For beauty, I choose the Corsair hands down.

There are compelling arguments for the P-38 and P-47, but damn the F4U is pretty.

Yes, my bad.  Late might posting.



Looks an awful lot like the Bearcat.

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MK19 Spitfire, speed and beauty in one package

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And a bare aluminum P-40

The Bearcat was designed with the purpose of shooting down the Japanese fighters, based on information that had been gained since the start of the war (including an evaluation of a Zero that had been captured).  It used the P&W R-2800 that was used on the earlier (and quite successful, in the Pacific theater of the war) Hellcat, that was also a Grumman design.  To achieve the goal of outperforming the Japanese fighters in every specification, the design team looked for ways to make the Bearcat as light as possible, including reducing the fuel capacity, reducing the number of guns, ignoring the idea of making it a multi-role fighter/bomber, and making it smaller than the Hellcat.

The Skyraider was designed with the purpose of replacing the multiple bomber types that aircraft carriers had been using.  It used the large Wright R-3350 engine, that was more commonly used on heavy bombers and large transport aircraft.  It was considerably larger than the Bearcat (with some versions having four seats for the crew), around 100 mph slower than the Bearcat, and could carry a quite substantial load of bombs and other things to drop on, or fire at, the enemy on the ground.

The Bearcat had a short service life, because it was designed with a single purpose - to shoot down lightweight, nimble, Japanese aircraft that had little or no armor.  After the war was over, that purpose no longer existed, and the world was moving on to jet engines for fighter aircraft.

The Skyraider had a rather long service life, because it was designed for the purpose of delivering almost anything (that could be thought up as an effective 'fuck you') to enemy positions on the ground.  It was something of an A-10 of it's day.

Looked it up to confirm.

Bearcat had a gross weight of just over 12,000 pounds.
Skyraider had a gross weight of 25,000 pounds.

If you have ever stood next to a Skyraider, it is an enormous aircraft.  Dwarfs even the P-47.

My two favourites are the Spitfire Mk9 and the the FW190 D model.
One is pure grace and the other pure lethality.

The Gruman Bearcat was designed to be a "Naval Interceptor" based on the "Big Blue Blanket" Anti-Air Defense of the USN in the late war.

The Japanese had wrought terrible damage via their Kamikaze attacks, and the Naval planners figured (correctly) that as the Americans closed to Japan, the Kamikaze issue would grow worse and worse.  While the Gruman Hellcat was a war winning Carrier Fighter that dealt well with the Japanese Threats, it did not not have particularly fast airspeed or climb performance, but was very ruggedly armed & armored. It was a great General Purpose Naval Fighter.

The Bearcat was a more specialized "Hot Rod" of most powerful engine crammed into the smallest & lightest weight airframe to allow a Carrier fighter to have maximum speed & climb to altitude to reach formations of Japanese Kamikazis and shoot them down before they can get into range of US ships to attack them.

The Douglas Skyraider was the antithesis of the Bearcat.   Besides having a 'conventional lay out' as single engine propeller driven single pilot naval aircraft, the Skyraider was designed from the Ground up to be a Ground Pounder (& Torpedo plane - SKyraiders actually Dam Busted during the Korean War!).



The single engine Skyraider could actually carry as heavy a weapons load as WWII 4 engine B-17 Flying Fortress...  

The Skyraider was built very ruggedly (which means heavy) and designed more as a bomb truck to haul a lot of heavy ordnance to the target while flying off an aircraft carrier.

Oddly, the Bearcats ended some of their service in combat in Indochina be used by the French to fly ground strike mission against the Vietminh using rockets & napalm.  

The Skyraiders were used by both US & South Vietnamese forces in Vietnam for air to ground strikes by the US Navy, The US Air Force & South Vietnamese Air Force.

 Yet every discussion of light attack has "bring back the Skyraider!". I dearly love the plane but light attack it was not: it was a large and very expensive plane,each one cost more than an F-86.

what would something with better turbo/supercharger/engine tech prop plane be like today?

Fun Fact.  "Our" Zero, the one recovered in the Aleutians, had better performance than Japanese Zero's because we flew it with 100 Octane avgas versus the Japanese 89 (IIRC) octane.  Also, at wars end, when we got our hands on a Do-355, one was flown from Germany to France escorted by two P-51 Mustangs.  It left the Mustangs in the dust, it was that much faster.  Would have been a formidable foe had the Germans gotten them to the front lines in strength.  Thankfully, it never happened.

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Super Tucano

lets do this!

If I'm not mistaken, they have a production line set up in the US, and there is a civilian owned one (without the guns) in the US.

The Do 335 had both an Ejecting seat (to clear the tall cruciform tail) and a Explosive positioned on the rear driveshaft to explosively separate the rear propeller from the aircraft in the event of a bail out (to avoid the Cuisinart effect...)

I would also like to fly the Dornier Do 335.

He 113