[schwarze-man]

Hi everyone,
I am pleased to say that I have more results about the DB605 engine serial number analysis from the loss records of the 800+ engines supplied by Matti, Tomislav and otherb contributors.
So far in my posts (mainly about #68 to #70) I have covered the DB600/601 engines and I think the numbers stack-up well. However, although the further numbers for the DB605 are well represented, my analysis of the DB605 5-Digit serial numbers is not satisfactory. Simply put, the numbers of engines indicated by the 5-digit block numbers seems too high. I suspect that there may be gaps in the serial number allocations that I cannot identify.
So, I decided to consider the later DB605D engines in the loss reports and I quickly saw how well defined they are, for the period Nov '44 to Jan '45. I will report those details later.
A by-product of the 605D study was a better definition of the 605A serial numbers for the new 8-digit numbering system that was introduced in about early 1943. The 8-digit numbers have the first three digits for a makers id, eg 007 for Genshagen, followed by a five-digit number for the sequential engine serial number starting 00001. So, the first engine in this new numbering from Genshagen was 00700001.
I was able to corelate the BIOS report of engine manufacture quantities, dates and plants accurately and easily confirm data against the loss table engine numbers and the inferred production numbers.
There are some interesting relationships between engine production dates and the date of the loss. Generally, the first date of loss of a series in the data will be a fairly early serial number, but it won't be the first made. The vagaries of engine supply, airframe build date and then use mess it all up. However, the dates of some losses were fairly close to manufacture and, with these series here of over 10,000 engines, there is some good correlation.
There are some errors in the data I have to work with here, possibly 1%. I think that I can accurately correct 50% of those but some are just errors that cannot be corrected accurately. Fortunately, the data is large enough to not use the info with errors.
The number of engines in this 8-digit engine serial number analysis covers approx 25,000 DB605A engines built by six manufacturing plants in the period. There is one plant with 10,000+ engines, two with 6,000+ and two with less than 2,000.
I will list the details on my next post.

Cheers

SM