T. A. Gardner wrote:Not to be a spoiler here, but the "virtual pilots" accounts seem to jibe fairly well with Carson's in a general sense:
* At high speeds the ailerons are stiff and control forces are high
* The slats operate at low speed often without warning and are generally an annoyance.
* The cockpit is cramped
* Range is short comparatively.
* At lower speeds the aircraft is very aerobatic
These, in both accounts are pilot impressions of the aircraft not empirical data. On the whole, the 109 by 1943 was getting long in the tooth and probably ripe for replacement. Given the situation in Germany it was retained in production for more or less obvious reasons.
Actually not at all.
At high speeds the ailerons are stiff and control forces are high
At high speeds all non-boosted controls become heavier, the problem is how heavy they become. Early fighters like P-40, P-39, Hurricane, Spitfire (ailerons), Yaks, Me 109E had heavy controls at high speed. Late war fighters like P-51, Me 109G/K, Fw-190A/D still had heavy controls at high speed, but light enough for a normal pilot to easily pull more G than allowed. However, all these late fighters (expect Fw-190) have heavier controls at low speeds than early war fighters, a fact often commented by pilots, for instance Jeff Ethell complains about how heavy are P-51 controls compared to P-40 that he was used to. Yes, late war fighters had heavier controls at low speed because they had smaller surface than early war fighters, and required a larger deflection, hence more effort. At high speed early war fighters had stiff controls, whereas late war fighters could still deflect them (so much that they could easily damage the controls or the plane all together).
The slats operate at low speed often without warning and are generally an annoyance.
This is a "defect" found only in Western wartime evaluations of 109E. Read about recents flights with newly restored 109E, pilots tried hard to obtain such behaviour but did not have anything worrisome to report. Anyways, 109F had a changed slat, with better dampening, nobody complained about those, in fact there were pilots that noticed them working only they were told about them
The cockpit is cramped
I talked about this in this thread. Bottom line is: the cockpit was perfect fit for the German pilots back then, not for pilots that serve now.
Range is short comparatively.
Comparatively to what? To an escort plane? Of course. The overall performance of an escort plane is much worse than of lightweight fighter. Carson himself admits that there is no plane that can satisfy all requirements for a fighter. In general fighters should be divided in at least 2 weight classes: the lightweight fighters, those with weights up to 3600kg (I would include here Spit XIV and Ki-84, even if they are slightly outside it, they were still designed with lightfighter roles in mind), usually used for frontline fighters, interceptors, in general optimized for flight performance, and the heavyweight fighters, those with weights above 3600kg, usually used for escort, ground attack, bomber destroyer, in general those fighters optimized for carrying larger payloads (eighter fuel or ammo). Me 109 was a lightweight fighter, and so were Hurricane, Spitfire, Yaks and Las, P-39, P40 and many others. Fw-190 was a heavyweight fighters, and so were P-38, P-47, P-51 and so on. Comparing fighters across classes is meaningless. This is what Carson does. He says that Me 109G endurance is 55min and range is 350 miles. He forgets to mention that this numbers are at high speed cruise, the endurance triples at economic cruise, and range doubles (3 hours and 1000km, 5 hours and 1600km with drop tank IIRC). These numbers are among the best in lightfighter category. If emergency power was used during the mission, 109G was certainly the one that had the largest endurance (again we are talking about lightweight fighters), because DB-605 had a specific consumption of almost
half of competing fighter engines in this power regime.