Simviation Forums

Greatest Ever... Machines  
Channel 5 Mon Jul 11 8:00 PM
(60 min., 2005, United Kingdom, Education/Science/Factual Topics)
 
A celebration of modern technology, this series debates the best of the best. A well-known panel including author Tom Clancy look at their favourite fighter planes and pick their ultimate top ten flying machines.

Should be cool.

TSC.

,,,mmm...just finished watching it .......super TV....the P51 came out top .........just pushing the Spit into second place on range and sheer speed..........it became the best ever fighter AFTER it got the Spit engine I believe...commoner

Yeah saw most of it, Discovery had something on at the same time... also a top ten countdown of the greatest fighters  :P

Biased American made telly. Any other panel of judges would have found the Spitfire top.

For the record, this American finds the Spit to come out on top.  Although we're opening a can here...

its always going to be difficult to have these lists be fair. The spitfire and mustang were made for two completely differant missions. In their own departments they were each the best. to put one infront of the other is really impossible. Also remember although it was built in the US the Mustang was a british design built under contract by north american. With the merlin in it the mustang was just as much a british plane as an american one. Also showing how little this list was researched, why wasn't the Hurricane on the list, it did more than the spitfire.

I didn't watch this programme. Anything like this is bound to be affected by national pride & personal preference, no matter how unbiased you try to be. The P-51D Mustang would have to be a strong contender on my list of top fighting machines. The Spitfire might be a national icon but it was designed as a short-range interceptor (a job it did very well) & never intended as an all-round fighter. The Spitfire's main advantage was in being adaptable to modifcation to suit operational requirements & the later versions bore little relationship to the original design. They could almost be regarded as a different aircraft.*

although it was built in the US the Mustang was a british design built under contract by north american. With the merlin in it the mustang was just as much a british plane as an american one.

Just to set the record straight, the P-51 Mustang was loosely based on a RAF requirement but is as American as apple pie. The British Purchasing Commission was touring all US aircraft manufacturers in early 1940 buying up as many military aircraft as they could. Their prime requirement was fighters. They approached the comparatively new North American Aviation to build the Curtiss P-40 under licence. Although the company had never built a fighter, James H. "Dutch" Kindelberger & his small management team decided it would be more lucrative to build their own design from scratch. The vice-president J. Leland Attwood persuaded the Commission with the famous remark: "We can build you a better airplane than the P-40". An order for a prototype was placed on April 10th, 1940. Austrian-born Edgar Shmued was put in charge of the project with instructions to "Keep it simple". The result was the NA-73X, first flown on October 26th, 1940,