Wild_Bill_Kelso
Senior Master Sergeant
- 3,231
- Mar 18, 2022
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The major problem withthe dream is that the P-46 was the upgraded P-40 in 1940 and Curtiss won the competition - all it had to do was perform to promise. Materiel Command bent over backwards trying to make it work. The P-60 was the diving save attempt. In summary, They were 'the end' of Curtiss as a Prime Pursuit competitor with the XP-46 disaster and depended on the P-40N for survival.I think I did already stipulate - P-51 was better! Not just for speed but also range.
Was there a niche for P-40Q? Well maybe, considering the US were still using P-40s well into 1944 in the Med and I think to 1945 in China / Burma, a 40 mph faster version with a much higher effective ceiling might be worth having, instead of another 3,000 P-40Ns. If, and big if, they could get something working in time. My fantasy element here is if you took away P-46 and P-60 and just focused on something like a Q, could it have been done a bit earlier. If it arrives by say, mid 1944 I think it's too late, just use the Mustangs and other new designs.
It sounds like the P-40Q they patched together for testing was performing fairly well, though it's hard to say if the prototype crashes were due to aircraft design problems or not. maybe they were.
Given the conditions at Allison I doubt things could have been speeded up much.Yeah I don't disagree with that, the only wiggle room here is whether V-1710-121 (or something similar) could have been made much earlier, which I think it could have if it had been made a priority. Even a two speed supercharger would have been quite helpful (made a P-40N much more useful) and the US Navy contractors figured out two speed and two stage pretty early.
I think the dream of turbos, which maybe should have come together a bit quicker and more neatly than it did (weren't these GE turbos being used on airliners in the 30s?) and this whole thing about the V-1410 that SR6 brought up (which I hadn't even heard of) probably made quicker and more substantial development on the V-1710 impossible. And Curtiss obsession with failed projects like the P-60 and several others mentioned upthread.
Anyway, obviously it's coulda shoulda. In a way the V-1710 was almost too efficient as what it was, which prevented it from becoming more. A bit like the A6M and Bf109 perhaps...
To do a proper job Allison should have redone the entire back of the engine. the 9.5 in impeller supercharger was going to limit things no matter what kind of a gear box you stuck on it. With the demands on Allison's time in 1940-41 this was not going to happen.
No airliners used turbos in the 1930s, they barely used 2 speed superchargers. There was no sense building airliners that could fly over 10-12,000ft until you got pressurized fuselages. Making passengers put on oxygen masks for a number of hours would not have gone over well.
The Boeing 307 (10 built)
View attachment 724637
used two speed superchargers, not turbos.
The P-53 was a 'stretched' P-40 using a laminar flow wing (and holding more guns than a P-40E) and the Continental engine.
This is where everything came apart for Curtiss. The Army wanted more speed, more range, more guns/ammo but wasn't suppling the engines with enough power to do the job.
The engines were government furnished equipment. It was not Curtiss's job to develop or even order the engines. The Government (Army) told Curtiss what engine/s to use and Curtiss had to figure out the installation. Curtiss could suggest engines but the Army made the actual decisions. If the engines were late, or lacking in power or were otherwise trouble some it wasn't Curtiss's job to fix them. Curtiss could try to suggest alternatives (How the later P-60s got P & W R-2800s).
They did, they were the two speed Cyclone 9s used in many export Hawks. in fact they were very similar to the engines used in the British Brewster Buffaloes.So put those engines in P-36s!
The RAF uses Imperial Gallons so 132 times 1.200949 = 159.73 US GallonsGood chart, except that both Mohawk and Tomahawk could carry 160 gallons internal, which is precisely what we were talking about. At some risk to flight stability.
Also was there two wings for the Hurricane? 231 or 258 sq ft? I never heard of that. Can somebody explain that?
The US aviation industry standard for S=wing area is the Gross wing planform area, including the fuselage section. Wing Loading, Aspect Ratio derived from MAC.Usually the figure used is the Gross wing area, but there are exceptions. Sometimes it is due to a transcription error by the authors (whether a book or an official data sheet of some sort), and sometimes it is due to the engineers using the Net area in the analysis/report. As Geoffrey mentioned above sometime the authors in books and articles mistakenly use the gross value minus the ailerons. But in this case with the Hurricane the difference is due to the fuselage area being subtracted from the gross wing area.
Sometimes from an engineering viewpoint it makes a significant difference in total lift.
Incidentally, the total aileron area for the Hurricane is 20.4 ft2, so 257 - 20.4 = 236.6 ft2
sweet mother of sassafras, those some of the most beautifully detailed dimensioning documents I've ever seen. Angle of Incidence, Dihedral, Wheel size, even Stabilizer data... all in one placeHi,
I believe that the wing weight category used by the US during this time period could included "fuselage carry-through structure" as part of the "Wing Group", as shown in the link below for the F4F-4 from the wwiiaircraftperformance.org website
Specifically, the 1181 lb Wing Group weight is listed as consisting of;
1030lb for the wings
38 lb for the ailerons
43 lb for the flaps
70 lb for the fuselage carry-through structure
Similarly the specifications for the F4U-1 from the same site lists a 2121.7 lb Wing Group Weight for that aircraft including;
1088 lb for the center section
872.2 lb for the outer panels
6.6 lb for the wing tips
57.6 lb for the ailerons
97.3 lb for the flaps
Regards
Pat
10G ? Modern F 16 or F 35 are "only" stressed for 9 G. Doubt a pilot could survive any routine 10 G manouevres.I know in part it's the wings. P-40, at least the military versions, had a wing stressed to 10G. More spars etc. Which did have some benefits.
Wildcats, Corairs & Hellcats were built for carrier ops - by design they had to be rugged which carried a weight penalty. Spitfire & 109 were designed as interceptors, power:weight was everything, time to altitude & manouverability were key inputs - not so for the naval fighters.Another big thing is fuel. US was expecting to have to fight at a distance, not on home territory. P-40s and Wildcats carried a good bit more fuel than Spitfires, Hurricanes, Bf 109s or Yak-1s. Lightnings, P-51s and P-47s, Corsairs and Hellcats carried much more fuel. So that is a lot of weight right there even for the empty (but self sealing) fuel tanks, and the structural strength to carry all that gas.