Bf 109 “Rival”; The Focke-Wulf Fw 159
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 9 окт 2023
- Buy my book: amzn.to/3preYyO
Sources for this video can be found at the relevant article on:
militarymatters.online/
If you like this content please consider buying me a coffee or else supporting me at Patreon:
ko-fi.com/ednashmilitarymatters
/ ednash 
Наука
The Battle of Britain would have looked even weirder if the slip-wing Hurricane had been fighting the Fw-159.
Yeah, at least it would have simplified enemy aircraft identification. 😀
One should remember that at the same time the gloster gladiator was designed and built. compared to the gladiator, the Fw 159 appears very modern.
He did hint at 2:08 that compared to other fighters in 1934, it was a fairly advanced design.
On the other hand, by the time Fw159 went into its maiden flight, I-16 was already in service.
I may have missed something but I thought the parasol wing had been around for sometime.
As for Gloster their next aircraft was a jet. Bypassed the piston engined monoplane entirely. Just shows how warfare speeds up technology.
Dude really made the angriest looking 172 Skyhawk lol
This is the first time I've ever seen the Fw-159 OR the He-112. I love all these little nooks and crannies you find :-)
@@DIREWOLFx75
Yes, and explain that the He-100, and the He-112, were the SAME plane, with different designativo, for nazi propaganda reazons.!!!
Rex's Hangar here on RUclips has done quite an extensive video on the He 112 if you want to check it out, it is a lot longer than Ed's usual fare though.
The Focke-Wulf 159 looks like a Salmon attached with a wing.
Yes, but, an ill tempered salmon!
It might have made a good high-speed reconnaissance aircraft, with excellent downward visibility.
I thought the exact same thing. If they could have ironed out the landing gear issues, it might have made a great reconnaissance/artillery spotter aircraft that would have dovetailed well with the Wehrmacht's "blitzkrieg" warfare style.
Easy prey for the bandits coming from above!
Single-seat reconnaissance aircraft were not a thing at that time as pilots had too little time for spotting and recording.
All those wing struts would have added drag, limiting speed.
@@scootergeorge7089 Agreed. And an overall look of weakness and frailty, even by German overall puny standards. Obsolete right off the drawing board. But genius Tank was already showing his teeth
Kurt Tank usually took his designs up on their first flights. I wonder if he was on board.
I'd love to see a video on the early development of the BF 109. Normally you don't see anything detailed until the BF 109E
YES I was thinking the same. The Condor Legion started with a few Bf-109 A's and then the B's and C's cleaned up. The Luftwaffe took the Bf-109 D's to Poland and that was superior to Poland's air force. But I wanna see some stuff on the actual development I know there's a lot going on between 1936 and 1940
A very interesting looking aircraft that was developed at the time when monoplanes were taking over from the biplane. But Focke-Wulf did bounce back with the superb Fw-190, then missed out again with the arrival of the jet engine.
still this was a poor showing and they had better come up with something to recoup Tanks reputation
@@mikepette4422 The Fw-190 did that, but Focke-Wulf totally failed to get a jet fighter into the air by the close of WW2. The Ta-183 was only at the model stage when the war ended, Most likely would not have flpwn until 1947
I would like a what if BB with the Heinkel He 112 instead of the 109. Or, better: the Gladiator vs the Fw 159!!!
Considering that the Gladiator held it's own over Malta against everything that the Italians could throw at it in 1940/41, I'd hazard a guess that it would have done very well for itself against the 159.
As for how the Heinkel 112 would have performed in the Battle of Britain, it had more than 1.5 times the range of the early Bf 109, while being broadly comparable in most other respects. Given that the main issue with the 109 over England was it's lack of range, I'd say that an updated 112 (with the DB 601 engine) may well have made quite a big difference.
Thanks Mr Ed Nash.....
Old F-4 Flying Shoe🇺🇸
The initial sequence of video is from one of the many RUclips videos of Da Vinci's Songo di Volare as adapted by Christopher Tin. Used in the video game Civilization VI. Tin won a Grammy for his Baba Yetu from Civilization IV. The first piece of music from a video game to do so. And not in a special catagory.
