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Gear up!! Comments welcome.

I love the way the gear never goes up quite at the same rate on these old birds (not just Spitfires!)! Great capture of such a characteristic warbird moment. And of course... it IS a Sptfire!

The gear actually follow a sequence in which the two legs alternate in stages and don't move at the same time to reduce the load on the hydraulic system. Definitely part of the charm of these old fighters.

August, I know that the design was intended to function that way, but sometimes I think the results were a little more random:) You often see the historical footage of a group of airplanes taking off, and the sequence sure looks uhm... shall we say... less than clock-like in its precision!

This is of course to be expected given the kind of wear and tear some of these planes took in active service, and the often "wing and a prayer" methods of keeping them flying... Ah, anyway - its so iconic and I just love it!

Well, maybe Peter. Several years ago I was designing a P-51 for a computer flight simulation game and I wanted to animate the landing gear sequence correctly so I studied many P-51s taking off (hey, research is hard, but it has to be done). The sequence which appeared initially to be random turned out to be very precise when I learned what to look for, and I was able to make my computer model work just like the real thing. I would expect the same of other types.