Trouble with that assessment is, it doesn't take into account in-service dates, and with whom they were, as well as the kind of victories involved. This is just the same as if I say that both you and I ate dinner yesterday, and from that statistic conclude we must have eaten the same thing. We have to look carefully at statistics if we want to glean an informed result. To elaborate on that...
The Albatros DIII was in service about eight months before the Pfalz DIII, and the kind of enemy aircraft it met because of that, makes a huge difference on the relative ease it would have enjoyed in shooting something down. There is a world of difference between shooting down an RE8, DH2 or BE2 flopping along at 65 mph with a pilot who doesn't even know that turning is a good tactic, and something much more capable of turning, with a better-trained pilot at the controls. Furthermore, as we know, and as Von Richthofen and others pointed out, once you have got a few scalps under your belt, you begin to learn how the trick is done. And if the trick is learned on an Albatros, then it is only natural the pilots would say it was a big part of the equation.
Regardless of the craft, the early introduction of the Albatros was giving the pilots flying it the best start they could hope for when compared with what it opposed, just as the Eindecker had done with Boelcke and Immelman, despite the Eindecker being a fairly mediocre aeroplane.
We see the same thing with pilots such as
James McCudden, who was fortunate enough to commence his career at a time and in a section of the front, where his initial inexperience was helped by the opposition he faced at the time, allowing him the luxury of a comparatively gentler introduction to things. It wasn't easy, but it was easier. This is something which many other pilots were not fortunate enough to enjoy, and we have to wonder how many others who did not enjoy that luxury might also have been McCuddens if presented with the chance, just as we might similarly wonder how the Pfalz might be viewed if it had been the mount of Richthofen, since there is little doubt he would have been successful in one.
But back with the Pfalz, we also have to consider what the DIII tended to go for too. With its vastly better diving speed, like the SPAD, the Pfalz was considered a good choice for going after balloons, where a fast dive to the target through the intense ground fire was the typical preferred method of attack, something that would have seen the wings falling off a DIII or DV. As you probably know, many pilots considered the downing of a balloon to be the equivalent of getting three or more aircraft, and this was also reflected officially in the way gongs were handed out to pilots too.
What is more, with the reputation for being trickier to fly, this obviously affected the quantity in which the Pfalz was ordered, but more importantly, the way in which it was deployed. The famous Jastas, in which the Germans tended to group their star pilots, held a lot of sway with regard to which aircraft they got, and it's only natural that they would not have wanted the aircraft with a reputation of being hard to fly, as well as preferring the devil they knew. That would lead to the more talented pilots getting the Albatros, with its better overall ease of flight; the kind of pilots who could work around its flutter in a dive shortcomings.
So if the talented pilots were in the Albatros, then it would be the Albatros that would rack up the kills, regardless of whether the Pfalz would likely have done the same in similar circumstances. By the same token, one would assume that as a result of that, when the more average and lesser pilots got the Pfalz, it had a similar negative effect on the statistics.
This is probably not the whole story of course, but it would make the tales of woe about the Pfalz become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, by the way those tales affected how it was deployed and who was taking it into combat. We can see some of this in many autobiographical tales from RFC flyers, who did indeed consider the Pfalz easy meat. But if we read those tales, we can see that it was often the way the pilots were using the Pfalz as much as what type of aircraft it was, that resulted in them being referred to as 'dud Huns'. None of that would show in bare statistical data, but that does not make it untrue.
A good comparison would be the WW2 Focke-Wulf 190 Dora/TA-152. By any criteria, this was definitely one of the best aircraft of WW2, if not the best, but by the time it was in combat, most of the quality German pilots were either dead or washed up from the stress of long service. This meant that it was flown mainly by inexperienced newcomers. As a consequence, we might conclude that the P-51 (which shot it down in droves) was vastly superior, but have the pilots swap mounts, and it is for sure that the more experienced pilots would still have come out on top, in either craft. A classic example of that can be found in Johnny Johnson's 'Wing Leader' autobiography, where he relates witnessing Unternehmen Bodenplatte (Operation Baseplate). By the time the Luftwaffe were able to mount that operation, they had to do it with very poorly trained pilots. Johnson points out that it was a bold stroke, and probably would have worked too, had the marksmanship and flying skills of the pilots involved matched the audacity of the plan itself.
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