German Pilots Tested A Captured P-51 Mustang... Their Verdict Stunned The Luftwaffe

On D-Day, a young American pilot went down over Normandy in bad weather and was captured near Rouen, but left his cockpit radio switched on so his friends flying overhead would know what had happened to him. Seven months after this channel told the story of a captured Thunderbolt, a different Rechlin test pilot climbed into a different American fighter, and found something even harder for Berlin to hear. This documentary follows the P-51B Mustang "Jerry" from a fighter sweep over Normandy on 6 June 1944 to the Luftwaffe's main test center at Rechlin, through the flying circus that toured it to frontline units, and into the arithmetic of an air war that no single test flight, however honest, could change. WHAT THIS DOCUMENTARY COVERS ● The loss of 2nd Lieutenant Thomas E. Fraser's P-51B "Jerry" over Normandy on D-Day, and the detail of the cockpit radio left switched on ● The lineage of the 4th Fighter Group from the RAF's all-American Eagle Squadrons to the Eighth Air Force ● North American Aviation, James Kindelberger, and the rushed 1940 design of the original Allison-engined Mustang ● Why the Mustang's laminar flow wing was wasted on its first engine, and what Ronald Harker found in thirty minutes at Duxford ● The Rolls-Royce Merlin conversion, the Mustang X trials, and the Packard-built P-51B ● Hauptmann Hans-Werner Lerche's evaluation of the captured Mustang at Rechlin ● Why Lerche found the Mustang superior in a turn, against German expectations of American fighters ● Zirkus Rosarius and the tactics taught to Luftwaffe pilots for fighting the Mustang ● Big Week, February 1944, and the collapse of German fighter pilot training hours ● What happened to Fraser, to Lerche, to Ronald Harker, and to the aircraft itself