I was talking to a gentleman the other day who flew the Typhoon during the battle for Europe.

Apparently the Typhoon could take a huge amount of punishment and still stay in the air, he flew below tree top level and would target individual tanks using a direct radio link with the ground troops.

Apparently there were numerous engine modifications during this time which the pilots were told very little about.  If they were captured they couldn't reveal sensitive information to the enemy.

The Typhoon was in his words "Awful" up high.  It had a very nasty spin characteristic at 15-20 thousand feet and would happily go into a flat spin.  During the spin the centrifugal forces would pin you into the cockpit and the stick would hammer around smashing into various parts of your anatomy.  On one occasion he lost control whilst practicing aerobatics at 20,000 ft and regained control at about 3000 feet.  He told me that more pilots were lost during their first week of conversion training than at any other point in their careers.

His analysis was that the Typhoon was the best ground assault aircraft of the war, literally a flying tank.  When the three blade prop was replaced by the four blade prop she became a very stable platform that could outrun most interceptors at the altitude they were flying at and could survive some pretty intense flak.

Will

My Grandpa flew Typhoons in the war with 193 squadron he flew 70 combat sorties in that airplane.
The engine in that airplne was a beast it was I think naiper sabre with 2400hp. My Grandpa once told me that you swore the airplane was going to rattle apart when it was just ideling

Hey Will that was unnecessary. I only forgot once The Lada coming the other way was surprised followed swiftly by knackered

Twas George Lucas (Hawkers chief test pilot and my grandpa's second cousin) who was cruicial in curing the Typhoons set backs. Once he was flying the prototype and the tail started to wobble at high altitude. He landed the aircraft purely because he knew he had to or the problem would not be solved.

Geoffrey Wellum was another Typhoon test pilot but we're still waiting for that book...

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I saw this recently on the History channel. Very sad tale. It was interesting to hear the first hand accounts of some of the pilots.

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Does anyone know the origin of this phenomenon & how long it continued? From what I can make out it applied mainly to French aircraft.

I was chatting to an old friend who edits stuff for the Discovery & History Channels last night. He wasn't too complimentary about their historical accuracy.