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"bitching'" (complaining)
I am not sure why you are dragging Curtiss Wright into the discussion as to what Allison did or didn't do to develop their engine better. Any evidence that Allison was guilty of what Wright was?
The Wright factory in Ohio was Making R-2600 air cooled radial engines. Not Allison V-1710sYou are trying to nit pick, Curtiss was making Allison engines under the direction of Allison, or are you suggesting it was some new Curtiss engine? Did Curtiss set up the factory on their own? Did they create the tools and jigs?
Again, it's pretty simple - we both know those were Allison engines being made in that factory.
S
Allison had all it's subcontracting done in in General motors plants but Allison was the ONLY assembly plant for the V=1710 engine.And what type of engine is the V-1710? Are you suggesting Allison wasn't part of that? I should have guessed this was the angle certain people would take, but I don't think Allison can wash their hands of their own engines being built in another companies factory - as far as I know nearly every major aircraft or aircraft engine company had manufacturing done in other companies factories, right?
Italic: I never implied that, that is you interpretation. Stop putting words in peoples mouths.They solved the survivability problem for P-40s by increasing (low altitude) horsepower from 1150 to ~1550 and that is pretty good for what has been implied were retarded teenagers who barely knew how to count. Saved a lot of lives and basically made the aircraft viable again which was needed due to the failure of so many other designs like the P-39, P-35*, P-43*, P-46, P-60, and the (at that time still struggling) P-38.* before somebody nit-picks this I am well aware that these designs paved the way for the excellent P-47 but it took quite a while to get there and the war was still on.
The institutions, corporate and government, did enough of their part to get the country in position to survive, but it's also hyperbole to ignore the innovations in the field. It was from the field that the idea of putting bombs on several of the available fighters originated, when the bombers on hand were inadequate to do the job (and putting fighter escorts at risk because they were so slow). It was in the field that successful efforts were taken to lighten fighters (which were later copied by Curtiss), where the new boost settings got established which were later accepted by Allison, and so on. It was in the field that skip bombing was invented. Or the defensive gun added to the Il-2. The adoption of the finger-four and flying in pairs. And so on.
Allison had all it's subcontracting done in in General motors plants but Allison was the ONLY assembly plant for the V=1710 engine.
Unless you can show proof otherwise.
RR sort of stumbled into hiring Stanley Hooker and in fact didn't really know what they wanted him to do when they hired him.
Adding to this conversation ! Tossing this out here.It's hardly a big secret, and google is your friend.
Curtiss-Wright - Wikipedia
They were installing defective engines and then bribing Army inspectors to slip them through to the combat units. I would call this criminal negligence. It was a plague for the US, every country had it's own particular kind of cultural problems in meeting the challenges of aircraft production in WW2, but for the US it was corporate corruption.
from the wiki:
"From 1941 to 1943, the Curtiss Aeronautical plant in Lockland, Ohio produced aircraft engines under wartime contract destined for installation in U.S. Army Air Forces aircraft.[8][9] Wright officials at Lockland insisted on high engine production levels, resulting in a significant percentage of engines that did not meet Army Air Forces (AAF) inspection standards. These defective engines were nevertheless approved by inspectors for shipment and installation in U.S. military aircraft. After investigation, it was later revealed that Wright company officials at Lockland had conspired with civilian technical advisers and Army inspection officers to approve substandard or defective aircraft engines for military use.[8][9] Army Air Forces technical adviser Charles W. Bond was dismissed by the Army in 1943 for "gross irregularities in inspection procedure."[10] Bond would later testify that he had been "wined and dined" by Wright company officials; one of those occasions was the night before Bond fired four AAF engine inspectors another AAF inspector had described as "troublemakers."[10] In 1944, three Army officers, Lt. Col. Frank Constantine Greulich of Detroit, former chief inspection officer for the material command, Major Walter A. Ryan of Detroit, former central states inspection officer, and Major William Bruckmann, a former Cincinnati brewer and resident Army inspections officer at the Wright plant in Lockland were charged with neglect of duty, conspiracy, and giving false testimony in a general court martial.[11][12][13] All three men were later convicted of neglect of duty.[13] The story of defective engines had reached investigators working for Sen. Harry Truman's congressional investigative board, the Truman Commission, after several Wright aircraft assembly workers informed on the company; they would later testify under oath before Congress.[8][9][14] Arthur Miller's play All My Sons is based on this incident.[15]"
I'd like to point out, I'm not "bitching and moaning", I was referring to historical facts. I appreciate that it's useful to approach history from a variety of perspectives and have no problem, in fact appreciate your well informed perspective from the manufacturers point of view. But please don't get carried away. I'm not a bitch and don't appreciate being referred to as one implicitly or otherwise.
