Gunther Rall - 3rd highest scoring ace dies at 91

[Inverted2]

Read the obituary, he sure lived an amazing life. 275 victories.....wow!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituar ... -Rall.html

[loopy]

I've read some history on him before. Truly a singular gentleman. RIP.

[bodyflyer]

One must remember the Luftwaffe flew untill they were either killed or put out of action by being made a POW or badly wounded, the Allies had a rotation after about 200hrs combat, thus there were no allied pilots with such high scores,

I'll agree with that. Well, the 200 hrs applied to some US fighter pilots I recall; I thought the Brits were much more open ended, although pilots still rotated in and out of front line and training jobs etc.

I once looked over some stats on the German fighter pilots vs. others. While there must have been overclaiming too, the numbers actually make sense. Very very roughly it can work out to a fighter pilot meeting the enemy every second sortie, and every second time he gets into combat, the top pilot scores a kill. So a decent US pilot, doing one tour and making 4 hour missions out over Germany gets 50 missions, and a dozen kills. Some of the top German aces made 800+ missions, although often they were shot down a number of times along the way. 800 missions can result in what otherwise seem to be a crazy 200 kills.