Interwar aviation normally advanced in roughly three-year steps as funding limited how quickly experimental ideas became deployable systems. Wartime money and urgency compressed that process so dramatically that useful technologies could enter service within months. The main surge of genuinely new fielded technology came from 1939 to 1943. After 1943, combat lessons, production experience, and testing more often produced improved variants and evolutionary refinement. Comparing a 1935 design with a 1945 aircraft therefore mistakes an exceptional wartime acceleration for the normal standard its designers should have met.
Chapter · 1:00:32-1:03:26
Wartime acceleration distorts judgments of prewar aircraft
A burst of deployable technology from 1939 to 1943 made sound late-1930s designs appear obsolete with exceptional speed.