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Could have - but even then you're still looking at a few months of testing and red tape.Hurricanes were available in North America, in some numbers prior to Dec 1941 so one or more of these could have been converted to a Sea Hurricane for deck landing trials.
If the UK had all those Hurricanes, then why were they still taking deliveries of P-40s?The P-40 was already engineered for the Allison, so a hundred or so more Allison engined P-40s and a hundred or so fewer P40Fs. The UK had a relative abundance of Hurricanes in late 1941/early 1942 so much so that Hurricane production actually began to taper off in mid 1942. There was actually lots of aircraft in the UK waiting for "export" to other markets such as the USSR and North Africa.
That's still more than what could have been produced in Canada during the same period, even if the order came down after Pearl Harbor. It would have taken at least 6 months to see the first production Sea Hurricane arrive in the US, and that's very wishful thinking.Actually, not that many (a couple hundred maybe) and the F4F-F didn't begin production till Jan 1942, IIRC.
They were - the minute AAF left the hangar deck so did the glycol. Again, US Navy brass did not like "extra" hazmat or flammable materials on ships (same rules as today)We're talking maybe a dozen HSHs per CV, and I think the USN was resourceful enough to tackle that problem.
That's provided someone in the USN liked the Sea Hurricane and saw value added by importing it, apparently that wasnt the case.It wouldn't have taken a whole lot of clairvoyance in mid 1941 to see that the FAA was short of fighters, and that the USN would be too in a shooting war, so a joint Cdn/USA project to produce Sea Hurricanes would have made some sense, especially as the conversion kit had already been engineered in the UK and the Hurricane was in production in Canada (albeit in small number prior to large scale Packard production). Not a completely likely scenario, but not completely implausible either.
Again, Interest, how quick, and was it really worth it when you had, as you said it "a couple hundred maybe" F4Fs available, right there, right now - as the old saying goes, "A bird in hand is worth two in the bush."The ideal fighter might have been a Sea Hurricane II with 4 x .5in with 350rpg (or 8 x .3in with 500rpg) and a couple of 15g internal wing tanks in lieu of the outer guns on the Mk IIB wing. This would have given the FAA and USN a useful addition to the F4F that was carrier ready and also well suited to base defence.
Which means that the USN Sea Hurricane is ready for production just around Dec 7 1941.Could have - but even then you're still looking at a few months of testing and red tape.
If the UK had all those Hurricanes, then why were they still taking deliveries of P-40s?
That's still more than what could have been produced in Canada during the same period, even if the order came down after Pearl Harbor. It would have taken at least 6 months to see the first production Sea Hurricane arrive in the US, and that's very wishful thinking.
They would have had to have some spare amount onboard, but again I'm sure the USN could overcome this relatively easily.They were - the minute AAF left the hangar deck so did the glycol. Again, US Navy brass did not like "extra" hazmat or flammable materials on ships (same rules as today)
That's provided someone in the USN liked the Sea Hurricane and saw value added by importing it, apparently that wasnt the case.
Again, Interest, how quick, and was it really worth it when you had, as you said it "a couple hundred maybe" F4Fs available, right there, right now - as the old saying goes, "A bird in hand is worth two in the bush."
...Another aspect of
the attack that proved inadequate was fighter escort. To Fletcher the folding wing F4F-4s
represented no improvement over the fixed-wing F4F-3s, except more F4F-4s could be
carried. He echoed the call of Halsey and others of the urgent necessity'' for detachable fuel
tanks to increase their effective attack radius beyond 175 miles. Spruance and Browning
rated the Grumman Wildcat "greatly inferior'' in comparison with the nimble Japanese
Zero. On 20 June Nimitz relayed their fears to King, noting the "extreme and apparently
increased superiority performance of 0 fighters'' was mitigated only by the vulnerability
of Japanese planes and the superior tactics of the U.S. Navy fighter pilots. "Overall results
have been bad and will be serious and potentially decisive with improvement that must
be expected in enemy tactics.'' Remarkably he called for army Curtiss P-4OF Warhawk
fighters to replace navy F4F Wildcats and Brewster F2A Buffaloes in all marine fighting
squadrons defending forward bases and even asked that the P-4OF "or comparable type"
be tested for carrier suitability; In the meantime the F4F-4s must be lightened, and their
ammunition supply increased even should that require reverting to four guns in place ofsix.
