[Nick Beale]

I go along with Graham's comments: the more Allied pilots' accounts I see, the more confused I get. One day they'll say they could easily catch a given type of enemy aircraft, the next " these [whatever] were too fast" or "we were unable to close" etc. The performance figures we all use don't seem to apply!

I'm sure a lot had to do with the particular situation of a combat but I also wonder whether individual machines of the same type were much more variable in performance than we now realise? Certainly you read pilots saying that a particular aircraft they flew was aither a good or a bad one of the type.