WW2 Spitfire Pilot Mary Ellis Dies
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
(From the video embedded in the article)
There's something so surreal about flying, having the freedom to move across 4 axes (and more if you fly a helicopter), compared to the two that your car gives you.
Getting up in an aerobatic plane is even more fun. The feeling when you're in the middle of a barrel roll, pulling 1 G so you still feel stuck to the seat, but when you look outside everything is upside down, it's amazing.
Almost all flying clubs / schools offer "trial" or "experience" flights. Even if you have no interest in getting your own license, it's a great way to spend an hour or two!
Speed can increase lift but so that might count, but pulling back on the stick does the same thing as moving the wheel to adjust elevator trim.
Cars have two kinds: steering and change in speed. Planes have about 4: pitch, yaw, roll and thrust.
There are some drawbacks - its passive flying, so you are at mercy of the weather, wind and your skills much more than rigid construction with powerful engine.
'When I were a lad' I was in the Air Training Corps had got to fly in quite a variety of military aircraft. I thoroughly enjoyed it and at the time pretty much took it for granted, it's only as I've got older I appreciate the experiences I had.
I've since flown in civilian small aircraft and helicopters a few times since and now appreciate how much more 'fun' the military stuff was. Even the Chipmunk, originally a 1940s two seat basic trainer, was so much more exciting to fly than a modern Cessna.
Sadly I didn't get a fast jet flight, I was 1st reserve for a Hawk flight and went through all the ejector seat training but sadly the cadet in front of me stayed healthy and spent a couple of hours blasting through the Welsh mountains.
Quite a lady and a sad loss.
The work was "exhilarating and sometimes very dangerous", she recalled. Pilots often flew unfamiliar aircraft, guided by the "Ferry Pilots notes", which gave landing instructions.
"We'd say to each other, 'Oh look what I've got, look what I've got'. And that was terribly exciting. Sometimes frightening as well because the aeroplanes were all different. You'd get out of a Tiger Moth into a Wellington bomber and then into a Spitfire."
Based at an all-women's ATA pool in Hamble, Hampshire, she recalled that she flew "about 1,000" aircraft during the war including 76 different types.
Mary Ellis came close to death on several occasions.
She was shot at over Bournemouth, possibly by friendly fire, and had a near-miss as she landed in fog at the same time as another Spitfire coming in the opposite direction.
She also survived a crash-landing when the undercarriage on her Spitfire jammed, causing the engine to overheat.
That is interesting. How is the undercarriage and engine of a Spitfire linked together, such that jamming the undercarriage could cause the engine to overheat?
https://www.quora.com/World-War-2-What-was-that-box-under-th...
It’s quite tricky to Google as there are simulators that have users experiencing problems with overheating Spitfires.
[1] They also used pressurized glycol-water cooling, coolant temp was something like 135 degC, allowing a smaller radiator than atmospheric pressure water.
For example, a B-17 could fly with only one outboard engine running. But the pilot could barely hold the rudder in position to do it, and would trade off with the copilot. Women don't have the lower body strength to do it. Flying a damaged B-17 is just not possible without the leg and upper body strength.
There was an episode of "Aviation Disasters" where a piston airliner had some severe damage, I don't remember just what, just that the pilot had to desperately muscle the controls for a couple hours.
This all changed, of course, with the advent of hydraulic boost. With fully powered surfaces, the "feel forces" on the stick were faked by the "feel computer". By the time I worked on the 757 flight controls, the "feel forces" had been dialed back substantially to accommodate female pilots.
But not on average. The average woman is physically weaker than the average man. Which means, on average, women lack the body strength needed.
Why is HN getting infested with "muh feelings"? I don't know why people get so offended by basic facts.
He also did not say "literally all women" but I don't see anyone here making the case for that either.
>WW2 military planes were at the limits of a man's strength.
> Women don't have the lower body strength to do it. Flying a damaged B-17 is just not possible without the leg and upper body strength.
> By the time I worked on the 757 flight controls, the "feel forces" had been dialed back substantially to accommodate female pilots.
The final quote seeming to imply the mechanical feedback from the controls of more modern aircraft were lessened to accommodate female pilots, instead of more likely making it easier for all pilots to operate the aircraft.
I thought I stated it quite plainly, not by implication. It's what I was told by the engineers that worked on it.
There was also some concern that by lessening the feel forces, men would then be likely to overcontrol the aircraft, but this concern didn't pan out.
"The average woman is physically weaker than the average man."
Excellent motte and bailey (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey).
The second statement, on the other hand, "But not on average. The average woman is physically weaker than the average man. Which means, on average, women lack the body strength needed," is much easier to support (in fact, I'll accept it as true). It also looks like it offers support for the original position.
