The P-36 a Zero Killer??? (P-36 Hawk/Hawk 75)

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Correct, but the genesis of this thread was how valuable the high altitude performance of the F4F was early in the war.
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Actually, it's called "P-36 a Zero Killer??? (P-36/Hawk 75)" The P-40 was the logical step for the P-36, regardless of the F4F's performance. I honestly don't believe that adding the other radial would have offered the design anything that the Allison V-1710 or in fact the Merlin could have given in the P-40.
 
Just clarifying my intent of starting the thread...
The title of the thread was a play on another active thread at the time, The P-39 a Zero Killer???, and not meant to be taken literally.
That thread spoke of the value of the altitude performance of the 2-stage R-1830 powered F4F.
I was curious to learn if such a powered P-36 could have been of benefit.
I understand the P-36/P-40 evolution, but that did not address the issue of altitude performance.

SR6 did an excellent job addressing this query.
 
buffnut453 said:
P-36s did ok for the Brits operating over Burma from bases in India. The Dutch also used some in the East Indies in early '42 but I don't have specifics on how well they fared compared to the Brewsters and CW-21Bs that the ML-KNIL also operated.
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the hawk did just as bad as the others. However one should note that this had nothing to do with aircraft performance and cannot be used to measure as such. Most of the debacle was caused by a total lack of early warning systems, this combined with a lack of aircraft and the vastness of the area that had to be protected contributed to the failure of defence.
 

Thank you.

A big problem was the drag of the radial engine. One book claims that the P-36 had 22% more drag than the XP-40 in it's best configuration. That explains the 'early' P-40s speed advantage although later ones added lots of weight and drag. The P&W test mule may have been the second fastest type P-40 flown after the P-40Qs. It is estimated that it had only 8% more drag than the XP-40 and because it's engine offered much more power above 20,000ft it was faster. It may also have used exhaust thrust much better, I am not sure if these drag figures take exhaust thrust into account. However it may have had NO protective equipment and NO armament. Later radial installations might have done even better but come way to late in timing.
 
I understand the P-36/P-40 evolution, but that did not address the issue of altitude performance.
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I guess this depends entirely on your expectations of what is considered to be better altitude performance of the time. Would fitting a 2-stage R-1830 meet those expectations and like I said, would the Allison or even the Merlin be able to do the same? Emulating, or attempting to emulate the F4F's performance is perhaps not the best option, all things considered. What would that have given the P-36? It certainly would not have offered it better performance than the likes of the Zero. Fitting the Allison to the P-36 offers/offered more flexibility in terms of a viable future for the airframe, regardless of the immediate benefits of the 1830, otherwise, Curtiss would have done it.
 
A lot of things meshed together to cause certain aircraft to play the roles they did. For the US Army a key moment was the Jan 1939 fighter trials (delayed from 1938 ). The XP-38 was not available and neither was the XP-39. Curtiss had several prototypes and Seversky had at least two. The Army was testing the XP-37 with turbo and one of the Seversky fighters had a turbo. One of the Curtiss aircraft had a two stage superchargered R-1830 as did the other Seversky. The P-40 won not only on performance but because it was the lowest risk. Army wanted a lot of new planes and it wanted them in a hurry. The Turbo was figured to be at least 2 years away from service use and the P&W two stage engines hadn't really shown their potential. Troubles were unrecorded (or at least unpublished in popular press) but even later versions of the engine in the early F4Fs were not trouble free.
Since the P-40 was a P-36 with a new engine the existing production equipment and work force could be used for even faster delivery. Once production got rolling the P-40 became, while not the only game in town, the primary game in town. 778 were built in 1940 (starting in May) compared to 1 P-38, 13 P-39s, 106 F4Fs, 1 F4U. 1941 sees 2248 P-40s built and while production increases for other types the total for all the others put together is 71% of the number of P-40s. 1942 sees P-40 production overtaken by all types of fighters but only about 90 more P-38s, P-39s and P-47s were built than P-40s. Any P-36 built (regardless of engine) is a P-40 NOT built because the major factory expansions are only starting to take effect in 1942. Curtiss was expanding it's Buffalo factory as much as possible as it was. A new P-36/P-40 factory?

