FLYBOYJ
"THE GREAT GAZOO"
Is this an oxymoron? How long did it take to roll one on the flight line?!?!?
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Is this an oxymoron? How long did it take to roll one on the flight line?!?!?I didn't mean they produced one a year,just that each one took a year.
Is this an oxymoron? How long did it take to roll one on the flight line?!?!?
There were more than one in production at any one time,I have no idea how many but there would be several aircraft in various states moving through the plant.
For the second part I'm only repeating what I was told. Each aircraft took more than a year to produce.
This isn't my field,it is my brother in law who worked (retired earlier this year) for Bae systems and its predecessors,in his case British Aerospace, for 35 years.
It's a family affair,his cousin and nephew both still work at Samlesbury/Wharton. Maybe not for much longer the way things are going.
Cheers
Steve
Our planes shot down some 6500 Japanese planes and some 80% of those were at the hands of our F6Fs in just the two years the F6Fs saw combat. That's unprecedented.The F6F Hellcat did have a 19 : 1 kill ratio. It was the best piston fighter kill ratio of all times. The next best was down around 12 : 1. That was the Corsair.
What was the contract flow rate? What was the production flow rate if the line was accelerated? Lockheed by contract was told to accelerate the P-3C production flow around 1981 if I remember correctly. We could have done as many as 4 a month if long lead time items were available. Normally we would deliver one every 45 days.
Just because a company is only producing one aircraft a year doesn't mean it could not be produced quicker. Production flow rates are contract driven depending on lead time times and the customer's ability to deliver progress payments for the aircraft being produced.
BTW, I worked on the P-3, L1011 and B-2 production lines so I speak from personal experience.
How do you know that? Ive seen a list of British aces, but the list shows names, not what plane they flew. Most aces who made kills generally flew more than one type fighter in combat ... if they survived that long...
In the PTO, it was MUCH easier to keep track of victories since it was usually 4 - 8 versus 4 - 8 - 12 rather than many hunderds of planes going at each other as in the ETO. It was determined that the verified victories over the ocean, with fewer distractions was quite accurate atfer the early days.
So the kill ratio of the Hellcat is almost certainly VERY accurate since the Hellcats were mostly engaged in the PTO with many fewer enemies than were the P-51's in the ETO with not only many enemies, but also competition from bomber gunners and AAA.
The 19 : 1 kill ratio is real and is formulatged from a population of more than 90% of all Hellcats operated in the war. You should not look a a kill ratio for a mission or a group, but for a type that is represented by more than 50 - 60% of the planes flown in the war.
The apologists for the Finns' record with the Buffalo fall into a classic mathematical trap ... the smaple consiting of just the Finns is NOT a random sample, rendering the math completely invlaid. The only way to get a random sample is to actually collect all the sorties flown by the Buffalo and choose some random sample from that population. I'd want any sample more than 50% to put a lot of faith in it, but even a 20 - 30% sample will show what the Buffalo did in much more real terms than choosing the Finnish Air Force alone.
Combat reports are claims, not vetted, real victories. Typhoon and Tempest story is probably pretty good about the planes, but the kills are claims from the British side. And since there are NO studies done of Germany's REAL losses, how can John Foreman's volumes be anything but claims? I have a list of German claims that is basically as complete as yoiu can get, but some have been lost. For instance, I can verify most of Erich Hartmann's claims, but not all from the claims list.
If there are vetted lists of German, Japanese, and Soviet losses and/or victories ... I'd surely like to see them or purchase a copy for myself. Heck, I'd like to see an authoritative list of losses and victories from France, Finland, Poland ... any country other than the U.S.A.
I already have the U.S.A.'s vetted lists in the form of the official military reports, and they aren't everything you'd want. The USAAF Report doesn't list the plane the victor was flying or the victim type and the Navy report is not exactly hopeless, but doesn't list kills by name ... only by type. So they vetted wqhat the Hellcat shot down, for instance, but do not have a list of victories credited to particular pilots. You can back into that list other ways, but the totals, though close, are not entirely equal. You can see what was the probably overall truth, but it's tough to attrubute exact U.S. Navy kills to individuals like you can with the USAAF Report 85.
Contracts are often set by Government annual budgets. These sometimes seem absurd: for instance cutting down production of an aircraft by 20% in order to achieve at best a 5% reduction in overall cost. If the program is then stretched over a longer period, another tactic, the per unit cost of the aircraft goes up and the only thing that has been achieved is a reduced rate of deliver, higher cost although annual budget requirements may have been met. Overall it must be a bad bargain but it's probably done to keep a program intact as much as possible.