Cool as always Ed,
Thanks :)
Fw 159 makes me think of the PZL 11, and there were French parasol wing fighters only a little bit earlier. This wing placement must have had some appeal--was it just a coin toss which wing of a biplane you left out, or were there real advantages to the highish wing placement in a fighter?
More on the Heinkel 112 please. On paper this seems a close competitor to the ME 109
3:23 "This led to an extremely streamlined design."
I suspect the parasol wing was chosen more for its familiarly to the engineers designing the plane than to its future pilots.
At 02:45 did you say *Transitioning...? (Sniggers like the big kid I really am! 😂)
Now to transition back to the only acceptable persona available to the 54 year old parent I portray, I thank you once again for another well crafted and beautifully portrayed upload and please keep them coming young man.
Much awaited, much appreciated excellent insights as always from you.
The 159 always looked to me like they forgot to add the bottom wing to a biplane. Other that the fact it looks like the trainer I do wonder what advantage having the wing on the top would give, especially when you consider the how much sky it blocks out.
Good for ground attack?
@@bob_the_bomb4508 and perfect for landing... maybe even on intended carrier ship
Considdering it was in a period when biplane fighters were still the norm, it is an advance over what was common in service. It certainly looks odd today, but in the 1930s, it was cutting edge.
@@bob_the_bomb4508 I did think of that but as a fighter the wing would make it easy to bounce from above, especially as the enemy is most likely to be ahead of you.
@@xmeda And watching you undercarriage fall off.
Another " l had no idea " from your collection Ed. Thanks
At first glance the high wing seems to have a real blind spot that would invite an attack from above and ahead. The details of the pilot sitting behind the wing the notch and hoo haw in the wing, look like this blind spot was addressed.
I wonder how well this worked.
To eyes used to low wings this wing look doesn't look like a high speed design. It looks like it would be torn off in a dive.
The 'blind spot' probably wouldn't have been significantly different to many of it's contemporaries - the biplane fighters of that era tended to solve the issue in the same way.
Saw the narrow landing gear and thought: ground loop.
Great episode! Cheers!
A great very interesting video and aircraft I did not know anything about it Mr . Ed.Imagine the FW159 flying in formations with the soviet flying tank carrier or flying submarine.Have a good one.
Great video, Ed...👍
6:21 D-INGA had a few dings.
Muito bom! Grato pelo vídeo.
There are quite a few aircraft that weren't adopted which were clearly missed opportunities. The Fw 187 was one of those. The Fw 159...was not.
I guess we'd better file this one under 'Vice-Versa' - as in: 'If it looks good, it'll probably fly well''. First plane I've seen that looks better on the ground with all its panels open that it does in flight.
To be honest, the only true competitor for the 109 when it was proposed was the he 112
I agree. It would seem that the RLM also didn't consider the Focke-Wulf to be a serious proposal, considering that BFW, Heinkel and Arado were provided with Rolls-Royce Kestrel engines for their prototypes, while F-W was not.
You have to admire how amazing the 109 was at the time. The Heinkel was too complex, the 159 too conservative. The 109 was pure.
one can't help but notice just how many HA-1112 slides got put up when talking about the BF-109... you can tell the diff b/c the HA-1112 has a much larger, squared-off airscoop below the propellor, where the 109 has a much smaller, more conformal intake much like a Merlin-powered P-51.
Ironically, in the film _The Battle of Britain_ the HA-1112s they borrowed - along with the CASA 2.111s standing in for Heinkel HE-111s - were all powered with Merlin engines... and thus the only full-sized aircraft appearing on-screen (the Stukas were models) *without* Merlin power were a pair of Ju 52 transports... and the North American B-25 camera ship with its big round Wrights.
Huh, and Tank has such a good reputation for designing aircraft. Maybe a case of if it looks right, the Focke-Wulfe office needs to slow down on the schnapps at lunch?
if the Fw 159 was adopted and took the place of the BF109, WW2 would of ended about a week after it started.
