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My guess is the same problem with the P-43, if a pilot tries to three point it while landing, the fat wing chord and short fuselage blankets the rudder just as you said.Because the veteran Chinese pilots found ways to get into the P43s, and the nuggets, fresh from stateside training, came straight from initial fighter training in the infamous Niagara groundhog. They weren't ready for a high powered tail dragger, especially a squirrelly one like the P66.
A short coupled, exaggerated wide stance tail dragger like the P66 requires extra finesse with brakes and throttle to keep it straight on the ground. A little more throttle is needed to get it started into a turn, then when the tailwheel swivels you've suddenly got too much, and snatch the throttle back, but it keeps turning, so you stomp on opposite rudder. Unfortunately, your undersized rudder on its short fuselage moment has been deprived of slip stream, and doesn't have the authority to stop your turn, so inertia and gyroscopic precession take over and round an' round she goes. Your frantic efforts on the brake to stop this ground loop serve only to pitch her up on her nose, sudden-stopping the engine and wrenching the prop. In Jakarta, there are no spare engines or props to be had. 'Nother one bites the dust!
All true but nothing to do with the Corsair.How true it is - I don't know - but author John Wegg, mentions the Model 48 Vanguard was patterned on the Hughes H-1B racer - both designed by Palmer.
I would describe it as sub-optimal machines condemned to operate under sub-optimal circumstances.But you do have to wonder why, if the Zeke and Oscar were competitive, that the P-66 and Curtiss CW-21 could not have been used more effectively.
It had a head start timewise, so there was a pre-existing body of experience and supporting infrastructure, it was a somewhat more honest handling machine, and in many cases, of long and precarious supply chains and primitive conditions, the best available substitute for the late arriving REAL thing.In fact the Mohawk IV soldiered on in the CBI for years after it was considered a death trap elsewhere.
Sort of like the Wirraway to Boomerang.From what I see the P-66 was nothing more than an attempt to capitalize on Vultee's successful trainer line.
True. What's worse for the Brits, the Vought Chesapeake or Brewster Bermuda? Lets send them both to the IPO, might as well get rid of them. The Bermuda was a year late, but two FAA squadrons of Chesapeakes (presumably with former Skua pilots) would give an otherwise absent dive bomber capability to the Malayan defences.Well, it wasn't "Brewster" bad, just had several issues that just kept it from being better than it could have been.
Bingo. If the performance numbers cited had been for a P-34 they might have been considered respectable. But the P-66 came well after the P-47 and P-51, so a 340mph top speed was a step backward.I think the P66 suffered from several disadvantages:
1) Late out of the gate. It's development was begun two or three years later than other aircraft of similar design performance,
Nice depictions. Do you have details on P-66 engines? 1830 dash what? Were all P-66s equipped with the same HP P&Ws? Actual HP? Prop Ham Standard what? H-1 had a Twin Wasp Jr. 1535 dash what? 825 HP? The H1 as flown had more than the book value. Dick Palmer told me so. Among other things they bumped the timing up to 28 degrees from 25. Prop was a Ham Standard D12D40, I think. Length? Blades? Do you have any details of the H1 XC record? Altitudes, and routes? TAS?Don't know where I got this, or why it is in the language it uses.
I've always thought it looked like a Zero.
View attachment 658785View attachment 658786
And just for comparison, I've attached something else.View attachment 658788
P-66 production saw deliveries by summer of '41 - the P-47 didn't start deliveries until December '41 and the Mustang Mk.I was being delivered in October of 1941.Bingo. If the performance numbers cited had been for a P-34 they might have been considered respectable. But the P-66 came well after the P-47 and P-51, so a 340mph top speed was a step backward.
I remember seeing fly off comparison tests of P-66 and contemporaries. Cannot remember where. Think it happened at Wright-Pat, USAAC sponsored, but have no idea where I saw the data published. P-66 did OK v fighter with similar hp. I know Dick Palmer thought they'd given him a P-36 engine, and he'd designed a plane that was better than the P-36 around it. He thought the frontal area of the 1830 was a nearly impossible problem, which was why he played around with prop extensions and fairings in the prototype, also why he used the Twin Wasp Jr on the Racer. Not germane to this thread, but he told me he'd designed the H1 with the possibility of turning it into a fighter in mind. He imagined the Twin Wasp Jr. with a two stage, two speed blower, tweaked for 1000 HP, critical altitude of 20-25K. XC version of H1 had fuel capacity of 275-285 gallons, I forget which. Call it 1670 LB of fuel. Put 1/3-2/5 of that into guns and armor, and you still can carry as much fuel as a P-51.Wikipedia has nothing good to say about the Vanguard, but with 340 mph top speed, four guns, rate of climb of 2,520 ft/min and 850 mile range, the Vanguard doesn't read that terribly. Certainly no worse than the Buffalo.
You are correct. It turns out that the Vultee plane was already flying, and foreign orders had been placed, by early 1940. But the AAF did not assign the P- designation to the plane until after Pearl Harbor, so it got #66. But by that time the Vanguard's performance was not as good as other planes in the pipeline, so it simply was not good enough to merit mass production. Meanwhile, the P-47 designation had been issued sometime in very late '39 or early '40, but Republic took the XP-47 and and discarded the design and essentially started over, so the P-47 didn't actually fly until after the (eventual) P-66 did.Nice depictions. Do you have details on P-66 engines? 1830 dash what? Were all P-66s equipped with the same HP P&Ws? Actual HP? Prop Ham Standard what? H-1 had a Twin Wasp Jr. 1535 dash what? 825 HP? The H1 as flown had more than the book value. Dick Palmer told me so. Among other things they bumped the timing up to 28 degrees from 25. Prop was a Ham Standard D12D40, I think. Length? Blades? Do you have any details of the H1 XC record? Altitudes, and routes? TAS?
The P-66's probably could have given the P-64's what for!
"The dogfight of the dogs"
North American was another new company who did the same thing, albeit much more successfully.2) It started from a design approach that tried to make one basic airframe perform multiple tasks with engines ranging from 450 to 1200 horsepower. (230 to 1200 if you count the hypothetical primary trainer version) This is a tricky task for even a highly experienced manufacturer to pull off, let alone one with less than ten years under its belt.