Speaking mainly about fighters like the Hellcat. Huge air frame for a fighter at the time. Could take a huge amount of hammering from a zero with it size, frame, armor for the pilot, self sealing gas tanks.

Very powerful air cooled radial for the time (almost twice the HP of the zero), great range speed and maneuverability for it's size, needed the big HP power to pull that big ass frame. Not as nimble as the Zero but it was like Mike Tyson fighting a Ninja, do your dance moves then I'll deck you...lol..

6 .50 cal MG's, literally 6 cannons compared to most other allied and enemy planes still using rifle calibers. Yeah zeros had sometimes 2 20mm and 2 rifle calibers MG's but 6 faster firing .50 "cannons" with more rounds met if you got in the path you were lit up.

I often wonder how the Hellcat would have done in Europe at the time. Yeah I know the P51 and P47 were awesome too. In fact the P47 was sort of on the same lines of thinking as these WWII Navy fighters.

Anyways always loved this plane.

I would buy a F4U if I hit the lottery.

The P-51 and 47 were better fighters and facing better competition. The F-6 was a great carrier plane and did an amazing job in the Pacific theater, but it’s competition largely stayed stagnant from a technology standpoint and the pilots degraded rapidly

Old school.

In a previous thread there were accounts of Hellcats mixing it up with the luftwaffe.  I believe southern France invasion and maybe the Brits around Norway.

As the poster before you stated - those P51 fighters got some good kills....!

I went to Alameda last week, the aircraft carrier USS Hornet is still open there as a museum with Hellcats and other planes inside. It's pretty fucking awesome, you can touch everything too and run all over the flight deck.

Here's a good video talking about exactly that.    Greg made a bunch of great videos about ww2 fighters.

" If I were to speculate on what would have happened had the two later Navy aircraft been deployed in numbers in Europe I suspect a similar situation as that which developed with the P-47 and P-51 would have developed, the Hellcat is slower than the Corsair (and very much slower than either a Thunderbolt or a Mustang) but is a very forgiving aircraft and also insanely rugged (a proportionately much greater number of F6Fs survived being hit by flak for example than did F4Us) and thus it would seem likely that the Hellcat would be employed more as a fighter bomber rather than a straight air-to-air fighter. If intercepted the Hellcats exceptional manoeuvrability (it could follow the A6M Zero through most manoeuvres, and that aircraft may well have been the most agile of the war) would have proved difficult to deal with for both German fighters but they would have been able to break off at will. F4U3.jpg The F4U was a rather different prospect, with a significantly better performance than the Hellcat it is likely that any service it might have given against the Luftwaffe would have been impressive. There are caveats however – the afore-mentioned Eric Brown said he would prefer the Hellcat in a dogfight, however during the second world war pilots in every nation (except maybe Japan) were desperately trying to avoid dogfighting wherever possible and use dive and zoom climb tactics. This would have favoured the Corsair which excelled in the vertical plane. Whether it would have done as well as it did against the Japanese is unlikely however. The Luftwaffe, although a shadow of its former self by 1945 was still a dangerous foe and did not suffer the same technological disparity (in general) as did the late war Japanese fighters compared to their principal American adversaries. It is possible of course that it may not have fared so well, the P-39 Airacobra was generally regarded as unsatisfactory in the Pacific theatre yet was extremely successful against the Germans over the Eastern Front (of US built fighters only the P-51 would score more air to air kills) However, we do have at least a glimpse of what might have transpired in reality as the US tested the Fw 190 against the F4U and F6F and the results are here. It is worth noting however that the Focke Wulf in this case was an early model and not indicative of the models that the Corsair and Hellcat would have actually met in combat had they been committed to the European theatre. In short, what would actually have transpired is anyone’s guess. The American fighters were formidable but then, so were the German aircraft. It may have depended a great deal on when they were committed. Corsairs fist flew into combat in August 1942, at that point the Luftwaffe was still probably the most powerful, best trained, most experienced and arguably best equipped Air Force in the world. Any fighter thrown at them at that time would have suffered. Had the Luftwaffe of early 1945 been their foe though it would have been a different story as most of the veterans were either dead or wounded, there was precious little fuel for operations and the training programme had collapsed. All of which is a long-winded way of saying it’s pretty much anyone’s guess what would have actually happened." — Edward Ward

Didn't at least one Hellcat score?

The mighty Buffalo:

Why did he shoot down an American?

Last year, I had the honor of hosting a birthday party for one of the 7 living Hellcat aces. The Blue Angels helped.


I get to do those kinds of things fairly often.  It is truly a high honor and often a lump in the throat experience.

There weren't any Brits around.

Lt. Louis E. Curdes

Wayward C-47 headed to accidentally land at a Japanese held island.  Couldn’t deter the C-47 from changing course so he shot out its engines and forced them to ditch.  Coincidentally he married one of the nurse passengers on that flight.

the Wildcat is by far my favorite naval fighter of the war... probably because the movie "Midway" sparked a lifelong interest in history when I was a kid.