Another odd thkng is the fuselage. It looks far more like a 109's than a 190's. Perhaps losing was a 'good' technical\psychological thing? In that it helped him decide to just do his own thing. To get a team & build his absolute expression of the fighter essential for Germany. Resulting in a real anti-109\Spitfire design, the 190.
_I mean the 159 fuselage has many 109 aspects\cues & the 109 was an agreed success. And so Kurt was "nah, start again on the lot." Ofc, Kurt was a genius, I'm barely average."_ 😂
That might be more to do with optimal design for Radial vs inline engines. The Hughes H-1 pretty much defined the ideal design used for high speed radial engine fighter aircraft through WW2. The only one to not follow the design was the P-47.
@@CreeperOnYourHouse what exactly did H-1 define that was not used before it (aside from the flush riveting)?
@@sergeychmelev5270 it's not that it specifically influenced any specific design, but the specific appearance of how the engine sat on the body with how the streamlining was done behind it was seen repeatedly on almost every ww2 radial engine fighter. It's not the same type of streamlining as on an inline engine.
If the Germans had gone ahead with this then there probably wouldn't have been a Battle of Britain.
I'd guess that the 159 would have had major problems over Spain, and this would have caused Germany to have a rethink about their choice. Considering that Heinkel had developed the He 100 in the interim, it's possible that they would have been able to get this into full production by the end of 1939. I doubt that it would have made a huge difference if they had still been using the 159 in Poland, but having the He 100 in time for the war in the west would make a huge difference, since it had more than 1.5 times the range of the 109, and was faster than any other fighter in 1940 (by a significant margin).
Apparently, the 109 was not referred by Messerschmitt as the BF109, but rather the ME109. Messerschmitt bought the BF concern and the 109 design, in 1938 or so and thereafter referred to their products as ME109, ME110 etc. Even Messerschmitt himself referred to it as the ME109.
They recently found a Hungarian-manufactured 109 G in Lake Balaton
epic time
Looks sleek.
Like a fish.
0:31 NO! P40 and P38 were Pacific Twins 0:31
"Dude! Turn back! You left your lower wings at the field!" (Sorry, couldn't resist...) I wasn't familiar with this aircraft before, have to say it truly looks unique. Definitely a transitional design, probably would've been a terror in the skies if things had happened 2-3 years earlier.
I'm surprised that they didn't try a prototype with a mid mounted wing. The undercarriage might not have needed re-engineering.
There's not a lot of room in that area of the fuselage. Depending on exactly how high in the fuselage you put the wing, the main spar will interfere with the undercarriage, ammunition capacity, or pilot legroom, all of which would necessitate a significant redesign. Probably the easiest alteration would be to a low-wing design, with the undercarriage retracting outwards like the Bf 109 or the Spitfire. That said, The Focke-Wulf proposal didn't look anywhere near as serious as its competitors (mostly due to being based on their existing Fw 56 trainer rather than a clean-sheet design) - which would also appear to be the opinion of the RLM, given that Focke-Wulf was the only one of the 4 manufacturers in the competition not to be given a Rolls-Royce Kestrel engine for their prototype.
Kurt Tank seemed to have accidentally designed an aircraft that just on looks alone, would've been a great CAS/tankbuster.
Would've been amazing if armed with medium calibre autocannons and/or unguided rockets.
Except no one was thinking about that at the time......
Kinda bullet dodged!
A rectngular constant chord wing might be easy to build, but it's never going to be highly efficient.
Looks a little bit like a Cessna 172 and a Fw-190 had a baby...
I wonder why the FW -159 was not built in greater numbers as a training aircraft!
Germany already had quite a few different trainer aircraft available. Also, the Junkers Jumo 210 engine used in the Fw 159 was the same as used in the early-models of the Bf 109, Bf 110 and Ju 87, and those aircraft would have received priority for use of the available engine supply.
Certainly i dont think that Hitler said " This looks like a Fieseler Storch, Let us choose this as or main fighter"
G'day,
Yay Team !
Parasol-Wing Fighters
Make a sort of sense,
If
Engines are
Presumed to be
Limited to
750 Hp, or so...
Daimler-Benz
Soon
Exceeded the 750 Hp
Parasol's Performance
Envelope.
