Fancy owning a two-seat Second World War Messerschmitt fighter?

Not if you want to live you won't, they had a nasty "sabre dance" like stall problem on take off, killed a lot of pilots including two experten recently - it was so unusual it took powerful computer modelling to work out what was happening.

Back in the day no one had the foggiest how to solve it - pilots were just taught to climb out very shallow - otherwise it'd lose air flow, stall and drop out of the sky backwards, not a survivable experience in most cases.

Re: Excuse me ..

Wrong.

For some unknown reason the bf109 and if I remember rightly the bf110 were both referred to in that way officially until the end of the war. The Me210/410 was designated after Dr Willi (and he probably wished they weren't) but it wasn't backdated for some reason.

The only bf109 you'll find with an Me109 build plate would be some few that were repaired/refurbished on the eastern front. In Estonia I think.

If any survive they'd be rarer than dodo's teeth.

Re: Excuse me ..

Nope, ME was applied to all new aircraft post 1938, e.g. ME210, ME410 etc. Bf109 & indeed the Bf110 were pre 1938 and kept their original prefix, they were commonly referred to as ME for later models but officially it's Bf. I've seen the serial plate on a 109G, it says Bf109.

Re: Why were inverted V12s popular with the Germans?

The packaging is better with the sump/crank upwards (the widest part of the engine is towards the widest part of the fuselage. It's a reason why flat-12 and wide V were used in formula 1 - easy to build aero around.

The reason you don't get hydro lock and a very expensive set of flying piston rods is the DB engine was a dry sump design - car engines are wet sump, invert one while it's running and expensive things happen quite quickly.

Specific to the 109 it also allowed a 20/30mm motorcannon to fire through the hollow crank and for two 151 to be placed above the flat deck of the "sump". The toasty motor kept the guns warm (its - 30c at 35,000ft) & the narrow mounting of most of the weapons (compared to a spit for example) made it much easier to put shells through a target in a nice tight pattern. Win-win unless you were the other guy.

However it wasn't all sweetness and light. The canopy opened to the side, so forget about getting out in a hurry, the undercarriage had all the design flair of an Austin Allegro (although it's understandable why it was done that way, to save weight) - and the wing tabs turned the thing into basically a giant 1700hp vibrator on fast sharp turns (to the point that some pilots wired them shut). A good pilot was roughly on parity until about late 43, an inexperienced one would be dug out of the permafrost after about a week.

The engine had mechanical fuel injection so it could be bunted when a Merlin would half stall in a cloud of black smoke (partly solved by miss shillings orifice). But being early FI and being 6 litres larger than the Merlin it drank fuel and gave only a 20 minute combat radius over the UK.

Being higher compression than the Merlin - they didn't like artificial petrol either and there are many unexplained accidents were aces just disappeared or had engine failure possibly attributable to fuel that would make 2** cut with Guinness seem like a good idea.

Incidentally if anyone ever tries to sell you purple petrol I'd not bother - they used to use it in racing cars post war but don't leave it overnight - it dissolves the fuel tank.

Re: question

"....and one nice straight run over Trumps next Inauguration...*"

Do not forget that he has now instructed the pentagon to arrange a military parade.

During a parade, it is common to have all parading personnel face the dictator as they march past. It is just a matter of convincing the great orange one that this includes all tank turrets as well...

Re: question

No, I don't think parades are tradition, unless it's Gay pride Day, of course.

But if you're dreaming of a fly-by, that would give a reboot to the old meme 'the British are coming!'