"Bf109 vs Me109" Topic

What's the difference?

None – see link

One is accurate and the other is incorrect.

Simple as that.

The same for Bf110 and Me110.

But not for Me-210 or Me-410 or Me-262. There were no Bf-210s, Bf-410s, or Bf-262s.

<sigh>

It all made sense inside the German military.

- Ix

Found on Wikipedia: "Originally the aircraft was designated as Bf 109 by the RLM, since the design was submitted by the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke (literally "Bavarian Aircraft Works", meaning "Bavarian Aircraft Factory"; sometimes abbreviated B.F.W., akin to BMW) during 1935. The company was renamed Messerschmitt AG after 11 July 1938 when Erhard Milch finally allowed Willy Messerschmitt to acquire the company. All Messerschmitt aircraft that originated after that date, such as the Me 210, were to carry the "Me" designation. Despite regulations by the RLM, wartime documents from Messerschmitt AG, RLM and Luftwaffe loss and strength reports continued to use both designations, sometimes even on the same page."

More: "By the time the Second World War started, manufacturers increasingly built developments of successful existing types rather than completely new designs. To reflect the lineage of those aircraft, the new types were numbered in steps of 100 above the number of the basic model they were derived from. As mentioned previously, the Junkers Ju 88 formed the basis for the Ju 188, Ju 288, Ju 388, and Ju 488.

Another change in the system was the gradual replacement of the two-letter prefix for the constructor with a prefix for the designer. Almost from the beginning the RLM used an elaborate system of licence-building and subcontracting to maximize its output of huge numbers of relatively few types of 'standard equipment' airplanes. Initially, the factory that designed the plane maintained the biggest share of that planes production. With the war proceeding, the Luftwaffe's need for fresh airplanes quickly outpaced the capacity of the original manufacturers, certainly with its factories now regularly being bombed by the Allies. As a result, the connection between aircraft and original manufacturer eventually lost its significance. Aircraft were now built by a variety of factories often without any links to the constructor whose name it bore. Furthermore, aircraft engineers and designers, a hot commodity for a constructor and therefore aggressively courted and headhunted, were famous for their tendency to leave one company for the next bigger one every few years. Finally more and more of them started their own aircraft development company under their own name. The RLM followed suit by giving their products a two-letter designation reflecting the designer's name rather than the constructor he (originally) worked for. To further complicate things, those new design bureaus were often assigned ranges (or "blocks") of aircraft numbers formerly assigned to other constructors but unused. Thus when Focke-Wulf's chief designer Kurt Tank founded his own design bureau he got assigned the prefix Ta and the block of RLM airframe numbers comprising 8-151 through 8-154. As a result, the further development of his Focke-Wulf Fw 190 became the Tank Ta 152 but remained commonly known as the Focke-Wulf Ta 152."

It's a Messerschmitt bf109 model, most call them me109, it's more accurate to call it a bf109 is what I learned.

So yet the same, yet different.

Did the allies have code names for the German planes similar to the codenames for Japanese planes?

Some German aircraft were called by their name, such as the FW 200 Condor, because that was common. But generally they used the same letter and number system that the Germans did, no code names. I guess it was because they could easily pronounce the German designation but had difficulty with Japanese words.

They are both spoken as "null neun".
pronunciation link: forvo.com/search/null%20neun
Click the triangle before each word.