Merlin Two Stage Supercharger

[Engineman]

It astonishes me what some pilots had to put up with, not just prop adjustment, mixture and throttle. Look at the attached. Two speeds, two stages. Flipping all that on and off during combat must have been very challenging. Fig 17 is R-1830, as in F4F and XP-41. The lower one is R-2800.

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The mid to late 1930's until the mid-WW2 period does seem to have had some very complicated examples. It is interesting that you can read descriptions of some pilots being sent-off with hardly any instruction about the aircraft, and yet reading the flying manuals today reveals a whole encyclopedia of limits and operating requirements that could only have been learned and observed by considerable study. I do suspect that many aircraft were operated with very poor handling skills.
As I have read, the early versions of turbo-charged P-38 were very demanding, so much so that they were possibly limited in effectiveness.

Cheers

Eng

 

[MIflyer]

As I have read, the early versions of turbo-charged P-38 were very demanding, so much so that they were possibly limited in effectiveness.

One Saturday my friend Ward Duncan, the WW2 maintenance chief of the 9th PRS, hauled out his picture albums and gave us a little tutorial on how you could screw up a P-38 just by the pilots not understanding the various systems. Even proper fuel management was beyond the pilots at times.