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The "easy meat" quote supposedly from Grider's diary is apocryphal. A WW1 air-power historian I know says that no one has seen Grider's diary, not even Eliot Springs, who put that quote in his book.
In my opinion the Pfalz D.III(a) is a lot like the Hurricane. Rugged and successful, everyone who was shot down by one said it was an Albatros, just as Luftwaffe pilots claimed they were shot down by Spitfires in 1940.
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Mik,
Another friend of mine (an engineer who is also a pilot) has put together a spreadsheet for estimating the performance of WW1 biplanes. We started with the Mercedes D.IIIa powered Fokker D.VII because there is a lot of data available for it from France. Based on the aircraft dimensions and engine performance data (from a German test in a sealed chamber), the Pfalz D.IIIa performance does not come out so bad.
The reported 185km/h airspeed at sea level is reasonable (190km/h for the D.VII) provided you assume a prop pitch of at least 2000mm. It climbs a little better than the Albatros D.Va we modeled, but not quite as well as the D.VII.
Treat every figure you see for a WW1 scout with a healthy dose of skepticism. In addition to detailed technical specifications, unless they tell you the air temperature or air density on the day of the test (or at least the time of year!), the performance data could be highly skewed. For example, if I choose a temperature of 30 degrees C at sea level, our Pfalz D.IIIa model ceiling is only about 5200m. If I lower the temperature to 5 degrees C at sea level, the ceiling increases to over 6000m!
I suspect that a lot of the performance data we see that disagrees so sharply with combat reports is due to comparing one aircraft test at a cold temperature with another aircraft test at a warm temperature.
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