P-51 vs Bf109K - TavView track - ask for debriefing

I would like to ask some experienced Mustang pilots to see this track from 14:56:00.

I (P-51 Tapi) attacked Bf 109K with speed and height advantage and though I tried to maintain speed after the attack, the 109 pilot (human) turned sharp and climbed like hell and in a few seconds gained the same speed as me...

I finally saved my ass diving and speeding with WEP... I know the 109K climbs like a rocket but it seems to even gain speed while climbing? It seems to me that the only solution is immediately after the first pass go away and do not try to repeat the attack in any way...

What would you recommend me to do better next time in a similar situation (if I fly without wingman)? Any tip welcomed.

Track: HERE

For quick view I uploaded video from TackView as well:

First i don't see any speed advantage here, maybe small at the beginning but once you made couple turns and bf109 engaged mw50 speeds were the same.

First when you jumping on bf109 the best speed is near max mach if it is below 10000ft i would aim for 400+ IAS more if below 5000ft 450+,

First what you did wrong was turning in to this bf109 this bleed your speed a lot. If you missed your shoot just continue straight and pull up high, don't turn in to enemy when you have significant higher speed you will over shoot ending up with enemy on your tail, if you have to do it trade you speed for alt then make turn and regain speed with descent never do horizontal hard pull.

I am bad pilot so if i were you i would buzz off after first attack :) Just remember AIM good before shooting :) it maybe your one opportunity.

THX for the comment grafspee. You are right, my energy (speed) advantage was not decisively higher... After the pass, I intended to very slightly climb while maintaining speed and possibly try to repeat attack. Bad decision on my side bacause I underestimate climbing power of DaimlerBenz :-)

The P-51D is not a dog-fighter. You Boom-n-Zoom her, and that's it. Nothing else will work well. Also having an wingman is an enormous advantage.

- When you started your approach to the 109 you have about 400kts TAS and the 109 about 265kts(!!) plus over 1000 feet. That's a huge advantage. But by the time you pull into 1000 feet behind the 109 he's at 280 and you are at 330 TAS. Your advantage of 135kts and 1000 feet(!!) have already dropped to 50kts and 0 feet. I don't think this is simply from the turn, because even after the turn your are still losing speed. I think you've pulled back on the throttle to allow for more time to fire, so you are throwing your speed and altitude advantage away.

Better would be to stay at your altitude and gently circle around behind the 109 (go from above right of the 109 (his fight direction) to above, behind, left to allow for a wide turn with minimal speed loss, plus to use space to stay behind him. Then when you are ready to dive on him you still have most of your speed, plus you gain from diving.

- Target practice - you needs it. It takes lots of practice to get to be a good shot, especially in aiming an aircraft. It's about 1000% more difficult than aiming a rifle. To shift your aim a little to the left, there is no way to just drag your reticle (unless you only need one shot and only need to adjust just a little, you can use the rudder) to the left, you have to bank, rudder just enough and then just before you're directly on target you have to bank in the other direction to stop your turn. It requires more than twice as much coordination as simply pointing, and that requires practice.

Set up a training mission with a target aircraft which has ROE to never fire and set to never avoid enemy attacks. Put it on a race track circuit or set 4 waypoints (1, 2, 3, 4) with a trigger that when it gets to waypoint 4 it switches to waypoint 1, so that it will fly around forever until you shot it down.

Now practice on shooting it down. Trying different attack angles. But practice.

- After passing the 109 (he pulled down and left, you should not have tried to follow him. He will ALWAYS out turn you - ALWAYS. He's more maneuverable, and slower (or he was :smilewink: ). Just start a shallow climb keeping an eye on him. You are now defensive as long as he is behind you. You have to know how to read what he's trying to do and how to counter it.

He turned hard left. If he keeps hard left, he's trying to get behind you, which he will. You can either extend (increase your distance) and pull away by going into a shallow dive, or turn slowing in his direction, to force him to lengthen his turn and cost more energy to get behind you. Whatever you do, play to your strengths, which are really just maintaining speed.

This is why maintaining your speed is of utmost importance, and why shooting skill will save your life. Get in, shoot (hopefully kill), and climb out with your speed. If you didn't kill him, tough. Live to try again and get good.

When i have very big speed i use rapid climb if bf109 is slow, then he will not be able to follow me.

Thanks a lot for your tips and suggestions!

Set up a training mission with a target aircraft which has ROE to never fire and set to never avoid enemy attacks. Put it on a race track circuit or set 4 waypoints (1, 2, 3, 4) with a trigger that when it gets to waypoint 4 it switches to waypoint 1, so that it will fly around forever until you shot it down.

Pls, would you help me how to set it in the ME? I can assign 0% of ammo to the enemy and in advanced waypoints, there is a choice "circle". But enemy still goes vertical as I am near. I did not find how set "never avoid enemy attacks".

They say a picture's worth a thousand word...

I haven't actually tested this -- bit tired at the moment -- so if anything is amiss, let me know.

