F6F Hellcat vs. P-47 Thunderbolt

[davebender]

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.

 

[drgondog]

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.

I would not only agree, but add that an 'army' version would not require folding wings or arframe structure/weight to mount arresting gear. The F6F-5 'Army should be nearly 6% lighter with attendent boost in climb and acceleration and range.

The 9th AF could have easily substituted the F6F-5 for P-47D with zero loss in mission flexibilty...

 

[davebender]

I wouldn't count on that. If the Army F6F is designed as a fighter-bomber then it will gain some additional cockpit armor. Plus it will come standard with extensive bomb racks. Similiar to the Fw-190F variant.

 

[renrich]

The F6F3s and 5s were used as fighter bombers extensively in the Pacific. There were 553 lost to AA and they dropped over 6500 tons of bombs. At the fighter conference the F6F was ranked third as a FB, just behind the P47. The Corsair was ranked number one. A couple of hundred pounds of armor, if needed, would not probably effect performance much if 6% of weight had been deleted as an Army fighter.

 

[Magister]

http://www.history.navy.mil/download/nasc.pdf


Table 19 presents the record for individual types of aircraft for the entire war. It will
be clear from the foregoing data that direct comparisons cannot always be made between various
types of aircraft, because of the varying tires and conditions under which they engaged in combat.
Thus comparisons are valid between the carrier F6F and F4U totals because they generally operated
from the sanm ships during the sam periods.

Certain tentative conclusions may Ee reached from these two tables:

(a) The F6F was slightly superior to tie F4U in combat, apparently chiefly because of its
greater ability to survive damage.

P. 58 Naval Air Combat Statistics

(e) The F6F appears to have had considerable advantage over the F4U when flown under the same
conditions. Receiving about the same number of hits per sortie in comparable operations, the
F6F had a far lower rate of loss per plane hit.

P. 79 Naval Air Combat Statistics

 

[Colin1]

Polling 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

You're telling me
Best strafer: What did the F7F do?
Best all-round fighter below 25,000ft: The Mosquito's up there but the P-38 isn't?
Best all-round fighter above 25,000ft: The F6F is better than the P-38?

 

[Magister]

I'm telling you what the polling of the Joint Conference revealed. Nothing more. Another poster listed some data from the Conference and I just added some more along with an actual study based on data collected by the USN.

Pilots from the various air services and aircraft companies were given opportunities to fly these aircraft at the Conference and were then given questionnaires. Not all questionnaires were returned. The returned questionnaires were tallied up.

Industry folks may have been partial to their own aircraft. Naval pilots may have been more comfortable and biased in favor of their own aircraft. The Brits may have been biased in favor of their aircraft and so on and so forth.

The "Division of Votes" were as follows:

Army - 9
Navy - 15
British - 7
Contractors - 20

Chance Vought (Corsair) had 16 members present at the conference, Grumman (Hellcat) had 8. Republic (Thinderbolt) had 5, Lockheed (Lightning) had 2.

 

[Colin1]

I'm telling you what the polling of the Joint Conference revealed. Nothing more...

That's right, you said 'polling can be affected by bias'
I simply said 'You're telling me'

No messenger boys getting shot here...

 

[renrich]

Magister, your data must be from a different fighter conference and I question the accuracy not of you but of the data itself. To begin with, what I posted from was the Oct. 16-20th, 1944. There was no F8F, F7F or Mosquito listed in the polls I saw or any foreign AC at all. Mine came from the book by Dean, "America's Hundred Thousand." Also there are some obvious inconsistencies in your data. To say that the F4U1 ranks ahead of the F4U4 as a fighter at any altitude smells funny. Where did you get the poll you quoted. It obviously is a different one than I quoted. By the way a rather well known AAF pilot, Rex Barber, said that if the US had only produced one fighter bomber, it would have to be the Corsair. As far as drag is concerned, again from Dean, the following: Profile Drag Coefficient Summary- P51D-with DC of .0176, P47B DC of .0213, F6F3 DC of .0272. Has the others also, P51 best, P47 in the middle, F6F3 worst except for P61.

 

[Magister]

For the best all around fighter above 25,000 feet, only 82% of the questionnaires were returned. The breakdown was:

(1)P-47 -45% of vote
(2)P-51 -39% of vote
(3)F4U-1 -7% of vote
(4)F6F -3% of vote
(5)F4U-4 -3% of vote
(6)Seafire -2% of vote
(7)P-38 -1% of vote

I would add that if you are not used to flying a twin engined P-38, it would be difficult to be comfortable putting the aircraft through a battery of flight maneuvers to enable a good evaluation.

 

[Magister]

Renrich, my copy is of the Report itself and is for the entire 8 day conference. October 16-23. It sounds like you have portions of data taken from the Conference that were printed in Dean's book. As such, your source is somewhat secondary.

"To say that the F4U1 ranks ahead of the F4U4 as a fighter at any altitude smells funny. Where did you get the poll you quoted."

I agree. Again, the data I posted is from Report of Joint Fighter Conference, NAS Patuxent River MD, 16-23 October 1944. As I have pointed out, there are certain biases that stem from a variety of sources. If we assumed that the same 20 pilots (or however many) flew both the F4U-1 and F4U-4, then your criticism of the recorded polling would smell very funny indeed. This is what we know about the evaluators though.