Allison tried to put an engine into production using 9.60 supercharger gears in 1941 but the gears failed (needed to be wider to handle the load) so that avenue to better altitude performance was delayed. The Merlin XX (Packard V-1650-1) was tested in the summer of of 1941 and in production in Jan of 1942 and would have helped considerably in the South Pacific, except they all went to North Africa so the P-40 would have some hope against the 109s.
 
Curtiss was also working on improving the P-36, by various projects such as the XP-37 and the XP-42.

The XP-37 (built from existing P-36 airframes) had an Allison V-1710-11 but still was armed lightly, with a single .50 MG and a single .30 MG. with the cockpit moved rearward on the fuselage. It was never able to reach it's projected top speed of 340 mph (547ph).

The XP-42 (also built from an existing P-36 airframe) was powered by a P&W R-1830-31 radial. While it was faster than the P-36, it suffered from several problems like overheating and excessive vibration. Since the XP-40 was demonstrating much better results, the XP-42 development was terminated. An interesting side note, is that the XP-42 was used as a hack until 1947, when it was scrapped. Not a bad lifespan for a one-off prototype.
 
The book P-40 in Action, 1976 edition, says of the Curtiss-Wright Company, had they spent their time and money building a fully developed, quality, improved P-40 rather than wasting time and money with the P-46 (which the book says pilots said was miserably cramped, hot and less maneuverable than the P-40) P-60, P-62, P-71, XF14C and others while shoving as many aircraft as cheaply as possible out the door, the Curtiss Aircraft division probably would not have stopped making aircraft shortly after WWII ended.
 
A lot of authors like the P-40 but let's face it, it was a re-engined P-36, not a wonder plane. IF they spent their time and money building a fully developed, quality, improved P-40 it would no longer be a P-40. How much a plane can you change and still call it the same name/designation? Hurricane changed from a fabric covered wing to a metal covered one but kept the same shape/planform and same airfoil so lift/drag and flying characteristics were unchanged. For the P-40 to be improved it needed a new airfoil, new flaps, new landing gear and a new wing structure. Still the same airplane though, right?

Making an improved P-40 instead of trying for a next generation fighter was a sure way to go out of business. Think about it. You can only sell the same old airplane/car for so long by changing the grille/tail lights and chrome while keeping the same chassis and driveline. Trying to play catch-up with new technologies if you skip a generation or two doesn't work very well.
 

I have to agree with these statements. In the UK we had a couple of these developments. The Manchester was modified to have four engines and became the Lancaster despite the fuselage being effectively the same. The Lancaster was stretched and became the Lincoln, the Wellington stretched became the Warwick. On fighters the Tempest was basically a Typhoon with a new wing and the Spiteful a Spit with a new wing. A P40 with the changes being discussed would be nothing like a P40.
 
The P-46 with the (and this is from AAFO site dedicated to air racing by racers) much over-rated laminar flow wing (at that site they say if it loses it polish it loses its effectiveness, they also said while in combat you simply cannot keep its polish up) plus the P-60 which was an improved fighter developed off of the P-53 which was developed directly off of the P-40, were both flying already in 1941, while the bastard child Qs, despite a lack of backing of the people running Curtiss who were busy with the dead end P-46-53-60, still managed to be built and flying by November 1943.

Had Curtiss done what Berlin wanted instead of wasting time with dead-end failures, an improved P-40 could have been in production by 1943, at the very latest.

Addendum:
Both the P-53 and early versions of the P-60 had the less than aerodynamic style P-40 landing gear, as that was changed in later models, changing it on the P-40 would not have been hard.
 
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Folks, understand a few things here...

It may have seemed like Curtiss was trying to "polish a turd" with all of these dead-end designs but in the end they were being funded by the AAF to continue development, in some cases cost-plus. As long as the DoD continued to pay, the work continued. Look at all the experimental fighter programs Curtiss worked on during WW2, do you think they were all completely funded by Curtiss?

