Recent content by BobB

Likewise, the PT-17 didn't.

T-6 was used postwar for primary training; no need for PT's.

By "winning" the BoB, The Spitfire and Hurricane prevented a disastrous German invasion attempt of Britain which would have destroyed much of the German army and thousands of river barges (crippling river traffic in Europe). The war would have been much shorter if it weren't for the Spitfire &...

We used to say that government inspectors could be in an aircraft factory or a meat packing plant, it's all the same. Some AF inspectors that I saw were well qualified and some seemed to have been hired just to fill a space. That said, you can't inspect in quality; it has to be built in. A good...

Someone told me the story that he and his carpool buddy stopped to look at a truck with a "For Sale" sign parked in a front yard. An old woman came out to talk to them and when she saw Delta Airlines on their shirts, she said "I worked for Delta on the F-5 mod program". Their first thought was...

Not over 10,000. P-51 control forces and maneuverability don't become better at 25K. Read what the man who flew them said. Summary: the P-40 is a better dogfighter but won't win if the P-51 pilot is competent and uses his airplanes strengths. Another 1960's warbird owner, Bill Ross, said that...

P-40N owner, Mike Dillon, wrote about a mock dogfight with Bill Fornof's P-51D in the January 1969 Air Progress magazine. "It takes a while to figure why the P-51 ever replaced the P-40 as a combat machine. However... our contest proved only what all good fighter pilots have always known: you...

Running military power for an hour, you'd better be defending your home base or you'll run out of gas on the way home.

There's a lot of times when flying a T-6 that you realize even though it's fighter-like it needs more power to be a fighter. A BT-13 modified to look like a P-66 with retracting gear and shorter wings would be a lot lighter than a real P-66 and probably slightly better than a T-6 as that T-6...

I had the thought that rebuilding a BT-13 into a P-66 replica powered by R-1340 would be neat. My father saw a BT-15 in Tulsa about 1950 that had flush riveted wings so you just need to find where those went(probably into the aluminum Coke cans at the supermarket).

Wait a minute. I read on a forum post that the P-39 was the best WW2 fighter!

The RAF spent 1941-1943 flying fighter rhubarbs at low altitude over France and getting pilots killed strafing Germans on bicycles. They didn't need high altitude performance for that. Mustang I was superior to P-40 but the RAF didn't have them until later. There probably wasn't any thought...

V-1 & V-2 aimed at the Normandy beaches might have killed more Germans than Allies. A German infantry unit that arrived in the Hurtgen Forest in 1944 was hit by an errant V-1. They said that V-1 stood for Versager-1 (Failure Number 1).

P-40 was short ranged in 1944 but long ranged in 1942. RAAF pilot Nat Gould said that he never loved the P-40 like he loved the Spitfire but the Spit simply couldn't have done the job in New Guinea because of its short range. A crop duster, Mike Dillon, who owned a P-40N in the 1960's said that...

You might as well ask "What if Napoleon had a B-52 at the Battle of Waterloo?" There would have been no invasion without the expectation of air superiority.