Geoff,
Great story!
Joe Lombardi
----- Original Message -----
From: "Geoff Winnington-Ball" <gwball@sympatico.ca>
To: "Military Vehicles Mailing List" <mil-veh@mil-veh.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 05, 2001 9:12 PM
Subject: Re: [MV] [MVlist] Re: [MV] Merlin Engine
> "Antoine C." wrote:
>
> > Pardon my french, but I thought the "wing over" tactic against
> > V-1's was used early on by the prop driven fighters, and that
> > V-1's were abandoned by Fritz before the Meteor came to play and
> > replaced by the dreaded V-2, fortunately in much samller numbers?
> > Antoine
>
> Not at all! Fighter pilots being fighter pilots around the world and
across
> the generations, they would prefer to shoot the little buggers down, but
> failing that, could suck it up and use the technique described by Richard
> earlier. Whether Meteor, Typhoon or Tempest, it involved using the mass
> airflow over the fighter's big wing to disrupt the airflow on the tiny
wing
> of the doodlebug, thus toppling the latter's gyro. The thing would still
blow
> up when it hit, but hopefully that was away from any densely populated
area.
>
> Imagine the challenge, though... spotting a twinkling out of the corner of
> your eye... instinctively winging over, and diving at Ludicrous Speed (if
not
> Plaid - Dark Helmet, where are you?), knowing you have but a few seconds
> before the bastard is gone. You want to line it up and take a shot if you
> can, but you can't be too close... and if you can't take the shot, there's
> only one other way to bring it down before it impacts the London docks,
where
> thousands of your countrymen are boarding transports for the continent at
> this moment...
>
> Personally, I don't think I'd like to invite a ton or so of high explosive
to
> detonate a scant few yards from my bird -- there are some really good pics
of
> scorched Mosquitos attesting to the power of the resulting fireball! Hell
of
> a job, but someone had to do it...
>
> The Meteor flew operationally in the late summer of 1944, well before the
> coastal V-1 launching sites were eventually overrun by the Canadian 2nd
Corps
> in September of that year.
>
> Phew... need another beer... :-)
>
> Geoff
>
>
>
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jun 05 2001 - 23:18:31 PDT