Best Pacific Fighter? (1 Viewer)

Best Pacific Fighter?


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The F4U was a great plane, BUT you talk about a real bear to land! The cockpit was too far back to make it easy to land on a base, much less a carrier. Because of that and the stability as a gun platform, the Hellcat was chosen to be the Pacific night fighter.

At low speeds, the Zero could out-turn anything. At high speeds, it was not as manueverable. The key was big ailerons, the ones on the Zero are really big. Joel Paris, who flew P-40s said that the ailerons on the Zero were "big as barn doors". But those ailerons did not have the strength at high speed to make high speed rolls. Most pilots agreed that over 275 MPH, anything could out-turn a zero.

One more thing, the AVG NEVER flew the P-51 or P-47. They were disbanded on July 4, 1942 and absorbed into the Army. The Army unit that replaced the AVG, the 23rd FG, also called the China Air Task Force did fly the P-51 and 47.

Eric
 
Evenglider, thanks, I knew the AVG was disbanded, but also that a lot of the pilots were still pying in China. But as for a bear on a carrier, I found this pick of P-47s on the CVE Minilla Bay getting ready to fly off to fight over Saipan.
318thManilaBay.JPG


The water spouts behind the carrier are from Jap bombs ;)
 
That is a great picture. I think I will add that to my collection! :) I will be giving a presentation on the P-47 in December and that will make a nice addition. Thanks!
 
No I mean on that particular photo...the P-47's are right near the end of the carrier, there's no way they'd be taking off from there...
 
It was possible to launch land based aircraft from carriers (the Doolittle operation is a fine example), but they obviously couldn't land there.

But yeah, it seems pretty unlikely in the case of those P-47s. They do appear to be parked for ferrying. :glasses2:
 
Glad you all liked the photo. The website has some good reading. But you all should know that P-47s were used off the CVEs to fly from then land on island bases. I know this photo is not one but I will keep looking.

P-47N best fighter out there! :)
 
lesofprimus said:
The fact that the shiitass P-40 got more votes than the N1K2 Shiden makes this poll useless.... There is no way u can even compare those 2 airframes, let alone say the P-40 was better.....

Bah on this poll......

Take that idiot [Minoru] Genda. He could barely fly, but he jumped up and down about the Shiden-kai ["George"], so everybody else pretended to like it, too. That plane was a piece of crap, put together by a third-rate firm [Kawanishi].
- Saburo Sakai (Japan's leading surviving ace of WWII)

=S=

Lunatic
 
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