A Me 109 crashlands at a Berlin Air Show 2008

[Doktor Krollspell]

Hello!

Here's some video footage from a Berlin Air show showing a Me Bf 109 that has a rather unsuccesful landing. Hope you don't mind the swedish narrator...

http://www.svd.se/nyheter/webbtv/utrike ... 301419.svd


Horrido!

Krollspell

[phylo_roadking]

Looks like the general press opinion was a skid, and it does look as if it drifted off the hard apron and onto the grass. The pilot seems in the video to have been trying very hard for a three-point landing and starts to drift it on the wind. We only get a smattering of Euro weather forecasts here in the UK, but wasn't Berlin kind of wet and stormy this weekend for the big ILA airshow??? I can understand a main strut collapsing if the G6 drifted onto soft grass.

[Commissar D, the Evil]

Always was a tricky plane to land, due to the configuration of the landing gear. Looks like the right-side gear collapsed.

Bestens,
David

[Tom Houlihan]

Okay, I'm not overly familiar with flight characteristics, but that video generated a question.

I know that a lot of the airfields the Luftwaffe used were grass. How common was that problem during the war?

[phylo_roadking]

The ME109 was well known for "groundlooping" and various undercarriage issues. LW aerodromes were pampered items LOL - smoothed, rolled, perforated plate being laid etc., even down to watering equipment being available to keep dust down...and for instance NOT being used properly in and around Athens and Salonika during the Crete campaign, when with the airfield support units having been shipped off East for the start of Barbarossa, regular soldiers were given the job of keeping the dust down...and made it FAR worse!!!

[Dragunov]

yeah, looks like one of the gear collapsed as it touched down.

was it a repro or the real thing?

[phylo_roadking]

As far as I know, it's a restored G6. There are several Buchons still flying on the warbird display circuit, and at least two in Europe have been reengined back from the Buchon's Merlin to make a kind of "fake" 109...but there are as yet no full reproduction 109's as there are FW190s and Ju262s.

[Waleed Y. Majeed]

It's a hybrid!

Berlin’s Schönefeld airport was shut for more than an hour yesterday afternoon after the EADS historic flight’s Messerschmitt Bf 109G-10 ‘Black Two’ – piloted by Walter Eichhorn – groundlooped onto the grass after landing on the tarmac following the aircraft’s ILA2008 display.

The starboard undercarriage leg of the “Augsburg Eagle” as the type is known, collapsed causing the starboard wing tip and the propeller to strike the ground – stopping the engine – as the aircraft completed a 120-degree ground-loop to starboard. At the time of writing, it is not known whether the undercarriage leg collapsed before the aircraft left the runway, out of control – or whether the collapse was caused by the groundloop itself.

An EADS spokesman said that an investigation was underway and it was believed that the damage to the aircraft was relatively light. The aircraft was lifted back onto its undercarriage – using airbag technology – and was then wheeled back to dispersal. This particular Messerschmitt is a ‘hybrid’ airframe, using the fuselage from a Bf 109G-10 and the wings from a Spanish-built Hispano HA-1112-M1L Buchon which originally had a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine.

From: http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/20 ... -show.html

[phylo_roadking]

Interesting! Not the hybrid I had in mind...for AFAIK there aren't many differences at all between Buchon and 109 wings LOL....except they'll have had fewer flying hours on them probably!

But I see they ARE describing it as a groundloop now

[Uncle Joe]

Folks, the Bf 109 gear was strictly designed to operate from grass like any other fighter of its generation*! If there is any possibility, a 109 pilot should never land on concrete or asphalt. When landing on grass, the naturally "slippery" grass surface allows pilot to make more mistakes than on concrete. The latter easily induces higher lateral forces on the gear that it does not really like.

*To be exact, it was designed to operate from a round or so grass field of a given diameter so that it could allways take off or land directly against the wind. Remember, most European (and US for that matter) pre-war military aerodromes were just grassy pastures where it was to align one´s path against the wind.