Thank you!
My older brother was home this last week, a bit early for the holidays but it was the only time he could manage. He's a first lieutenant in the USAF and mission commander, and without him I would not have this website, the study I'm conducting, my knowledge and research skills and anything at all regarding aviation and history. He's an original player of War Thunder. About as OG as they come now, he remembers logging into the game under the original twenty tier tree system, pony warfare, planes gameplay only, and with that experience and time he also has access to some of the rarest planes in the game. Things the average player today would have no idea about. Things that only an OG such as himself would even remember; the types of events that aren't practiced anymore.
Back in the day Gaijian used to run events lasting single weekends, get x amount of kills and you could have this plane. The selection at the time seemed infinite, every new event was truly special. It was of course before supersonic jets, when the game still had a heavy focus from early World War 2 to very early Korean War. So the planes offered were mired in true interest. Today if any of those planes were offered in an event half the player base would scoff it off and say, “It's just x plane but with y minor modification who cares?” Well he cared. He cared back then and he cares now.
He's well aware of my website and the scope of my study; he very graciously let me use his account while he was home to test all of his extremely rare collectors items. Here's a list of everything I flew this week:
- A-1H
- F7F-3
- AU-1
- A-26C-45 (gift plane not the xbox premium)
- P-51D-10
- XP-50
- Fw 190C
- Ta 154
- He 112B-2/U2
- Ju 288
- Bf 190E7/U2
- Bf 110C-6
- P-47 (Bubble canopy german captured P-47D)
- I-301
- Lagg 3-23
- Lagg 3-34
- I-16 Type 28
- I-180S
- Pe-2-205
- Su-8
- Yak-9M
- Yak-3(e)
- Yak-3 (VK107)
- I-29
- Spitfire F Mk. IXc
- Spitfire LF Mk. IXc
- Boston Mk. I
- Havoc Mk. I
- Martlet Mk. IV
- Thunderbolt Mk. I
- B7A2 Homare
- G.55S
- IAR-81C
- M.B. 151C1
- D. 521
- Late 289D
- F6C-10-NA
- S.O. 8000
- J26 David
- P-51C-11-NT
Or a total of 40 aircraft spanning every nation (expect Israel). This isn't the whole extent of his collection, just the items I don't have. Whilst technically not all of these are strictly event vehicles they are all at the very least premium/event vehicles I didn't already have and wanted to test for the sake of this study. Some of them were pretty good racers, most of them weren’t. But that's the point of this study, I already know what the best race planes are in this game. I'm just digging for context and to properly show an audience general flight performance across a wide data set. I'm not going to add all of these aircraft to the raw data sheet yet, I'd like to keep things in the same order I have going on right now. But their data will be added when it's their time.
He doesn't accept player friend invites or generally have the time to chat to others but if you wanted to check out his account and his vast amount of cool collectable vehicles (not only planes) you can find him on StatShark.com at Vought_ . Thank you Vought_ for not only getting me into this game 10 years ago and starting my aviation historian journey, but also for lending me your account and allowing me to test things I didn't already have.