Check the 109 for advanced waypoint tasks for where all the magic is... yeah, it's not really any magic, just a few settings.

Have fun and feel free to make any changes you might wish.

P-51D A2A Training.miz

THX, your test mission works good.

Glad it works for you :)

Another thing you can do for practice is fly formation on the 109. On the straight and level it's not hard, but in the corners it's a rodio :D

No offense to Captain Orso, but anybody who says the P-51 isn't a dogfighter doesn't know what they are talking about. Energy fighting is dogfighting. It also irks me when people say "Plane 'X' is a boom-and-zoomer." Boom-and-zoom is a tactic, not a type of fighter. Technically every plane should strive to be a 'boom-and-zoomer' since this implies having an energy advantage over your opponent. As far as aim, you don't need to stress about it too much, it typically develops naturally with experience. I highly recommend using the gyro gunsight and using it properly. If you want to specifically practice your aim, jumping into instant action and just shooting things works perfectly fine. Also, I don't mean to call out Captain Orso too much, but he's completely wrong about the 109 always being able to out-turn the P-51 and that slower speeds equals more maneuverability.

Now as far as analyzing the tacview, here's what I got from it:

Before the merge, you're roughly 1500 ft above him with about a 120 mph speed advantage (i.e. a pretty good energy advantage). The biggest advantage though is that you have seen him before he's seen you. The problem however is that you're not in a very favorable position to get guns on your target. To fix this, your first move is to turn very sharp to immediately position yourself on his six. This is unnecessary since you were still completely undetected and had an energy advantage. What I would have done instead was perform a shallow climbing turn so that when you roll out you're at around 300-350 mph (keep in mind the P-51's energy retention throughout a shallow turn is second to none) which would have placed you on his high seven/eight o'clock while maintaining the energy advantage that you started with. What this move would do is place you in a position to pose an immediate threat to the 109 while retaining essentially all of your initial advantage. The biggest emphasis is always on the set up because that is what ultimately decides dogfights. I know it's really tempting to place yourself in a shooting position as quickly as possible, but patience wins in this type of situation every time.

As far as what happens after you shoot at the 109, I could go on all day about what you maybe could have done from there and BFM, but the biggest factor in any dogfight is always the setup. The biggest tip I can give you is that the P-51's tremendous energy-retention is far less impressive at low speeds, so you want to maintain a high speed as long as possible. I'm sure you've heard that a million times but you might not know exactly what that entails. All you need to do to retain your speed for longer is to ease the back pressure on the stick.... that's it. People make it sound way more complicated than it is. Keeping your speed up throughout a fight and waiting for the perfect opportunity to pounce is what wins dogfights, not flopping around the sky like a fish out of water. Going back to what I said before, patience is key. Being so desperate to get your nose back on the enemy after he broke away, you ended up cutting your airspeed by about 60% in a single turn, thus losing any advantage you had left. One thing I will say is that you did a good job recognizing when the fight was lost and ran away. There is never any shame in running away.

To sum it up, you did the all-important thing and spotted your enemy before he spotted you, but then you essentially wasted your advantage before a bullet was even fired. You can go on all day about how the damage model sucks (your initial burst should have probably taken him out) and that non-150 octane fuel P-51's should not be fighting K4's, to which you would be completely right, but at the end of the day there is always something you can do.

Thanks very much, andremsmv for your comment. Very helpful. I really appreciate this community for an expertness as well as a willingness to help.

Regarding P-51, I have a lot to learn but hope that with all of the advice I got in this thread in mind, I can improve much quicker than trying it only on my own...

andremsmv, you've obviously got a chip on your shoulder, but that's not my problem.

I'm talking about 1-v-1 combat here. In multiple aircraft vs multiple aircraft countless things can happen which you cannot plan; you can only take advantage of the opportunity. Nine times out of ten, if you listen to aces talk about their kills, it was because the poor sucker who they shot down, didn't know they were there until it was too late, and it was not something you can plan for. It happens. Aces proved that they know how to take advantage of the situation and have the aggression to do it.

You apparently don't know what a dog-fight is. It's not when any two aircraft meet in the sky and at least one fires onto the other. It's aerial combat in which the emphasis is on out maneuvering the enemy, which means turning and fighting along the horizontal to the greatest extent, which means the aircraft which can turn the best while retaining the most airspeed will have a great advantage in such a turn-n-burn fight. The P-51D losses a lot of speed in tight turns, and because of its weight, it does not climb nor accelerate well. If you cannot turn with the 109 and cannot climb with it, you cannot dog-fight it. You can do that which your aircraft is good at, which is diving and retaining speed, striking the enemy (and hopefully killing him) and then using your energy advantage to climb out of the enemies attack radius. That's not dog-fighting, that's booming-n-zooming.

About the enemy being unaware of your presence, if the enemy doesn't know you are there, you can be 5,000 feet below him and 50kts slower, and as long as he doesn't spot you, he's dead meat (period). That's not a strategy nor a tactic. That's the blind luck of war or the incompetence of the enemy. How do you want to practice and learn that?