Unfortunately, it doesn't. It serves only to divert the argument from an unsupportable position to a supportable one. That is why it is a logical fallacy.
No. You're significantly altering the statement with the words you're injecting. Consider this:
"Dogs have four legs."
Would you correct people and point out that there are amputee dogs with fewer than for legs? Most wouldn't, because referring to a group without a qualifier is understood to refer to the majority or state that something is the norm, not that it applies to literally every single item in that group.
Unfortunately, that latter addition doesn't work; according to [1] (an interesting document), 60% of RAF crews were rejected on medical grounds.
So we are seemingly left with, "[Normal] women don't have the lower body strength to [fly normal (?) WWII-era military aircraft], [but superior men do]," which once again is approaching the "so what?" stage.
>For example, a B-17 could fly with only one outboard engine running. But the pilot could barely hold the rudder in position to do it, and would trade off with the copilot. Women don't have the lower body strength to do it. Flying a damaged B-17 is just not possible without the leg and upper body strength.
It's clear that the commenters recognizes that flying the aircraft pushed male pilots to the extremes of their physical ability, "...the pilot could _barely_ hold the rudder in position..." Furthermore this is in reference to combat situations (a plane with 3 of 4 engines damaged). You're complaints about this comment do far have been that it:
* Denied the existence of _any_ women that could perform these tasks. This wasn't claimed, see the "dogs have four legs" comparison.
* Claimed that women couldn't fly "normal" WWII aircraft. No, the commenter highlighted a combat scenario of flying a damaged plane that pushed pilots to their physical limit.
* That the average man could be a pilot. I don't see where this is claimed in the original comment. It actually states the opposite, that piloting in combat demanded peak physical performance.
Again, the Motte and Bailey only exists if you're injecting some other message. The point is simply that piloting a WWII aircraft in combat was physically extremely intense and demanded physical ability beyond typical women (a point corroborated by your evidence that even most men were rejected for their physical condition).
"Dogs have four legs" != "Every single dog that exists has four legs"
>For example, a B-17 could fly with only one outboard engine running. But the pilot could barely hold the rudder in position to do it, and would trade off with the copilot. Men don't have the lower body strength to do it. Flying a damaged B-17 is just not possible without the leg and upper body strength.
Because, as you say, dogs =/= all dogs (and men =/= all men).
So, why was the original statement limited to women, if it applies to everyone?
That's true. But delivering aircraft is not the same thing as flying combat maneuvers, nor is one flying in emergency situations like damaged flight controls or extreme weather. Many of those delivery flight airplanes were lost anyway.
> And those Soviet combat pilots.
True. Perhaps the Soviets designed their combat planes with lower control forces in mind because they were meant to be flown by women. But the US planes were designed for male strength. Keep in mind that those planes were not designed for any notions of equality or fairness, they were designed as killing machines needing maximum performance. Even a 1% edge meant victory rather than death. And that meant being constrained by the limits of what the pilot could do.
- Those aircraft that required large control forces were disliked for that reason, no matter the pilot's sex, age, race, religion, or choice of favorite vegetable. It was regarded as a flaw in the design. (The B-17 in particular had a long history of changes to its control surfaces and aerodynamics.)
- No engineer is going to say, "Yeah, we cocked that one up." The response to criticism will be, "We made the best trade off of conflicting requirements that was possible at the time."
- The reason women didn't fly combat missions in WWII was that women don't fly combat missions except in extraordinary circumstances. The Soviet Union being the exception that proves the rule: the "girlies" (as described by one general) seem to have done as well as anyone else, but were pulled out of service following the war.
I don't happen to know specific details about any of the aircraft, particularly those flown by the 588th Night Bomber Regiment[1], but I suspect the 586th Fighter regiment[2] flying Yak-1s, -7s, and -9s would face more physical stresses than bomber crews and dive bombers like the 125th Guards[3] are notorious for their pull-out g-forces. (Bonus, cute quotes:
"While the Pe-2's flying characteristics were generally favorable once it was airborne, it took a good amount of force to pull the elevators up to rotate the plane for takeoff. Russian night bombing missions often flew with female pilots and some of the women were not strong enough to get the airplane airborne by themselves. When such a situation occurred, the procedure was to have the navigator get behind the pilot's seat and wrap her arms around the control wheel and help the pilot pull the wheel back. Once the aircraft was airborne, the navigator returned to her duties and the pilot continued to fly the plane without assistance."
"The 587th's Petlyakov Pe-2 dive bombers also required a tall person to operate the top rear machine gun, but not enough women recruited were tall enough, requiring some men to join the aircrews as radio operator and tail gunner." So there's that.)
- Aircrew's sex was not a parameter in aircraft design at any point; I find a certain entertainment in the image of the response to "Well, the control forces are too high with all but one outboard engine out, so we'll have to limit it to male pilots."
