..."No 91 Squadron Spitfire pilots at the butts, Hawkinge, 23 July 1941. Archery was in vogue with several squadrons, a supplement to the more usual forms of recreational target practice"...

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A Country Boy Can Survive

Their aim had better of been pretty good or they were going to have a hard time explaining to the maintenance chief why there was an arrow sticking out of the engine cowling. Note: never pi** off the guys that load your guns.

The English long bow was the machine gun of it's time.

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"from my cold dead hands" C.H.

No attached picture.

Best regards,

Lest we forget:

"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." Winston Churchill

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Ukraine -- now more than ever

No doubt they were anticipating a Chinese virus induced ammo shortage.

Shooting a bow takes great eye/hand coordination. Just like flying.

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No baby we aint

A Spitfire Mk V, what a lovely aircraft. Grace, speed and lethality all rolled into one package. Although I don’t think they fired arrows.

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"Your other right........."

The Mk Vb was the first model to get cannons from the factory, but they got badly mauled when the Fw 190 came into service.

Oddly enough, 91 Squadron was largely a weather recce/air-sea rescue unit.

The perfectly proportioned Spitfire for me was the Mk IX. Here's one in formation with a Corsair.

Attached Images

BeautyandBeast01.jpg (113.9 KB, 271 views)

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Release the Kraken

The bows and arrows were their backup weapons in
case they ran out of ammo or their machine guns
jammed.

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Ubi Est Mea

Yes the Vb had clipped wings to aid rapid movement, but the "Butcher Bird" ignored those to the detriment of a lot of Vb pilots. Personally I have always liked the PR Spitfires; no guns, highly polished and quite fast. Mind you, flying over Europe without guns took a lot of "cojones". Dave_n

OK.. without looking it up who knows why the F4 Corsair wings had that shape?

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SWHF #595

I always thought that if aerodynamics was judged by beauty and grace the Supermarine Spitfire and the Jaguar XKE would have been the most aerodynamic of all machines. Later I became an aerodynamicist, by that time more testing and the advent of computers had developed shapes with less drag. But I still love those two shapes.

The designers needed to have enough ground clearance for the huge propeller, so they went with a gull wing rather than straight.

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USAF 1981 - 2001

Here’s our NM Corsair.
Don’t know of a Spitfire here.
There’s one over at Tucson at the Pima.

Attached Images

A8CFCE36-2509-4690-8649-6615491B60F7.jpg (82.3 KB, 32 views)

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NRA LIFE MEMBER

The Fleet Air Arm developed a curved carrier approach that allowed the pilot to see the carrier deck in the dip of the wing because visibility over the nose was a problem. The USN considered the Corsair unsuitable for carrier ops for some time.

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Release the Kraken

While visiting the Maritime museum in Portsmouth, England once upon a time, and specifically the raised "Mary Rose," I found it interesting that they found boxes of long bows on her. If memory serves, hew was the wood of choice for constructing them.

No.It was yew. But you'd have to hew the yew, ha!

Close, the preferred wood is yew, with elm as the reserve.

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Release the Kraken

Correct the F4 had the largest prop of any WWII fighter.

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SWHF #595

An interesting history of Douglas Bader, a double amputee Spitfire pilot. Douglas Bader - Wikipedia

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John. SWCA #1586

Bader flew a large proportion of his missions in Hurricanes and there is a current theory that he was actually shot down by "Friendly fire". Dave_n

...to keep the landing gear reasonably short...

... while keeping that 13 foot swing propeller off the ground...

...13 feet is the distance from the floor to the top of the backboard on a basketball court...

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A Country Boy Can Survive

..."High Flight...A sonnet written by John Gillespie Magee, an American pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force in the Second World War. He came to Britain, flew in a Spitfire squadron, and was killed at the age of nineteen on 11 December 1941 during a training flight from the airfield near Scopwick"...

"Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds -
and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of -
wheeled and soared and swung high in the sunlit silence.
Hovering there I've chased the shouting wind along
and flung my eager craft through footless halls of air.
"Up, up the long delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
where never lark, or even eagle, flew;
and, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
the high untrespassed sanctity of space,
put out my hand and touched the face of God."

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A Country Boy Can Survive

Yes the prop was just a little over 13 Ft. on the whistling death.

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SWHF #595