Sweet pic! although i cant find records of any Ta-182s ever combating bombers(though they were intended to) this is still a cool picture of one of Germany's finest aircraft of the war! These ones are Ta-152 H-1 varients, and Green 3 was flown by Oberfeldwebel Josef "Jupp" Keil, of Stab ./JG301. He was the only known Ta-152 'ace'. again: Awesome Picture!

:( ...why come my mercedes never gets attention like that?

i definitely plan on seeing that one!

beautiful indeed

Haha! Thanks for the welcome. I didnt mean to sound like a know it all if it came accross that way. im just a history major and a lifelong WW2 aviation buff, so i know all sorts of random, useless things like that!

perhaps... if yould just made a dive bombing run and were going quite fast you would drop the gear to bleed off speed in order to be able to bail safely. just a thought... or maybe they were extended during the dive(im assuming the dive ok..) this was a commonly recorded practice among U.S.N. dive bomber pilots in the pacific, even though they had huge airbrake flaps as well. Anything that might cause drag like that will keep the plane from picking up too much speed to be controllable.

Beautiful pic and props to the artist of course!, but thats not a ki-51, its a D3A VAL dive bomber. You can tell by the forward sloping lower front side of the tail fin. The one below with retracted gear is a B5N2 torpedo bomber. Haha, just sayin. beautiful pic though! i downloaded it!