To say that the P-51D could not turn with the Bf-109K-4 would be factually incorrect. At above about 23,000 feet the P-51D has a power advantage over the Kürfurst enough to be able to hold a sustained turn tighter. But at above 20,000 feet, all turns are pretty tame compared to below 15,000 feet.

andremsmv, you've obviously got a chip on your shoulder, but that's not my problem.

 

I'm talking about 1-v-1 combat here. In multiple aircraft vs multiple aircraft countless things can happen which you cannot plan; you can only take advantage of the opportunity. Nine times out of ten, if you listen to aces talk about their kills, it was because the poor sucker who they shot down, didn't know they were there until it was too late, and it was not something you can plan for. It happens. Aces proved that they know how to take advantage of the situation and have the aggression to do it.

 

You apparently don't know what a dog-fight is. It's not when any two aircraft meet in the sky and at least one fires onto the other. It's aerial combat in which the emphasis is on out maneuvering the enemy, which means turning and fighting along the horizontal to the greatest extent, which means the aircraft which can turn the best while retaining the most airspeed will have a great advantage in such a turn-n-burn fight. The P-51D losses a lot of speed in tight turns, and because of its weight, it does not climb nor accelerate well. If you cannot turn with the 109 and cannot climb with it, you cannot dog-fight it. You can do that which your aircraft is good at, which is diving and retaining speed, striking the enemy (and hopefully killing him) and then using your energy advantage to climb out of the enemies attack radius. That's not dog-fighting, that's booming-n-zooming.

 

About the enemy being unaware of your presence, if the enemy doesn't know you are there, you can be 5,000 feet below him and 50kts slower, and as long as he doesn't spot you, he's dead meat (period). That's not a strategy nor a tactic. That's the blind luck of war or the incompetence of the enemy. How do you want to practice and learn that?

 

To say that the P-51D could not turn with the Bf-109K-4 would be factually incorrect. At above about 23,000 feet the P-51D has a power advantage over the Kürfurst enough to be able to hold a sustained turn tighter. But at above 20,000 feet, all turns are pretty tame compared to below 15,000 feet.

Captain Orso,

My apologies if I came across as an ass. I simply wanted to ensure that OP did not get the idea in his head that the P-51 is not a dogfighter because not only is that extremely discouraging but it's also false. Turn rate alone does not determine the outcome of a dogfight. Just think about how utterly unfair the 190D-9 vs Spitfire Mk IX matchup is. The Dora has about 60% the turn rate of the Spitfire but will completely dumpster it in a dogfight.

My original message was to inform OP that there is so much more to dogfighting than simply banking and putting the stick in your lap. Again sorry if I came across as an ass but I really wanted to make sure OP did not get the wrong impression about dogfighting.

No offense to Captain Orso, but anybody who says the P-51 isn't a dogfighter doesn't know what they are talking about. Energy fighting is dogfighting. It also irks me when people say "Plane 'X' is a boom-and-zoomer." Boom-and-zoom is a tactic, not a type of fighter. Technically every plane should strive to be a 'boom-and-zoomer' since this implies having an energy advantage over your opponent. As far as aim, you don't need to stress about it too much, it typically develops naturally with experience. I highly recommend using the gyro gunsight and using it properly. If you want to specifically practice your aim, jumping into instant action and just shooting things works perfectly fine. Also, I don't mean to call out Captain Orso too much, but he's completely wrong about the 109 always being able to out-turn the P-51 and that slower speeds equals more maneuverability.

I share your frustration regarding people labelling a plane a "boom and zoomer". The P51D is an air superiority fighter. It's job is to dogfight and it does it's job well. As Andremsmv said, any plane can dive on another aircraft and climb away with more energy. If you enter a fight believing your going to lose then your going to lose.

I share your frustration regarding people labelling a plane a "boom and zoomer". The P51D is an air superiority fighter. It's job is to dogfight and it does it's job well. As Andremsmv said, any plane can dive on another aircraft and climb away with more energy. If you enter a fight believing your going to lose then your going to lose.

P- stands for pursuit. Agree Boom and zoom is just a tactics.

Every plane can dive shoot and climb up back but some planes perform this very well other not so much.

There are planes which do boom zoom much better then other.

For example Bf-109 is not good boom zoom because at high speeds stick forces are making hard to change flight path.

When i flying MP and when i try to boom zoom in bf 109 i often find my self in position where enemy plane makes very little change in flight path and i am unable to follow him.

In fw 190 situation is much different, no problems in high speed dives.

Problem begins when your spacecraft don't want to slow down to 120-130 kts and it's still accelerating in vertical :P

Couple of ideas...

I didn't read everyone's responses, so I apologize if these ideas were already mentioned...

1. Set the fuel to "regular" for all the Bf109's; not the high octane stuff

2. Make sure your fuel load is 50% instead of 100%.

Just a couple of ideas to even things out a bit.

ChuckIV