Cool/Rare Plane Spotters thread.....

This dropped in at my local airfield last September. Can't say enough nice things about the pilot, who was kind enough to let a few little kids (and one or two of us big kids) sit in the cockpit.
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Not every day on the flight line
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Is that a Grumman goose? I once took a fishing trip in alaska with my dad, and the company had a restored 1941 GG that they used to ferry the fisherman from the airport out to the river in the middle of nowhere..I got to ride shotgun on the way back, it was a great experience

 

Nope, Albatross

Regards,

Art S.

PS. Twice as big and half the price of a Goose!

 

Albatross all the way!

I just finished putting together a model of it.
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Built that same model... (Monogram???) when I was a kid.

 

Research shows that its Werk no. is 739447, and it is an original Fw 190A-8. I found this about the airplane:

"W.Nr 739 447 was built by Ago at Oschersleben in December 1944, and in that month was almost certainly one of 47 new FW 190 A-8s delivered to II./J.G. 300."

It is now at the Tillamook Air Museum in Oregon, which is supposed to move in the near future, apparently to Madras.

 

1/48 by Trumpeter.. hadn't built any since a kid.. not restarting a collection.. just wanted to study this particular plane.. had to dust off a few old memories of painting and gluing lol.

1 48 Grumman Hu 16A Albatross by Trumpeter | eBay

 

Thanks, Terry. I knew that they were modified to do many other jobs and did them fairly well. It was a helluva airplane. I knew several fighter pilots who faced them and one of them shot 5 of them down in ten minutes with a P-38 no less. I guess that without the heavy armor and fire power they were a fairly good dog fighter but suffered a lack of performance when they were weighted down. I was stationed with a B-24 guy who was subjected to an attack by FW-190's and the results were very bad. A really great airplane. I knew that the engine was developed from the P&W built under license and improved by BMW. I think that it was the equivalent to the R 2800. I don't have all the details in my 88 year old head sometimes but I enjoy trying to dig up stuff mentally .

 

Fantastic.. would love one with a history and do the right thing by it.

 

Wow!

I drove by Teterboro today on the way to the store, and needless to say it wasn't as interesting as yours!

 

fyi I did a search and came up with perfect match for that exact plane since it was obviously P-51 based.

North American P-51 variants - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Not sure what you mean by P-51 'based'....

It is a P-51C.

The Tuskeegee Airmen flew that model.

The early P-51's did not have a bubble canopy.


Scroll down to the bottom of this wiki page and see that exact plane.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_P-51_Mustang

 

Yes that exact plane was in the link I had too.. perhaps "based" is too strong as "variant" would be better as per the page title.

I tend to think of the single seat P-51 bubble canopy as "the" P-51 is the root cause of the terminology failure

 

The P-51B & C were actually a bit lighter, faster and more nimble than the D, and a lot of pilots preferred them. And if fitted with a Malcolm hood, rear visibility wasn't much worse than with the bubble canopy.

The main disadvantage of the B & C is that they only had 4 machine guns, which was barely adequate. The 6 of the D or the 8 of the P-47 were definitely an advantage.

This two-seater owned by the Collings Foundation is the only example I know of with a full two-seat razorback transparency.

 

Saw this one at ANC a few weeks ago. Do you think it performs pretty well?
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VTOL seems a distinct possibility

 

Better prospects than that floatplane in the background? (probably has wheels anyway)

(I'd never seen more floatplanes in my life in one place at one time than Lake Hood seaplane base in Anchorage)

 

The British sticking the Merlin in to replace the troublesome Allison made all the real difference

 

Matt- The Allison was not troublesome, it was just that its single stage supercharger was set up for low to medium altitude flight and the later Merlin's 2 stage superchargers were set up for medium to high altitude (unless the Spirfire was an LF version). When introduced the Mustang I was far faster at low to medium altitude than any Spitfire with a Merlin engine, LF or not, or any other RAF fighter. Combining the Mustang airframe with the 2 stage supercharger Merlin engine produced arguably the best all around piston engine fighter of WW-II.