ear the typical blue white and red but they found out that the camouflage actually disrupted the roundel and it wasn't visible enough so they took the quite peculiar decision to put a yellow circle around the roundel which in my opinion actually disrupted the whole idea of having a camouflage in the first place also what we see are these three letters here so they actually had a meaning so a two letter combination that signified the squadron in this case PR that was the code for six or nine squadron an F that is the letter of the individual aircraft they would have well first twelve aircraft but towards the end of the war up to 26 aircraft and every aircraft had an individual letter behind me you can see the cockpit of the Spitfire like the rest of the Spitfire it was quite narrow and cramped however engineers came up with an ingenious solution to give a little bit more Headroom so if you look over here you can actually see that the cockpit hood is bulged so pilot could look left and right now obviously you also wanted to look backwards but that was quite difficult so they came up with a solution of their own they would take the rear view mirror of an automobile and put it inside the cockpit later on that became a standard piece of equipment on a Spitfire but with this early spitfyre here at the RAF Museum it's not there yet much bigger problem was that the cockpit hood in these early Spitfires didn't open when they should so a Spitfire pilot wanted to bail out of his aircraft only to find out that the cockpit hood wouldn't open you the aircraft behind me is the iconic Messerschmitt 109 the main opponent of the RAF during the Second World War now it is in a way very similar to the Spitfire it was also quite a revolutionary aircraft they're about the same size also the performance is similar but depending on opinion the Messerschmitt 109 is a little bit more angular looking more aggressive in a way now it was in service a little bit before the Spitfire came into service in the mid 1930s and it's designer really Messerschmitt wanted to have a fighter aircraft with the most powerful engine in the smallest airframe you have a closer look at the Messerschmitt and you'll see that's exactly what he got the armament on the Messerschmitt 109 is very different from that on RAF fighter aircraft aircraft like the Spitfire had eight machine guns which sounds great but as I explained earlier they were not all that effective the Germans put a machine cannon in the ring one here one on the other side plus two machine guns on top of the engine now a machine cannon is very similar to machine gun with one important difference the bullets are a lot bigger heavier and they carry an explosive charge think of them as grenades Messerschmitt 109 could fire a thousand of these grenades per minute so in that regard the armament of the measurement 109 was far superior to that of the Spitfire one unique thing about the Messerschmitt 109 are these leading edge slats so they extend at low speed this gave it more lift very important during takeoff and landing but it also meant that at slow speed the Messerschmitt 109 was actually more maneuverable than the Spitfire like the Spitfire the Messerschmitt 109 has a narrow landing gear however you may notice that the reel struts are actually in an angle which was an attempt to make the landing gear wider however it meant that the wheels were not vertically down which often made it more difficult for the takeoff and landing often said that the Germans lost more Messerschmitts and takeoff and landing accidents and in real combat now that is definitely not true however like the Spitfire it was quite difficult to control such a powerful aircraft on the ground but once in the air it did exactly what it was supposed to do the camouflage of the Messerschmitt 109 is in many ways similar to that of the Spitfire sure the colors are a little bit different but it was very effective dark on the top light colors at the bottom however liked Spitfire camouflage efforts were completely ruined by certain decisions to make it more visible in this case when you look at the engine compartment holding that fuel-injected daimler-benz engine it's completely covered in yellow paint this was to be able to recognize each other in combat so they wouldn't have friendly fire accidents but obviously that meant that these Messerschmitts were very visible also to the RAF fighters the cockpit hood of the 109 is different from that of the Spitfire while the Spitfire had a bulged cockpit hood which gave it a little bit more room no such luxury existed for the German pilot he was really in a very tight spot plus the many frames of the cockpit meant that the visibility was a lot less now the final question which of these is the best this is a question that we get a lot and I wish I could give you a simple answer but unfortunately it's not that easy so speed is quite similar both of them very fast aircraft the Messerschmitt was a little bit faster at high altitude but then again the Spitfire was more maneuverable except at low speed then those leading edge slats of the Messerschmitt made it a little bit more agile then because the Spitfire has wider wings it meant that it couldn't roll as fast as the Messerschmitt the armament on the other hand while that the Messerschmitt was a clear winner in the end the difference was so small that it depended on the quality of the pilot if you liked this video make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel or better yet come and visit us at the Royal Air Force Museum in London

Channel: Royal Air Force Museum

Views: 68,006

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Id: HY9DAD0BGPM

Length: 12min 45sec (765 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 30 2020