ORIGINAL: Top_Gunn
at any rate they were a giant step ahead of US designers
In some ways, sure. But does it make sense to use a lot of resources to produce a huge, complicated liason plane rather than painting Piper Cubs green and enlarging the windshields? The Storch has nine linkages between the stick and the elevator; the Cub has a cable. The Storch was hard to fly and needed a skilled pilot who could otherwise have been in fighters; the Cubs could be flown by guys who had washed out of flight school. And which one do you want to fix in a hurry in a desert or snowstorm? It was (among other things) overengineered machinery like this that lost the Germans the war. Great designs that were too expensive and complex for mass production and tricky to maintain in the field. The Russians made simple, cheap planes (like the Yak 3, with plywood wing skins), but they made a lot of them. Sometimes being a step ahead is not an advantage.
Plenty of opinions as to who did what the best
When the war was over - Both the US and the Soviets raced to see who could grab the German scientists and hardware which related to rockets and advanced aircraft. That is a cold hard fact- we grabbed all we could and so did the Ruskies
It wasn't the german machinery designs which lost em the war -equipment wise, they had just about all the advanced stuff.
I can't find any referrences to STOL stuff, prior to the Stork.
By the way- if you look at the video of th demo flight an dnote the actual angle of flight plus th angle of th e elevator and "spade", you will see a pretty close correlation.
NASA did somestudies I remember which showed that stabilizing extreme angles of flight worked best , when the angle of the tailplane and the angle of descent were the same - but then that just makes sense.