Such is life,
Have a good one...
Stay safe.
;-p
Ciao !
The extra endurence of the HE 112 if adopted might just have tipped the scales in the Battle of Britain .Although there wouldnt have been so many of them as BF109s they would probably still have outnumbered the RAF fighters
In the Battle of Britain, RAF fighters outnumber the 109. Of course you have to had the Me-110 and all the bombers.
@@samuelgordino No they didn't. Roughly equal numbers of single engine fighters on both sides and roughly the same losses. From the fighter perspective, BoB was a draw.
Looks like the wing would rip off in a dogfight
Probably had pretty good turn performance with that wing though?
I have this massive urge to rip the wing off and jam it into the bottom of the fuselage.
✌️
Why not take the hypothetical further. Imagine WW2 where the Germans have this "beauty," Italians using the Stipa-Caproni, French the Arsenal-Delane 10 and the Brits something like the Airspeed AS.31, for example. What a sight to behold.
The sosialism with real competition work. That time extremely efficiently.
It seems the whole wings' structure were very frail, with the high GS manouvers that more modern fighters had to do, don't think that it could've achieved the same results of the superlative bf109, it seems more and aircraft from ten yrs before. And don't think that it could've been upgunned as the bf109 was, the wings surely couldn't support a pair of 20mm guns/gun pods as the 109F/G.
Short war if luftwaffe had gone with the 159
PZL 24 the ,maybe, best monoplane fighter in '34 was a parasol too...sort off!
Well, green on green casualties would be minimized I suppose...
This would be a really beautiful design if the wings were at the right place. Someone photoshop that please
So the 159 was a bit of a Dinga? And deserved to get the Gong?
(Sorry Ed)
It would have been a good carrier-based fighter.
I would really like to see footage or animation of that landing gear in operation.
Would be a good looking plane if not for the wing
got rid of the weird learning gear and gave it a proper wing & decent armed it would have been pretty sleek fighter for its day...
Kurt Tank should not have designed a fighter while imbibing at Oktoberfest!
Visibility would have been awful from any enemy attacking from above etc ! Looks comical now 😂
Only because we are looking at it in relation to later designs. To be fair, a lot of contemporary designs (Gloster Gladiator, Fiat CR 42, Polikarpov I-15) would have had similar issues. All of them addressed it in the same way - by notching the trailing edge of the wing.
For the Battle of Britain they would have been better off with the Falke instead.
LOL looks like the Fokker D VIII ... why ? .... why ? .... why ?????
The similarity stops at the parasol base, like the polish PZL types
Die hat hoffentlich nicht Kurt Tank verbrochen.😳
Have you considered doing a video on the Miles M.20?
One of my first!
ruclips.net/video/wmyVmCCxtRM/видео.html
What is that?! WTF is that?!
Always found the 159 one of the most elegantly menacing combat aircraft in history.
There wouldn't have been a Battle of Britain because the Luftwaffe equipped with the parasol fighter wouldn't have advanced in the playoffs against Poland and France in the first place 😂
If germany had of chosen the Fw159 they would have won the battle of Britian as the R.A.F pilots would have laughed so much at it they would have died of laughter
:)
We had the same thing in the Allies camp! Rolls-Royce was known for brutally politicking their engines around the halls of court and the admiralty. The only way the sabre engine got into the typhoon was that there were a few honest people that had access to high places. Look at some of the things that happened to Frank whittle. A lot of that is because a Rolls-Royce behind-the-scene trying to stab everybody else in the back.
Wow imagine if this aircraft entered service the brits plenty of dead jokes to tell..
just wow. yikes.
Doesn’t look safe.
I think the Poles would have won
it's so ugly that now I have eye cancer
The 159 looks like junk from a 1935 point of view and shame on Kurt Tank.
7:23 "Image say the Battle of Britain with Spitfires and Hurricanes going toe to toe with this!" Silcence 'hmm hmmm wa hahahahahahahahahahahahaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahaahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahah. Good Grief that joke is almost lethal.'