The people who contined to fund these programs were just as guilty for these wasted projects as Curtiss!
 
absolutely....and military was the customer. they would ask or rather set out a set of specs and the ac maunfacturer would start to mod the plane to perform to those specs if possible.....and sometimes it worked out better on paper than in real life. the manufacturer didnt discontinue a model and force the military to consider their new and improved plane....the military was the one to phase out ac. if the company could still sell that model to another customer ( another country then production continued ).
 
BobR said:
Had Curtiss done what Berlin wanted instead of wasting time with dead-end failures, an improved P-40 could have been in production by 1943, at the very latest.
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Maybe we all would have been better off if Curtiss had license-built P-51's.
 

The scope of the query was limited...
During Guadalcanal, and other early Asian conflicts, the superior altitude performance of the F4F compared to the P-39, P-400 and P-40 often comes up.
The query was putting the F4F engine in the P-36 (both R-1830's, but one 1-stage the other 2-stage.)

Maybe overly simplistic, but one might assume that the P-36, not being a heavy/tougher naval fighter like the F4F, might perform at least as well as the F4F if not better, which might have been appreciated at that specific moment in time. Again, specifically, the altitude performance.

Alas, not only was it tried earlier, but the P-36, as SR6 explained, is not terribly conducive to this setup.

That's all.
The intention was not to question the P-36 evolution into the P-40 with the V-1710.
 
gjs238 said:
Maybe we all would have been better off if Curtiss had license-built P-51's.
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Fair enough, let's suppose Curtiss gave up on the P-36.

Where would we have been without the P-40, then? The P-40 bought U.S. forces time to get more advanced aircraft into theater. It provided filler to theaters that were in dire need of aircraft, both in the Pacific and the Med. The P-40 allowed American pilots to challenge seasoned Japanese pilots and survive to fight another day. It may not have been a world-beater, but it was able to go into a fight and survive.

Everyone gets starry-eyed at the big flashy fighters that have top billing, but it was the less than perfect ones that carried a serious part of the load at a time when they were needed.

The P-36 was a good aircraft, designed and built when air warfare was still evolving. If WWII happened in 1935, the P-36 would have been a serious contender.
 
The Army had a dept that evaluated designs before they ordered prototypes, as did the Navy. In some cases a requirement was put out and a number of paper proposals came back from the manufacturers. The people in the dept would evaluate the proposals and issue contracts for the more likely ones ( in some cases one manufacturer would submit 2-4 different proposals to the same requirement). In some cases the contracts were for a more detailed engineering study, in some cases they included a mock-up, in some cases they went straight to a prototype. Occasionally they skipped the prototype and went straight to production. Once the government had paid for an engineer study they were free to distribute that engineering study to other manufacturers.
I cannot think of any instance where a manufacturer built a plane during WW II on speculation. There may have been one but since the materials were controlled and the engines and instruments and other equipment were government furnished equipment the chances of completing a private venture aircraft was about zero.

The Army evaluating department/committee was the driving force in ordering the P-46, P-53, P-55, and the P-60 series from Curtiss. In part because they believed the P-36/40 airframe had limited development potential. It is true that the laminar flow wing didn't work anywhere near as well as it was hoped but it did work a little bit (normal airfoils lost smooth airflow in the first 15-20% of the cord. If the laminar flow wing could delay that to even 30% of the cord it was an advantage even if nowhere near what the laboratory claimed). Split flaps were also being seen as pretty basic and not in line with more modern (read just 2-3 years newer) developments. The Laminar flow airfoils also offered more volume in the wing. They kept a a certain depth over a larger percentage of the wing area than the older more tapered airfoils.
Laminar flow didn't work as claimed but that does not mean a 1935 wing was as good as a 1940 wing on average.
 
IMO, there was one Curtiss fighter that "should have" been further developed for a number of reasons, all the other pseudo P-40 based designs should have been thrown down the $hitter...

 
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