Favorite US Naval (carrier) bird

Which of the following did you like

  • Total voters
    134

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The Stringbag also carried out dive bombing but due to the lack of air brakes it was a dodgy maneuver as if the dive speed exceeded much over 200mph the wings could fold, but as the dive was so slow it made it very accurate the normal approach (taken from the book War in a Stringbag) was for the pilot to stand on the rudder bar and sight over the upper wing which must mean the dive angle was pretty acute. That said the SBD was undoubtedly the best of the Naval dive bombers.
 
Fairey Swordfish 102 (Stringbag is the nick name the pilots gave it as it carried so many different items of ordenance and equipment (its a type of shopping bag))
 
I was a an airshow once and a Corsair starting up drowned out a dozen Harleys. Ticked off the bikers too. Gotta love that!

:{)
 
JU-88 were exellent aircraft and did a good job as an all around attack bomber but it could not compare with tonnage sunk with the SBD. Also the SBD was a more stable and accurate dive bombing platform.

:{)
 
The F4U Corsair carried out some sterling work once the problems were worked out. It was a great aircraft once the pilot became skilled in using the aircraft due to the side slip on the plane. It has a tendency to slip sideways because of the wings, at least it does in FS2002 and it did in MS Combat Ace. Because of this you are mostly doing a lot of correction of flight etc. to avoid rolling.
 
The Corsair was a bitch to land on a deck. First of all, because of the height of the undercarrige, the Oleo struts tended to make the plane bounce like a rubber ball when landing on a carrier. Also there were some instances, if the struts were adjusted too stiff, the impact of landing could hurt the pilot. Also because of the length of the nose the pilot had to approach the deck from an angle and then at the last moment straighten out and land. In top of that it was a big bird, so big that it could not be hung from the storage hooks in hangars until the Midways came along.

:{)
 
Voted SBD dauntless, something about those inverted gull wings, the bombs slung underneath looking so menacing, and just knowing the look on the faces of the japanese men aboard the four carriers at midway that felt theyre wrath warms my heart.
 
the avenget looks much meaner........

and adler, i pitty only the fools that DON'T vote avenger, if you'd have voted avenger i wouldn't pitty you, but unfortunately for you, you must now feel the wrath of my pitty......
 
Haha - you arse, lanc. No blamin' that on a typo 'cos you wrote it three times. It's PITY, you tart.
 
I have to give it to the hellcat.

Out of the 6,477 confirmed victories by US navy carrier based pilots, the F6F (which only entered the fray on 31 August 1943) gained 4,947
 
One thing needs to be noted although the F4U did serve aboard carriers towards the end of the war it was primarly land based therefore I must go with the hellcat on this one, and if you look at the kill ratio in air to air combat it far excedes the ratio of the corsair if I am not mistaken.
 
Here I go again being "odd man out". I was stuck between two a/c, the TBM/TBF and the SB2C Helldiver. I actually got to work some on a TBM while I was stationed in Memphis TN. in the early 80's. A gent from Wiener, Arkansas owned it and flew around the mid south to many airshows. Now our friend CurzonDax thinks the F4U is a big bird but you got to climb up on a TBM to really understand what a BIG WW2 carrier A/C is. Wingspan =54' vs the F4U's 41' Length=40' vs the F4U's 33' Height was 16' for both. Climb up and down off an Avenger several times doing some maintenance and you start cursing the designers for not installing an elevator. The SB2C Helldiver I think is one of the more maligned A/C of WW2. As with all A/C it had its teething problems and the military ordered something like 400 changes because the USAAC also used it (for a short time) as the A25 Shrike. Early on the pilots and maintenance personnel referred to the SB2C as the "Son of a Bitch 2nd Class", but from '43 on it flew in nearly every major action in the Pacific war.
 
Most of the teething problems of the F4U were solved by late 1943 and the Navy decided the Corsair was superior to the Hellcat as a carrier a/c and carriers were to be equipped with Corsairs as soon as was practicable. By that time the Navy had also determined that the Corsair was as good a dive bomber as the SBD because the landing gear could be used as dive brakes and it was a steady diving beast.
 
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