I think it's a great lookin' All-American aircraft.







Joe Foss had kind of an amazing life story..

I have a real piece of a Hellcat hanging on my wall.  

(Ron Cole Artwork)

Corsair was the goat though.

I have some Ron Cole stuff as well.  That guy is talented.

My father worked at Grumman at the beginning of World War II. He built F4F Wildcats and then packed up the tooling and sent that to General Motors in Linden, New Jersey. Then he made f6f Hellcats at Bethpage.
Once they trained enough Rosie the riveters he joined the Navy. Did they make him an aircraft mechanic on a naval air station or an aircraft carrier? Know they made him a gunner on a liberty ship, LOL.

Except the F4U sucked on aircraft carriers. Kind of important if you're in the Navy. Worked well for the Marine Corps on rugged Pacific island air strips though.
And of course the kill ratio for the Hellcat was 19:1 and the Corsair was only 11:1.

Yeah, didn't the Navy pretty much give away the Corsair to the Marines because they didn't work with their carriers as well?

I recall the Brits were given Corsairs too and could not make them work well on carriers. Sucks cause the Corsairs were awesome fighters but sucked for carrier use. I think they just plain bounced to much making them very hard to land on such a short a strip.

But used by Marines on a long island runway they were great.

Sure is.

I also have a P-51 scrap on one of his paintings too.

If I had my way I'd have an entire basement wall of his stuff, but I am the poor.

I think it was a vision issue.  The nose was too long to see around when landing.

I recall that too. The engine made so much HP it needed a bigger longer prop to make use of the power, the gull wings to get the prop higher, then with the long nose high nose you could not see at close range in front of you.

I also recall reading that it's landing gear make the plane bounce excessively on landings while braking on such a short strip.

But this same landing gear made it ideal for a rough recently taken island strips as many planes would have been too fragile for or might dig in. So there is a good side to it not being suited for carrier in this regard.

There was an issue with seeing around the nose on the last bit of the approach, which was eventually addressed by making a curving approach (gradual turn, so they can see the carrier to the left of the nose until the last minute) to the back of the ship, instead of a straight approach.

There were also problems with the Corsair's heavy weight and the landing gear supposedly being a little too bouncy.

My father was an experienced heavy equipment operator when he got drafted in '42. The army sent him to cook and bakers school after basic.

It's like it got me thinking....When you look at all these US planes during WWII almost all of them were were huge successes overall, pretty much all the fighters, pretty much all the bombers, B17 B24 B25 B26 B29 all were great even with some faults overall compared to most other countries line ups.

Were the American designers and engineers then really good or really lucky?

I think they were really good.

In a lot of ways, at the start of the war, the Germans and Japanese had aircraft that were superior in some ways.

There are a million details and opinions but as the war dragged on, we were able to keep innovating and producing at rates the world had never seen.  While the Germans and Japanese kept losing the ability to manufacture.

The US ability to manufacture, in peace, with the largest economy in the world…..well, that and a lot of blood won the fucking war.

The F4U low speed handling behind the boat killed guys as well. Easy to stall and have it roll upside down and into the water.

“According to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum website, after the maiden flight, the US Navy requested heavier armament for production Corsairs and Rex Beisel, the Vought team chief designer, redesigned each outboard folding wing panel to carry three .50 caliber machine guns. These guns displaced fuel tanks installed in each wing leading edge. To replace this lost capacity, an 897-liter (237 gal) fuselage tank was installed between the cockpit and the engine. To maintain the speedy and narrow fuselage profile, Beisel could not stack the cockpit on top of the tank, so he moved it nearly three feet aft. Now the wing completely blocked the pilot’s line of sight during the most critical stages of landing. The early Corsair also had a vicious stall, powerful torque and propeller effects at slow speed, a short tail wheel strut, main gear struts that often bounced the airplane at touchdown, and cowl flap actuators that leaked oil onto the windshield. These difficulties, combined with the lack of cockpit visibility, made the airplane nearly impossible to land on the tiny deck of an aircraft carrier. Navy pilots soon nicknamed the F4U the ‘ensign eliminator’ for its tendency to kill these inexperienced aviators.”

https://theaviationgeekclub.com/the-f4u-division-lost-off-hawaii-and-the-story-of-how-the-iconic-vought-corsair-got-the-nickname-ensign-eliminator/amp/

The same can be said of Germany really.  Relying on the 109 the entire war as a main fighter

.....and he said let's talk Navy fighters.

Had the war gone on much longer, the F8F Bearcat and the F7F Tigercat would have come online. While not a fighter, the Skyraider wasn't too far behind. While the B-29s carried the load how would the Skyraider, working from the islands or carriers, with a bomb load bigger than a B-17 fared in the secondary bombing role?