I mean, if you're judging solely by physical attributes, the idiots (I mean, airmen) in the ball turrets should have been women---you could have fit in more ammunition.[5]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Witches
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/586th_Fighter_Aviation_Regimen...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/125th_Guards_Dive_Bomber_Regim...
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20120225213451/http://etd.lib.fs... looks like a good read.
[5] https://www.evblog.virginiahumanities.org/2012/09/they-washe...
Everyone knows there are some strong women out there. Common knowledge shouldn't need to be repeated at every opportunity in order to prevent imaginary slights.
See for one notable example see the First Lady Astronaut Trainees (also called the Mercury 13). For years the route to become a pilot for NASA included being a military test pilot, and that was forbidden to women, and so women were unable to become NASA pilots even if they outperformed men on NASA's tests.
https://history.nasa.gov/printFriendly/flats.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_13
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/29/17393698/netflix-document...
We should be careful to avoid attributing innate differences to traits that are really socialised, but we can't simply overlook the vast gender differences in many traits.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00421-006-0351-...
Citation needed, not all planes were B-17s.
Instead of relying on dogmas, the USSR had a very successful all-women night bomber regiment[1]
"The regiment flew in wood-and-canvas Polikarpov U-2 biplanes, a 1928 design intended for use as training aircraft (hence its original uchebnyy designation prefix of "U-") and for crop dusting, which also had a special U-2LNB version for the sort of night harassment attack missions flown by the 588th, and to this day remains the most-produced wood-airframed biplane in aviation history. The planes could carry only six bombs at a time, so eight or more missions per night were often necessary.[6] Although the aircraft were obsolete and slow,"
Not exactly the heavy, high performance aircraft flown by the other powers.
> Citation needed
In various accounts I've read, sometimes a pilot will remark how he pulled at the controls with all his strength to recover. Sorry I don't have anything specific.
And besides, aircraft designers are well aware of the control forces designed into the aircraft. Since they expected the pilots to be men, why wouldn't they design it at the limit of men's strength if that meant they could take advantage of that strength to make the plane perform better? If I were a combat pilot, I'd want the designer to give me every goddam advantage possible. Wouldn't you?
It'd be like telling the Roman soldier "we made your swords shorter and lighter for women soldiers, too bad that puts you at a disadvantage when faced with the enemy who has longer and heavier swords."
The burden of proof is still on you.
> Sorry I don't have anything specific.
Thank you, that concludes the argument.
"With hydraulic flight control systems, the aircraft's size and performance are limited by economics rather than a pilot's muscular strength."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_flight_control_system
The first airplane with hydraulic boost was the 1943 Constellation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Constellation
There you go. The B-17, P-51 and P-47 did not have hydraulic boost.
How is this relevant? You said - quote: "WW2 military planes". That is, planes operated during the war. These Polikarpov bombers were not just operated during the war, they were highly successful in their missions. Please stay on topic here.
Again, we know that women were OK piloting fighter planes like the Spitfire, or attaining the ace status on planes like Yak-1[1] (1940 design, by the way), or flying bombers like Pe-2 (also a 40's design).
That's yet more specific counter-examples to your claim, for which you haven't yet provided any support.
Hundreds of designs[2] took part in air combat in WW2. You'd have to crunch a lot of data for your claim to have any footing (to even argue about most planes of that era, which were all wildly different).
Is this an issue of pride? Can't you simply admit being wrong about women being too weak to fight in these machines? The history is not on your side here.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_women_in_World_War_II#P...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_of_World_War_...
1928 stringbags are not what I was talking about. If you can't see that, that's ok.
> we know that women were OK piloting fighter planes like the Spitfire
For transport use, which is straight and level flying. It's utterly different from combat maneuvering or emergency situations.
> Can't you simply admit being wrong about women being too weak to fight in these machines? The history is not on your side here.
If you can find women fighting air-to-air combat in Spits, P-51s, or P-47s, and winning, you'd have history on your side.
The Soviet women flew Yak-1s, which were only about 2/3 the weight of a P-51. This translates into lower control forces needed. Yak-1s were also much slower, again translating into lower control forces.
It's no surprise that hydraulic boost was added after WW2 as weight and speed increased further.
If you want to believe that control forces have nothing to do with weight, speed, and performance, that women are as strong as men, that hydraulic boost was added just for fun, that's your privilege.
If you said that women weren't strong enough to fly these specific aircraft in combat missions, we would be having a different argument.
I don't doubt that it would be very hard to find women who would have the strength to pilot some WW2 aircraft in combat missions. That is not what you wrote.
It may well be the case that the Spitfire is an example of such aircraft, but the Yak is not, as evidenced by the provided links.
But if you prefer to fight straw men all day long, that's your privilege.