Beautiful. The only thing nicer to hear than a Merlin....is two Merlins. Jim - did you ever get to work on the Mosquito? One of my former grad students works for Roush Industries in Livonia Michigan. Aside from all their automotive and aerospace work, Roush is one of the largest rebuilders of RR Merlins and RR Griffons in the world. At any given time, they usually have a dozen or more engines going through their shop for vintage aircraft folks, boat racers etc. from all over the world.
If you really want a good read about WW-2 and later aircraft and what they were
really like to fly - look for books by Capt. Eric “Winkle” Brown.
Brown was a Royal Navy test pilot, but he was also perfectly fluent in German and his dad was a businessman who travelled to Germany often in the 1930s taking along young Eric. Thus, Eric Brown met Ernst Udet, Hermann Goering and all of the other prominent German aviation people when he was a teenager before the war.
At the outbreak of the war, he joined the RN and flew various fighters and then joined the Test Flight at Boscombe Down (the British counterpart of Edwards AFB). At the end of the war, he was the Cheif Allied pilot who flew most of the captured Axis aircraft back to the west. He flew them all from the tiny He162 Volksjager to the Me262 to all of the German bombers plus all of the Japanese aircraft too as well as many modern types including the Hawker Hunter, F86 Sabre, and the F4 Phantom. In fact Brown flew more different types in his career than any other pilot in history and he is a superb author as well. He just died in the last year or so at the age of about 96.
His (he wrote six in all, I think) books are still widely available and are absolutely top notch reads. If you cannot find them in a bookstore - check out
www.abebooks.com. One of the books pits one fighter against another (and Brown had flown all of them) - even if the two planes never actually met in combat. For example, in
Duels in the Sky, he discussed the likely outcome of a match between the Corsair and Hellcat and the Me109 and Fw190 or the Japanese Zero versus the Fw190....fascinating.
Cheers,
Pete
awesome speed and fire power for a wooden aircraft
