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dreadnought
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There were doubts about the ability to mass produce the spitfire in the beggining due to the very unconventional wing shape.
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Quite right!
What I especially like about them [the spitfire and bf 109], is that they were easy-to-build fighters that stayed up-to-date till the very end. That only shows the brilliance of their design. Try doing that with a P-40.
I recall someone's signature... P-40, P-51 and Spit were the best three fighters of WW2. I can't recall who that was but I would love to hear his reasoning behind chosing the P-40. A good aircraft but ... the best??
Kris
The point being..."Reaching Newchurch airfield at 480 mph I held "RB" down to 20 ft from the runway and then pulled her up to a 60 ° climb holding it as the speed dropped slowly off and the altimeter needle spun round the dial as if it were mad. At 7000 ft the speed was dropping below 180 mph and I rolled the Tempest lazily inverted, then allowed the nose to drop until the horizon, at first above my head, disappeared below (or rather above) the now inverted nose, the fields and woods steadied into the centre of the windscreen and then whirled around as I put the stick hard over and rolled around the vertical dive. Steadying again I pulled out over the tree tops at 500 mph, throttled back and pulled hard over towards the airfield in an over-the-vertical climbing turn, lowering the wheels and flaps in a roll as the speed dropped. What a magnificent aeroplane! They could have all their Spitfires and Mustangs!"
("My part of the sky", Roland Beamont)
"The Messerschmitt Me 262's most dangerous opponent was the British Hawker Tempest - extremely fast at low altitudes, highly-manoeuvrable and heavily-armed."
(Hubert Lange, Me262 pilot)
These quotes are from The Hawker Tempest Page
There were doubts about the ability to mass produce the spitfire in the beggining due to the very unconventional wing shape.
The point being...
Everyone knows the Tempest was fast, I suspect the one that was shot down a low altitude was an less experienced pilot who got into a fight that suited is opponent and as a result was shot down. This was repeated countless times throughout the war. Still for me the best is the Ta-152H, if it had been around in Korea I'm sure it too would of been able to shoot down some Migs like the Corsair and the Seafury did.
And these were unfounded once a method of production was achieved that enabled mass production of the Spitfire throughout the war and beyond.
I think there were some miscoceptions about the Bearcat satted earlier.
The reson it was not picked for Korea was simple ... they didn't make very many of them, so there were not enough to deploy as an effective force.
Weak brakes? We operate one at the Planes of Fame Museum at Chino, California, U.S.A. and it doesn't have any trouble with the brakes.
You think 8 g's was not enough? Most WWII fighters were 3 - 4 g airplanes in a real fight. They didn;t have the power to sustain higher g-loading for more than a short time.
I stick with my list as posted earlier.
Oh yeah, at the Museum, we operate two Spits (a Mk IX and a Mk XIV), two to three P-51s (one is private), a Zero, a P-47G, a P-38, a Hellcat, a Hurricane, an F4U-1 Corsair, a Douglas Dauntless, a P-40, and several other flyable WWII-era planes.
Unfortunately, no one operates a Focke-Wulf Fw 190D or a Ta 152, so the comparison is all on paper there.
I'll stick with the Bearcat!
I'll stick with the Bearcat!
Compare the stats of the F8F-1 with those of the F4U-4:
F8F-1
Top speed: 421 MPH
Init climb rate: 4570 ft/min
Armament: Initially 4-50's, later 4-20mm cannons
Ceiling:38,700
F4U-4
Top Speed: 448 MPH
Init Climb 4000 ft/min
Armament 6-50's or 4 20mm cannons
Ceiling: 38,400
As you can see, the Japanese would have had a most unpleasant suprise indeed!
The F8F was essentially a flying hot-rod. It was designed to operate off of CVEs(small flight deck). It had a lot of weight saving design features, only weighed around 9000 lbs, only carried 179 gallons of fuel internally(the Corsair carried over 230 gallons) so almost always carried an external tank(which cut down on the weapons load it could carry.) About 1200 were produced. It only had 5 external store stations with limited capacity. One fuel tank and that left only space for 4 rockets or bombs which was one reason for it's short service life. The F8F-1 which had the best low altitude performance was an honest 440-450 mph aircraft at low levels. The F8F-2 had better high altitude performance but somewhat lower performance overall. The early Bearcats could go from a standing start on the runway to 10000 feet in approx. 90 seconds. That was done not later than 1948. It was quite a while before a jet could surpass that. The Bearcat was used by the French as a fighter bomber in Indo-China. Of course the F4U-7 was the last piston engined fighter the French used. If one wants to read more about the Bearcat and it's weak brakes, Richard Linnekin in 80 KNOTS TO MACH 2 has a whole section on it. His career began with the Stearman and finished with the F4 Phantom and the F8F was one of his two all time favorites.
Depends on what country you are talking about. The US did not enter the war until 1941 and the P-51 first flew in 1940 therefore the P-51 was in production for the whole war that the US was involved in. Same with the P-47.
As for the arguement that the Spitfire was the only allied aircraft that was competative throughout the whole war that is completely wrong.
Both the P-47 and the P-51 were competative throughout the whole war and the P-51 and P-47 could do something that the Spitfire could not. Do you know what that was?
They could take the fight to the Germans because of there long range.
Now having said that I think the Spitfire was an overall better fighter than the P-51 but the Spitfire was not the only allied fighter to remain competative throughout the whole war.