The difficulty of flying got me hooked, in fact!
Hello Hubbabubba,
Some Warbirds are more difficult to fly than others, but nobody in their right mind designs a combat aircraft to be difficult to fly.
Being difficult to fly kills your OWN pilots and the objective is to kill the other side's pilots!
The Spitfire Mk.I you described has a reputation for having very few vices and a ridiculously low stall speed.
The "difficult" part comes from having an aeroplane that is generally quite heavy for its size when compared to modern General Aviation aircraft and with that comes the resulting higher stall speeds, and faster take-off and landing speeds.
Many of the best liked (by pilots and not necessarily the armchair variety) fighters such as the Spitfire, A6M, Hellcat, tend to be described as quite easy to fly.
The flight modelling in CFS offers a LOT of possibilities that I don't believe we have exploited yet. Part of it is a lack of documentation and even today, over 20 years after its release, *I* am still discovering things in the AIR file that do things I did not expect. The Airacobra flight model took forever to develop because it had characteristics and behaviour that other aircraft did not have. To make it unstable, I had to figure out what parts of the AIR file affected that. Adjusting one thing would break others. There are many inter-relationships that I am still trying to figure out.... The Stirling gave me another surprise.
There is a whole lot more that the basic CFS AIR file can be made to do, but I don't yet have the knowledge to figure out how to tune things even though I recognize the features are present. I believe the people building the stock flight models spent much much less time on their development and testing.
....While most aircraft behave fairly well, there are some that have a reputation for dangerous handling in certain conditions.
The improperly ballasted Airacobra is one example that is easily available now. Another example would be a P-51D with its fuselage fuel tank filled and not carrying drop tanks.
The point I am trying to make is that the "difficult to fly" is not so much a reflection on the simulator's capabilities which are actually quite good but is really more an evaluation of a particular implementation of flight modelling which may or may not be so good.
- Ivan.
, in fact!