The swift introduction ofthe Vought F4U-1 Corsair fighter was an"absolute priority.'' Thus
after Midway the top fleet commanders experienced a serious crisis of confidence over the
effectiveness of the basic U.S. carrier fighter, a worry that would soon influence Fletcher's
most controversial command decision...
Black Shoe carrier Admiral, p.200
The Spitfire V with a 90IG drop tank has about the same wing loading as an F4F-4 with fuel internal fuel, but considerably less than a P-40E/F
The Merlin boost override can be engaged at any altitude to be used as the pilot saw fit. In any event, a P40 with 45IG drop tank weighs about 8900lb versus ~7700lb for a Spitfire V with a 90IG drop tank.
The F4F-4 was test flown against the Zero. USA Flight testing gave the following speeds for the same Zero:
SL/270mph (F4F-4 SAC data = 285
5000ft/287 (F4F-4 SAC data = 290
10000ft/305 (F4F-4 SAC data = 305)
16000ft 326
20000ft 321.5
25000ft 315
30000ft 306
and the results of actual flight testing:
...
Again, these actual flight tests show the F4F-4 to be somewhat slower at lower altitude than the SAC data - again in line with F4F-3/4 pilot comments regarding their experiences with the Zero in actual combat:
Thanks. Seems like the F4F-4 was actually able to do 326 mph at 16000 ft.
The actual flight tests also show that F4F-4 is also faster at medium and high altitudes than it is listed in SAC data - almost 15 mph faster at 16000 ft than SAC data.
Again, nobody was claiming, here or at other places, that Wildcat is a better climber, or that is faster than Zero - I don't get it why you post those excerpts? But, it seems like the F4F (mostly the heavier F4F-4) have had positive ratio vs. Zero in mid 1942:
Bottom line here is that between 7 May 1942 and 4 June 1942, and, thus, just on the basis of exposure, in the first
six months of the Pacific War, there were 12 F4Fs shot down by A6Ms and 14 A6Ms shot down by F4Fs, or an F4F
victory to loss ratio of 1.167 to 1.
Ceterum censeo, if the USN wants the V-12 powered fighter, the navalized, or just 'hooked' P-40 is a better bet. What kind of performance was the Sea Hurricane displaying, any version?
Until you back up the statement (1st sentence in the above quoted text) that, by take off, the boost can be greater than +12 lbs, your statement is just a claim, not a fact.
.
I know this is turning the thread but I always wondered why the UK didn't build a naval fighter based on the Hercules. It was a decent engine that entered service in late 1940 so would have been available for 1941. People tend to get hung up on the Merlin and not consider the Hercules in the same way they tend to consider the Halifax to be a distant second to the Lanc
Until you back up the statement (1st sentence in the above quoted text) that, by take off, the boost can be greater than +12 lbs, your statement is just a claim, not a fact.
Sea Hurricane Merlin III engines were modified to allow +16 boost. This gave them performance similar to a regular Hurricane I using +12 boost.
Climb might have been slightly better, but to say 4,000 feet per minute and 20,000 feet in six minutes seems exceedingly optimistic - especially considering from what I've read, the Sea Hurricanes used the old deHavilland two-speed props.
Basically you are asking the USN to adopt an unproven type before their own unproven type had met the enemy, of unknown or little known capability, in combat.
I know that the title of the thread is "Merlin powered carrier fighter other than Seafire" but you can't escape the fact that the Admiralty wanted a navalised Spitfire before they ever wanted a Sea Hurricane (from as early as 1938, in fact). The problem was that Seafires would reduce the number of Spitfires available for the RAF, and Fulmar production was a priority (!) for the FAA.
When Seafires did enter service they remained stuck with the single speed Merlin until the Griffon powered XV appeared towards the end of the war. A direct legacy of trying to prop up the performance of the Hurricane with the Merlin XX.
As for the F4F, Grumman had begun development on the F6F not long after the F4F entered service (and before Pearl Harbor). Any move to procure Sea Hurricanes would be a short term solution at best.
The USN "would have" had to begun procurement way prior. Ready for production? Tooling? Raw Material? Production floor space? People to build the plane? Oh, and you're talking about this being built in Canada where under 2000 Hurricanes were built during the entire war?Which means that the USN Sea Hurricane is ready for production just around Dec 7 1941.