I don't think there were many aircraft or engine manufacturers that didn't have to suddenly ramp up production from the tiny level of aircraft needed for civilian use in the 30's to the massive numbers demanded by the military forces in the 1940's. No doubt it was an immense challenge, but so was fighting for survival against a determined and well trained enemy in high performing fighters, in a not quite perfected aircraft that you only had 20 hours of flight time in. So was surviving El Alamein or the invasion of Guam or the Bataan Death March. World War II was an unprescedented screaming emergency that snuffed out the lives of 40-60+ million people depending on how you did the math. Everyone had a hard time.
And yet the war lasted four years for the US, and Curtiss and Allison certainly saw it coming. They had time to make certain decisions (as other aircraft and engine manufactuers did) and they didn't. In fact they cut corners, instigated corruption and got caught doing it. Cutiss also failed to make almost any useful major designs after the P-40 (one transport plane and one float plane, the rest basically all failed), which is why Curtiss aircraft folded shortly after WW2.
The P-40 was a good fighter, and the Allison was a good engine, there were many good people and obviously some excellent engineers involved in their production, but there were also clearly issues with the management of both Curtiss and Allison or it's parent company or both which prevented it from becoming a great engine - and that cost many lives. The rest is just excuses.
I'm not sure what mythological context you are coming from, but don't be confused, I never said that mechanics in the field knew more about engine design than Allison or Rolls Royce did, I'm saying they successfully rose to the challenge of getting the problems solved before the manufacturer did, certainly in the case of Allison. That again is an historical fact.
S
JeffAdding to this conversation ! Tossing this out here.
Yet the P40 Q model would have been a vast improvement and could be fielded by 1943
Wow! GregP is going to love you.
I guess hindsight is 20/20
If the correct spectacles are used.
Hope I did not steal this post.
Now that is an act that I would consider impossible considering the firepower of this
group.
Dan
I've said it before, 200-300 lb. weight difference between the Allison and the Merlin means the British one was a heavier built engine.Initially the British had the better Fighters and Engines.
Ironically I think the Allison was a better engine than the Watch Maker Merlin.
Just the British developed what they had into a great performer.
Dan
I've said it before, 200-300 lb. weight difference between the Allison and the Merlin means the British one was a heavier built engine.
You can put more stress (i.e., power) on either engine but the Merlin will stand up to it better.
Hydroplane crews in the 50's-70's found the same thing.
Elvis
Ironically I think the Allison was a better engine than the Watch Maker Merlin.
...ok, I stand corrected...That extra 300lbs includes a 2nd stage supercharger, an intercooler and 2 speed supercharger drive.
Equivalent single stage Merlins were 25-50lbs heavier than the V-1710.
And the 2 speed, single stage, Merlin XX series was only about 100lbs heavier.
...ok, I stand corrected...
From the 456th Fighter Squadron website...
"The production Allison turned out to be the sturdy and reliable powerplant that its designers had striven for. The only thing that stood between the Allison and real greatness was its inability to deliver its power at sufficiently high altitudes. This was not the fault of its builders. It resulted from an early Army decision to rely on turbo supercharging to obtain adequate power at combat heights. Even this decision was not a technical error. A turbo supercharged Allison was as good a high-altitude engine as most. The trouble was that the wartime shortage of alloying materials, especially tungsten, made it impossible to make turbo superchargers for any but a small proportion of Allisons.
Bomber engines got the priority.
The few turbo-supercharged Allisons that were made were allocated to P-38s, making the high-altitude performance of that plane its best feature.
All 14,000 P-40s got gear-driven superchargers and, as a result, were never first-class fighter planes. Donaldson R. Berlin, the P-40 designer, has said that P-40s experimentally equipped with turbo-superchargers outperformed Spitfires and Messerschmitts and that if it had been given the engine it was designed for, the P-40 would have been the greatest fighter of its era.
This may be to some extent the bias of a proud parent, but there is no doubt that the deletion of the turbo supercharger ruined the P-39.
Had Allison's engineers been able to put the effort into gear-driven superchargers that Pratt and Whitney and Rolls-Royce did, it might have been a different story. As it was, there can be little doubt that the V-1710 had more potential than was actually exploited."