Xray wrote:
I hope you aren't suggesting that comments and impressions from highly experienced and even renowned pilots who actually flew it are not primary sources ?
This highlights the issue: people themselves cannot be considered as primary source information, no matter what their knowledge, expertise or experience is.
Primary source information will always consist of material from official sources, often peer-reviewed and/or counter-signed by an approved signatory. So pilot 'x' or engineer 'y' can say what they like to you or I, but it won't be primary source information, no matter how many times they say it. But if they state that 'the handling qualities of airplane 'z' display a lack of lateral stability' in a peer-reviewed flight test report then yes, it could be considered as primary source information. Look at any flight test report and it will have at least two signatories: it's primary source data. An accident report will usually be counter-signed by three or four Board members: again, primary-source. Often official correspondence (e.g. HQ USAF to Commanding General, AMC) can be considered as primary source information, but care needs to be exercised: unsubstantiated opinions creep in at times even in 'official' documentation. It can be a minefield, but also shows why we can never be led into taking any anecdotal or recounted information as gospel: first-hand experience of an event does not necessarily guarantee reliable recollection thereof.
The issue was aptly described above, where a pilot involved first-hand in the Cutlass programme would render very different opinions of the aircraft, depending on who his audience was. Neither would be considered primary source data, though it's possible that one of those opinions was correct.
And it also demonstrates why historians need to be very careful when using Wiki, since its contributors do not fully understand what verifiable data is; the reader will usually not know either. As a result, heresay, magazines and books are often cited as being 'the Bible' when they either cannot be, or are not by dint of their derivation.