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You may find these books of interest. The threads also include some diagrams of the aircraft.I'm aware of the RAF investigating fitting radar to a Hawker Typhoon to make a single seat, single engine night fighter, and some Hurricanes were converted for such a role in the CBI. But were there other known successful conversions of single seat, single engine fighters to being night/all-weather fighters? I also know of the P-51D Mustang that was converted into a two seat night/all-weather interceptor, though I have no idea how well it worked (photos of it are at IWM's site), and some trainer versions of P-38s were converted into P-38M night fighters. The conversion as far as I know worked well, but there was little for them to shoot down in 1945 when it was introduced (the P-51 night fighter conversion was also from 1945).
P-82 was a 2-engined fighter. Probably does not fit well with the 1-engined fighters, that are the topic here?Sorry to revive this thread, but what about a single seat F-82? Sort of defeats the purpose of it's creation (two pilots for long range flights or putting a radar operator in the right side fuselage), but a single seat F-82 as a heavy interceptor was looked it, and could've been achieved by removing the right fuseage's windscreen, canopy, and seat and fairing over the cockpit.
Probably due to the cloudy canopies interfering with the vision of the excellent binoculars the crews were using.In theory, the best bet for the 1-engined night fighters were probably the Japanese D4Y and C6N - both were with good performance (on par with latest Japanese fighters), while not being limited to just one crew member.
Due to the experimental/ad-hoc nature of the (night) fighter conversions, and being without a radar, success probably eluded them.
I am sure that they could have made such an arrangement work, but at least through to late-1944 or early-1945 the radars worked better (in terms of user friendliness) when fitted to a 2-seat/twin-engine airframe. The only reason the USN used the AI on the single-seat/single-engine F6F (in late-1943) was that they did not have a 2-seat/twin-engine carrier aircraft of sufficient performance at the time. The SBD, SB2C, and TBF were not up to the task in 1944-45.
The USN flew CAP Night missions, and I would think with a modern 1944/1945 CIC and data flowing from ship based radar, the mission was more executable for the Night Hellcats and Corsairs.