F4U-1 - Army 13, Navy 4, British 3, Contractors 8.

F4U-4 - Army 0, Navy 2, British 1, Contractors 0.

P-47 - Army 1, Navy 14, British 4, Contractors 10

"By the way a rather well known AAF pilot, Rex Barber, said that if the US had only produced one fighter bomber, it would have to be the Corsair."

Not sure how that is relevant but I'm sure that in hindsight, Hitler wouldn't have opened a second front against Russia either.

 

[Sweb]

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.

The Cat was as aerodynamic as a brick. It was all up front and about as bluff as one could design a plane to be. The Jug was a pretty clean design frontally by comparison and it had a much more graceful (lower Reynolds Number) fuselage than the Cat did. The Cat pretty much bullied itself through the air. Heck, it was less aerodynamic than its predecessor. The Jug was heavier and had a higher wing loading so it couldn't turn with the Cat. In a turning, descending battle that was usually its heaviest in heavy air the Cat had to be the better airplane. The Cat is cited as being the highest scoring plane in the war. That's an easy boast considering most of its adversaries were new inexperienced pilots woefully untrained to take on the sheer weight of numbers the Navy threw at them. So, I don't take the Cat's kill ratio into consideration when contrasting types. But, I will make a guess that because of similar power and better turning ability the Cat had an advantage over the Jug, piloting skills being equal.

 

[renrich]

Magister, thanks for your reply and clarification. Perhaps the F4U4 had the colic and was not performing well but it was a real hot rod compared to the earlier Corsairs or according to your post not many flew it. Sweb, if you look at my post your observations about relative drag are dead on. I agree that a lot of the Hellcat kills were against IJN pilots who were rookies. The Corsair kills early in the war when in the Cactus Air Force, look better. And, of course the Wildcat went against the cream.

 

[Magister]

In similar fashion, the P-47M at the conference was flown by very few pilots and there were no comments about less that optimal mechanical performance. It got rave reviews by those that flew it but there were not enough votes for it to register in any of the categories. For instance, there were comments that it was the flat out best fighter in the ETO at higher altitudes and yet the P-47D was voted best fighter above 25,000ft. ???

An interesting exchange at the Conference related to fighter bomber survivability:

P. 87 of Report -

Colonel Garman: "I can speak only for the African theatre and only for a particular type of operation. The P-38 was used at low altitude on many occasions and we found that it was quite vulnerable to ground fire - any type of ground fire, even small arms fire. But other planes also experienced that same ground fire and the radial engines brought the planes home. You can't lay down any hard and fast rule and say the in-line engine is no good at low altitude as far as ground fire is concerned, It all depends on the operation entirely."

Lietenant Colonel Tyler: "We have data which shows that in the entire European theatre the P-47 is much better able to take punishment and return after any sort of mission - either ground attack or any mission which incurs damage. That may be due to the P-47 airplane or due to the air-cooled feature. We don't know which, but it certainly can take it better than other types."

 

[JoeB]

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.

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...

The F7F as great strafer is another example of opinion without all the relevant facts available. It had great fwd firing armament (especially the non-radar versions), so that's a reasonable theory, but there was no actual combat experience to demonstrate it as of the time of that poll. In Korea the USMC used the F7F-3N variant, albeit a night fighter so without the nose mg's, only the fuselage 20mm's. But VMF(N)-542 use of the plane for night and day close support in the early going led to the conclusion it was just too vulnerable in daylight to ground fire, more so than the F4U, just because it was bigger. But in long use in night interdiction alongside the F4U-5N VMF(N)-513 concluded the F7F was the distinctly superior plane for that mission: two men for a super-high workload mission, night attack on road convoys under flare light in mountainous terrain; and the second engine was highly desirable for those missions well inside NK.

Joe

 

[Magister]

The USN fully appreciated the difficulty in comparing data between aircraft in dissimilar situations and periods in time and stood by the statistical analysis.

Page 58.

It will be clear from the foregoing data that direct comparisons cannot always be made between various types of aircraft, because of the varying tires and conditions under which they engaged in combat. Thus comparisons are valid between the carrier F6F and F4U totals because they generally operated
from the same ships during the same periods.

Certain tentative conclusions may be reached from these two tables;

(a) The F6F was slightly superior to the F4U in combat, chiefly because of its greater ability to survive damage.

The Corsair sported performance well beyond the abilities of the Hellcat and yet the Hellcat was adjudged slightly superior in combat. I suspect that this remarkable admission by the USN was the result of the astonishing 57% increased likelihood of being brought down by ground fire. Such vulnerability would certainly erode the combat effectiveness of an aircraft.

I recall that someone once posted an account by a pilot in Korea who said that the Corsair was vulnerable to being brought down even by small arms fire.

 

[Magister]

I just found something that appears related. Crimson Sky The Air Battle For Korea by John R. Bruning Jr.

Under the Notes for Chapter 3 on page 215

#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.

 

[FLYBOYJ]

#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.

 

[drgondog]

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!

 

[FLYBOYJ]

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!

gotta agree there Bill!!!