Not in early 1941. When was the Soviet Union invaded????As I stated Hurricanes were being exported to Russia and elsewhere.
Which would of had to happen in the middle of 1941 - tell me how long do you think it would have taken for production to be set up? Have you ever worked in an aircraft factory? Even an aircraft as simple as the Hurricane would have taken at least six months to set up, and we haven't even brought up lead times for raw materials and castings!No, I don't think that's true. The airframe was already for production (conversion to a Sea Hurricane was relatively simple and could be done post production) all they needed was engines and the requisite production priority.
Yes, by dumping excess overboard!They would have had to have some spare amount onboard, but again I'm sure the USN could overcome this relatively easily.
Because the aircraft were there - period!!!! Within a year the USN got something a lot more suited for the role. Agree the F4F needed to be replaced but in the end it did serve well and even in the most conservative assessments had a pretty good air to air combat record against a superior enemy.Why wouldn't they like a faster, more manoeuvrable fighter that was already combat proven? The USN resisted liquid cooled engines, but as the statement from Nimitz makes clear by mid 1942 they were not happy with the F4F-4:
I could agree with that but your scenario would only happen if someone in the Navy Dept. started the ball rolling way before Pearl Harbor.By Oct 1942 the USN was scraping the bottom of the barrel to feed F4F-4s into Guadalcanal. The Sea Hurricane II would have given them another fighter to supplement the F4F-4 and it would have been better suited to shore based ops than the F4F-4 with it's narrow LG. Having the Sea Hurricane in production would have reduced the USN's reliance on a single source for carrier fighters.
Sea Hurricanes used either a Rotal or a Dehavillland constant speed prop, but the Dehavilland unit was preferred because it was lighter. The calculated climb performance of the Hurricane 1 at 6700lb is shown here:
and it works out to about 6.4mins to 20k ft. The Sea Hurricane IB is about 3% (~7000lb) heavier than the Hurricane 1 but has another 10% more peak power (1440 versus 1310) so we can expect the peak climb rate to be higher and time to 20K ft to be about the same.
Your previous info from the Sea Hurricane 1b data card indicated 10mins to 20k ft @ 7015lb which is only marginally worse than the Hurricane 1's data card which indicates 9.7min (~3% worse) to 20k ft @ 6793lb.
The USN "would have" had to begun procurement way prior. Ready for production? Tooling? Raw Material? Production floor space? People to build the plane? Oh, and you're talking about this being built in Canada where under 2000 Hurricanes were built during the entire war?
Not in early 1941. When was the Soviet Union invaded????
Which would of had to happen in the middle of 1941 - tell me how long do you think it would have taken for production to be set up? Have you ever worked in an aircraft factory? Even an aircraft as simple as the Hurricane would have taken at least six months to set up, and we haven't even brought up lead times for raw materials and castings!
Yes, by dumping excess overboard!
Because the aircraft were there - period!!!! Within a year the USN got something a lot more suited for the role. Agree the F4F needed to be replaced but in the end it did serve well and even in the most conservative assessments had a pretty good air to air combat record against a superior enemy.
I could agree with that but your scenario would only happen if someone in the Navy Dept. started the ball rolling way before Pearl Harbor.
I see what you're saying but just going by that is a stretch for me. Too much guesswork, especially considering the only reasonable source we have is the data sheet - and I've certainly found errors/discrepancies in those. When I can find no climb test of a DH prop Hurricane or Sea Hurricane and the data sheet uses a nice round number like '10.0 minutes' that raises a bit of a red flag for me.
And while there is little to choose between a +16 Sea Hurricane and a +12 Hurricane under 8,000 feet, the performance gap afterwards makes me think more pessimistically about your climb estimates. But hey, I'm guessing as much as you are at this point.
Also, I was under the impression the two speed prop was desired due to being heavier (metal) than the wooden Rotol - the CG needing to be brought forward due to the hook gear.
The Sea Hurricane was not "unproven" as it cleared RN carrier trials in early 1941 and saw combat from RN carriers in mid 1941, so, in fact, it was the only "proven" single seat, monoplane, naval fighter in the Allied inventory at that point in the war.
