P-40s "particularly difficult to handle"?

Dana Bell said:

(Didn't anyone read my book?)

Cheers,



Dana

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I just now connected your name with the book. I absolutely did read it, several times, and got ideas on formatting information for the book my wife and I are writing for Osprey on the XP-67. Like extensive captions on photos for example, rather than making people flip back and forth between text and pictures to get the full story. I expect to have a tussle with Osprey over that, since we're simultaneously limited on number of words in text and number of words in captions, with an overaching limit on the number of illustrations we can use to begin with. Your book has been an inspiration, but honestly I'd forgotten the ground-looping part of your discussion.

Dana Bell said:

Hi guys,

The original P-40 (no suffix) was a bitch to land. Of 200 delivered, 50 (25%) were damaged in ground looping accidents. Others (no records of numbers) were destroyed in more serious accidents. The 50 P-40Gs were the damaged P-40s rebuilt with Tomahawk wings, since the original P-40 wings were no longer in production.

The AAF had no plans to continue P-40 production, so the Greek note might have referred to the Tomahawk, which continued in production as the Army awaited the new P-40D. Problems with the shorter Allison gearbox forced the Army to accept more long-nosed aircraft based on the Tomahawk. Note the P-40B and C serials were: all were ordered after the P-40D.

Solutions to the ground looping problem included redesigning the wing fillet, lengthening the tail wheel, training pilots to avoid three-point landings (please land main wheels first), and eventually lengthening the aft fuselage, rudder, and fin strake.

(Didn't anyone read my book?)

Cheers,



Dana

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Seems like even very early Tomahawk types would have been a big boost for the Greeks had they arrived in time.

Is this the book? Amazon product ASIN B01N8YBD3X

GrauGeist said:

Well, the RAF did unload their unwanted Airacobras on the Soviets...

So it would make sense to try and sell the Daffys and recoup some money spent.

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They were definitely seeing the bottom of the financial barrel in 1940-41, from the government-to-government correspondence.

nuuumannn said:

I can't say for certain about the P-40 and its handling, I'll leave that to the experts, but it's worth mentioning that the most modern fighter the Hellenic air Force had at the time was the PZL P-24, which was quite a different machine to a P-40 in terms of performance envelope and available engine power. The Defiant decision is an odd one, not heard of that before and peculiar given its role; were the British attempting to foister the type onto the Greeks after it didn't work out as a day fighter, or did the Brits want to protect their stock of Spits and Hurris?

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Their supply of their own fighters wasn't at risk where Greece was concerned, but at that point in time they were urgently trying to buy American fighters to bulk up their forces, and the idea of diverting Tomahawks meant for them to Greece or anybody else (think "China") was just abhorrent to them. Every fighter that went to someone else was one they couldn't put in reserve for themselves, and in 1940-41 they were naturally obsessed with their own national survival over everything else.

Schweik said:

Seems like even very early Tomahawk types would have been a big boost for the Greeks had they arrived in time.

Is this the book? Amazon product ASIN B01N8YBD3X

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Hi Schweik,

That's the book.

Cheers,


Dana

OldGeezer said:

I just now connected your name with the book. I absolutely did read it, several times, and got ideas on formatting information for the book my wife and I are writing for Osprey on the XP-67. Like extensive captions on photos for example, rather than making people flip back and forth between text and pictures to get the full story. I expect to have a tussle with Osprey over that, since we're simultaneously limited on number of words in text and number of words in captions, with an overaching limit on the number of illustrations we can use to begin with. Your book has been an inspiration, but honestly I'd forgotten the ground-looping part of your discussion.

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Hi OldGeezer,

Many thanks - I'm glad the format worked for you, too!

I don't know what materials you've found for your XP-67 book, but if you're planning research at the National Archives I've built an extensive finding aid to the Sarah Clark/Wright Field collection (RG342). There are several boxes of correspondence and reports on the P-67, and I'll be happy to send an RTF of the finding aid if you think it will help. Either way, good luck with the project.

Cheers,


Dana

EDIT Duplicate of someone elses post

Dana Bell said:

Hi OldGeezer,

Many thanks - I'm glad the format worked for you, too!

I don't know what materials you've found for your XP-67 book, but if you're planning research at the National Archives I've built an extensive finding aid to the Sarah Clark/Wright Field collection (RG342). There are several boxes of correspondence and reports on the P-67, and I'll be happy to send an RTF of the finding aid if you think it will help. Either way, good luck with the project.

Cheers,


Dana

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My wife spent a couple of days at the National Archives before the whole COVID thing shut them down, and got a few things from RG 342 that have proven invaluable. We've made a list of what else is in it from a search online. But it takes quite a bit of on-site time to get things accessed and copied, which is why she was able to retrieve so few of the items, and of course there's been no way to get them now. I'd love to see your list and compare it with ours.

Without NARA, we've had to develop other sources. We've been extraordinarily lucky there. We've been able to tap into some private collections that are full of never-before-published photos showing construction and testing, and we've also become good friends with the son of the man who came up with the whole concept of extreme blending in the first place. He has a bunch of his father's papers and half a dozen blueprints that aren't in NARA, tracing the evolution of the configuration and particularly the propulsion system. Also, after a very long search, we were recently successful in linking up with the son and grandson of the McDonnell pilot who made almost all of the XP-67 flights, and we're hoping to get more insights from them. But we're running out of time now, with a submittal deadline of 1 November for the finished product.