Love his story, quite an 'all inclusive' kill list... and he saved the nurse and married her!

Launching and landing on a carrier had to cost some performance against advanced land based fighters.

In on my favorite type of the thread.

The humble Hellcat had more kills than any other US fighter plane!

Navy birds would be too slow at high altitudes (20k+) and didn't have the range to fly bomber escort missions at 300mph at 25,000ft as required for the USAAF fighters. The Navy birds were specified for medium altitude fights and low altitude cruising.

The problem the F4U has is its power, top speed, and rate of climb tail off sharply above 23,000ft, once the blower's high speed critical altitude is reached. The P-47 keeps getting faster until 28,000ft (31k ft for the P-47D @ 435mph). At approximately 27,500ft the P47C is 40mph faster then the F4U. At that altitude the P-51 has an extra 20mph. Also at that altitude the FW190 A-5 is faster then the F4U, but not either of the other planes.

The design specs for the Corsair call for it's maximum range to be achieved at 5500ft alt and at 190mph.
The F6F max range was at 12,000ft and at 200mph.
At 28,000ft the F6F can only do 365mph.

PDF of head to head tests for F4U vs the USAAF fighters
http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/f4u/f4u-1-02296.pdf

The F4U topped out at 388mph at a hair under 25,000ft, but the P-47 was faster beginning at 22000ft.
the P-47 had equal or better climb speeds at 10,000ft or higher. The P-51 was faster beginning at 9500ft.
the Corsair did have better turn radius than either aircraft due to its lower stall speed, but at high speeds stick forces were too heavy.

The Army also noted the Corsair required more maintenance time than other aircraft and had numerous mechanical and maintenance access issues.

The book, “The Jolly Rogers” by Tom Blackburn tells about the early days of the Corsair and testing them on carriers. The the author was the first skipper of the Jolly Rogers. They ended up being land based in the Pacific. They were very successful as a land based squadron with over 200 kills.

The 109 had many more variants.

Captain Eric M. Brown in Duels in the Sky, having flown each plane, thought a F6F-3 Hellcat and a Focke-Wulf 190A-4 would come down to the skill of the pilot.

There were plenty of American designs that didn't turn out as well as the ones you listed.  

P-38
P-40
P-47
P-51

The numbers were issued to the designs in sequential, numerical order.  

The P-38 didn't get all of the design problems sorted out until long after it went into production (and never did get the issue sorted out with the airfoil cross-section that was chosen).

The P-39 apparently wasn't liked too well by US pilots, but the Russians supposedly loved them for ground attack use.

The P-40 was a good design, but it was somewhat outdated by the time the war started.

P-41 through P-46... can you think of anything you ever heard about them?

The P-50 was a Grumman design that was based on Grumman's F5F, with neither one of them getting much fame other than their comic book role.

ETA: Attached File

I mean they were great planes,  why do you call 50 cals cannon?  Usually cannons had shells that exploded.  No need to exaggerate.

Corsair dogfighting in the time of the moon landing settles it

They squeezed everything they could out of that design.

As for US Navy fighters of that era. The key thing to me is the engine. The Zero and other Japanese fighters simply didn't have engines that could compare. Corners had to be cut. I've seen a flying Japanese Zero up close. All I could think looking at the landing gear especially was.

"This... Is not enough plane."

The Soviet use of P-39's was mostly Air-to-Air.  They ground attack myth persists.  (Mostly because of the Soviet translation of what they used it for)

Bit off topic but:
Attached File

I’ve been getting buzzed by Thunderbirds all day.
Taking my granddaughter to Randolph AFB for an air show tomorrow.
Supposed to be several WW2 birds there.
I’m stoked because she is excited about it.
Tora Tora Tora group is scheduled.

Want to see something impressive?
Step up to a Grumman TBF Avenger.
It’s a flying box truck that could sink a ship.

Windcrest area?

Have a fantastic time.  I was going to be there with a warbird, but something else came up.  I hope your granddaughter has the time of her life!

The Japanese, Germans, Brits and even a couple of Italian planes were good and maybe better but those are usually rare low produced planes, be it fighters, bombers, etc.

But I find it amazing when looking at the line ups of each country that no other country than the US had such a long list of non failures but rather superior in its role as so many US WWII planes of all types.

The Germans had so many types and most were rare comparatively and may well have been better but then there was the many failures...BF110, BF210, so much wasted time on things like the ME163 Komet. All while the US is cranking out winner after winner. Same way the Brits had some very good planes but a lot of failures in between.

Make me think about how good US engineering was at the time.


But lets get back to US Navy WWII fighters please.....

The Hellcat, Corsair, and Thunderbolt all used the same engine - air-cooled Pratt & Whitney R-2800 engine