The FAA wanted the highest possible performing fighter and in 1940 that would have been a variant of the Spitfire. OTOH, it is clear that this was a mistake and that the Hurricane was better suited for carrier ops because of it's more robust LG and airframe. The "priority" for the FAA was to secure a folding wing naval fighter that could fit down the narrow lifts of the Ark Royal and Illustrious class carriers and until very late in 1941, the only such fighter in production, on both sides of the Atlantic, was the Fairey Fulmar.
I am not suggesting that the USN "adopt" the Sea Hurricane as their primary carrier based fighter but I am saying that it would have been prudent and not impossibly improbable that the USN would have decided to support development and production of the Sea Hurricane in mid 1941 with a view towards securing an alternate source of single engine fighters both for itself and for the RN - yes a stop gap, but a very cheap stop gap, that would have paid handsome dividends.
We've already discussed how the RAF installed the Merlin XX in Spitfires, seemingly without difficulty
but the fact remains that the Merlin 45/16lb bbost peaked at 1515hp which actually exceeded the Merlin XX series until they were uprated to 18lb boost in 1943.
I would think it would take more than carrier trials to make an aircraft proven.
And by mid 1941, when Sea Hurricanes began operating (were these actual carrier aircraft or the CAM Hurricanes?) a replacement for the F4F was on the drawing board. It wasn't going to take a genius to see that if that replacement was any good it would also be superior to the Sea Hurricane.
The original proposal for a navalised Spitfire called for wings which folded just outboard of the landing gear and parallel to the fuselage axis. This could, quite probably, have fitted inside the lifts of the carriers. This was rejected in favour of Fulmars - in 1938/39. If Fairey had lent its carrier expertise to the program at that stage landing gear could have been improved, etc, for the task.
As for the Hurricane being better for carrier ops, was it really? The narrow landing gear of the Spitfire was a downside, but the same could be said of the F4F. But was the Hurricane's structure really more robust? Or was it just simpler?
The problem is that they would have barely got them on operations before the squadrons would be taken off active duty to work up on F6Fs.
A more immediate solution, as suggested earlier in the thread, would be for land based units to use higher performing land planes - like P-40s. The Navy can then get the best versions of the F4F until the F6F arrives.
I don't know if it would really have been value for money in the longer term.
I never said they couldn't be installed - just that they weren't. XXs were allocated elsewhere, and that killed the Spitfire III.
And since the early versions of the Seafire were based on, or modified from, Spitfire Vs they were basically stuck with the single stage engine. Also, the longer and heavier Merlin XX may have caused issues with prop clearence had the Seafires simply added the XX without the other required modifications.
That is a very narrow reading of the situation.
The single speed Merlins had a more limited operating range than the XX. While peak power of the 45 maybe 20-30hp more at its ideal altitude (for +16psi boost I am assuming it is quite low) the XX has more power over most other altitudes.
You just proved my point by your own timelines and indicated logistic issues of the day!!!The First CCF Hurricane left the production line on Jan 1940. CCF had a large plant that was fully tooled up by mid 1941. Production was slow prior to the Packard Merlin because RR Merlins had to come over from the UK. After Packard Merlins came on the scene the P-40F took a large number of them. CCF built about 1450 HHs and HSHs, so they could, and did, build both both types with the bulk of production from early 1942 to early 1943. To put this into perspective, Grumman only built a total 1778 ( 1347 F4F and 431 Martlet ) F4F and Martlet aircraft (according to Dean) from Dec 1939 to the end of 1942, prior to turning over production to GM.
The design engineering for the Sea Hurricane had already been done by March 1941.
The USSR was invaded on June 22 1941.
It didn't - they (USN) just didn't want it on their carriers.I think we'll have to agree to disagree about the coolant. I don't think that carrying a few hundred gallons of glycol represented an insurmountable problem.
That's an opinion - the Spitfire "should have" easily handled the Zero and it didn't, especially in initial engagements. How about the Hurricane over Burma? Shall we discuss the Hurricane's combat record against the Zero vs the Wildcat?They should have been able to do even better with a better performing aircraft.
Not denying that but your time lines on this happening only "would have" happened if someone recognized the potential in early 1941. A very good crystal ball would have been needed for that, but I repeat, in the end would have it beenworth the effort? In the mean time -That is what I am suggesting, and given the demand for naval fighters it would have been prudent to have another source for them.