We heard about the Sarah Clark Collection and from somewhere (NASM? AFM? I honestly can't recall) got 2 massive spreadsheets of 70,000+ lines each, listing what's in the Collection. While the titles are searchable, there are plenty of items that MIGHT contain XP-67 material or might not, like "Experimental Engineering Section Office Memos No. 42" or in one case just "Pursuit Experimental" and things like that. We've also heard that the St Louis branch of the National Archives, which is only about 3 miles from our house, has some sort of big database that may also have XP-67 documentation. It's in boxes that nobody has been able to get access to, awaiting declassification review. Apparently the facility doesn't have enough resources to tackle that job. We've heard that there may be a partial index, done by sampling every tenth box, but that index hasn't been made available to the public. It's really frustrating to know that there may be unseen historical information within walking distance of us, and not be able to go look for it!

One forgets that the Brits "gave" 100 Tomahawks to the AVG


With the exception of the P-39, all operational fighters in WW2 were tail wheel equipped. The major factors affecting the amount of difficulty in landing the various types was due to the following (no ranking of importance): distance between main landing gear wheels (the narrower - more difficult), height of main gear and thus height the center of gravity of the aircraft (the higher the aircraft - the greater the tendency for the nose to swing sideways or tip over), length of aft fuselage behind the main landing gear line (the longer - less tendency of the tail to "kick" sideways), brakes (some "bite" and thus harder to control the slowing down of the airplane and thus greater tendency to nose over), the main gear shock absorbers (some "hard" and unyielding or too soft and "too yielding"), and more.

OldGeezer said:

I just now connected your name with the book. I absolutely did read it, several times, and got ideas on formatting information for the book my wife and I are writing for Osprey on the XP-67. Like extensive captions on photos for example, rather than making people flip back and forth between text and pictures to get the full story. I expect to have a tussle with Osprey over that, since we're simultaneously limited on number of words in text and number of words in captions, with an overaching limit on the number of illustrations we can use to begin with. Your book has been an inspiration, but honestly I'd forgotten the ground-looping part of your discussion.

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We had no problem with Osprey on significant/large captions on our images - although the process of separating image/caption from text caused a couple of errors in final copy. The worst was someone at Osprey naming the A-36 "Apache" after the final edits. We began with a 100 page 100 image limit, final 352 pages - 250 images.

Hey, Big Jake,
what do you consider the P-38, if not an operational fighter?

Greg Boeser said:

Hey, Big Jake,
what do you consider the P-38, if not an operational fighter?

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Also:

Gloster Meteor
Me-262
P-61

Big Jake said:

With the exception of the P-39, all operational fighters in WW2 were tail wheel equipped.

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Well, if we're counting night-fighters:
P-70, He-219

The He162, although late, did go operational.
So there is one more for the list.

P 63, even.

OldGeezer said:

While going through State Department records in connection with something else, I noticed a very strange comment that I thought I'd put out here. On December 19, 1940, the Secretary of State commented on a request by Greece for 30 current-model P-40s: "In as much as all of the P–40 planes now being produced are earmarked for Great Britain..." - really? All of them? I thought maybe they meant all of the ones cleared for export, but from later content it's certainly not just that. The message went on to say that the Brits offered Greece an equivalent number of Defiants if the Greeks would agree to cancel their request for P-40s. The Greeks at first apparently said yes, then wised up and insisted on the original agreement, which led to the oddest comment of all: "...while the American Government has no intention of withdrawing the offer made to Greece, the informed authorities of this Government consider that Greece would be well-advised to accept the British offer for several reasons: (1) the time of delivery and shipment to Greece of the P–40's is uncertain; (2) the P–40 plane is said to be particularly difficult to handle, and partly for this reason our Army is not accepting any further planes of this type..."

I don't recall ever hearing that the P-40 was unusually hard to control, and I certainly never encountered anything saying that the Army quit accepting them for service at that time. Does anyone know anything more about this?

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The only problem I've heard about piloting the P-40 was that it tended to "mush" while dive bombing, meaning it was slow to respond. Some pilots crashed head first while training. With experience, pilots seemed to be resolve this problem.

SAAB J 21A. Bell XP-77. FM-1 Airacuda. Boeing B-29. Budd RB-1. Consolidated B-24. Curtiss CW-24 and XP-55. Dornier Do-335. Douglas XBT2D-1 and XTB2D-1. XB-42. C-54/R5DFairchild C-82. Fokker D.XXIII. GAL.38. Go.244. Heston JC.6. Interstate TDR-1. Lockheed XP-58. B-26 Marauder. XP-67 Bat. Me 309. Miles M.3 and M.33. M.35 / 39. Myasishev DVB-102. G5N. G8N. North American B-25. XB-28. P-56. P-61. Northrop N9M and XB-35 / 49. Ki-94. P-54. Yokosuka R2Y.

Not all fighters, but all nosewheels.

And the He280, Me264, Ar234, Ta154