davebender
1st Lieutenant
It appears to me that a F6F fighter-bomber could perform at least as well as the P-47 fighter-bomber. For half the price.
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It appears to me that a F6F fighter-bomber could perform at least as well as the P-47 fighter-bomber. For half the price.
You're telling mePolling can be affected by bias...
Best Strafer
(1)P-47
(2)F4U-1
(3)F7F
(4)P-51
(5)F6F
(6)P-38
(7)F8F
(8)P-63
(9)F2G
Best All-Around Fighter Below 25,000ft
(1)F8F
(2)P-51
(3)F4U-1
(4)F7F
(5)F6F
(6)Mosquito
(7)F4U-4
(8)F2G
Best All-Around Fighter Above 25,000ft
(1)P-47
(2)P-51
(3)F4U-1
(4)F6F
(5)F4U-4
(6)Seafire
(7)P-38
That's right, you said 'polling can be affected by bias'I'm telling you what the polling of the Joint Conference revealed. Nothing more...
Sweb, the Jug may have had slightly less drag than the Hellcat, but the main reason the Jug had a higher vmax than the Cat was that it's engine made more power high up where the air was thinner and an airplane could go faster because of less drag. The F6F5 was a legitimate 400 plus MPH AC at critical altitude. For a WW2 recip AC to go fast it had to get high.
That's a good point to compare sources like that. Those polls are interesting historical artifacts about contemporary opinions of various people, but next to useless IMO to objectively determine which a/c did what best. 'Bias' implies that people have all the facts, but for non-rational or self interested reasons ignore or put less emphasis on some facts. That may have been true of some of those opinions, but also a lot of the voters simply lacked certain important facts. None of them had actually flown *all* the a/c in question in combat. Many hadn't flown more than one, some none. And even that is just first hand experience. The point about F4U v F6F ground fire vulnerability really needed statisical operations analysis to quantify. And even statistical operations analysis is only as good as the data, which in some cases (though not in the case you cite) really requires the other side's accounts, which you can't do till after the war...Polling can be affected by bias.
We can see that biases are not always born out when data is collected for an apples to apples comparison.
NAVAL AVIATION COMBAT STATISTICS—WORLD WAR II
This 57% figure is frankly a bit shocking and one that you might expect top see in a head to head comparison between the Hellcat and Mustang, not Hellcat and Corsair.
#6 Though well armored and generally able to withstand battle damage, the Corsair had an Achilles heel in its oil system. ... After a hit in the oil cooler, the Corsair pilot had only seconds either to bail out or crash-land his plane as the engine overheated and seized. More Corsairs were lost than any other type of Naval aircraft during the first six months of the war as the result, in large measure, of this weakness.
Actually that could be said about any aircraft that has an oil cooler and a radial engine, but at the same time I think the "seconds" comment is a bit exaggerated as even with catastrophic oil loss most radials would probably run for more than seconds.
I might add that a fatal hit on a radiator or oil cooler is about the same on a heart, lung or Brain. Somebody demonstrate that the armor on the oil cooler is less than on the head of the pilot?
I'll take my chances on an oil cooler hit!