Favorite Prop Military Aircraft

I have to agree with your father, the P-38 was a beautiful airplane and according to Gen Jimmy Doolitle it was the best all around fighter. I have also heard that the p-47 was best but who cares, they were both great airplanes.
I knew and flew with an ex-'38 pilot named Larry Blummer who was a P-38 ace and flew in the 9th Air Force out of England and France. He was the more than typical fighter pilot; rough , aggressive, irreverant, individualistic, etc. He used up 4 P-38's, all named " Scrap Iron-1,2,3,4". In his last, " Scrap Iron IV", he shot down 5 FW-190's in less than ten minutes in a fight over a German airfield. I've told his story last year in another thread so I won't repeat myself. He also was jumped by a Spitfire over France and promptly shot it down. He had a cigar box full of decorations that he kept in his dining room and relived WW2 on the drop of a word, the greatest thing that ever happened to this tough North Dakota farm boy.

 

Bob- That is the funny thing about pilots who served only during wartime. It was the biggest thing that happened to them in their lives. They are the ones who go to the unit reunions year after year to relive the glory days. My father was in the AAF/USAF for 32 years and the war was just a small part of his flying and career. He only went to one 86 FBG reunion, and that was an excuse to get me to take him to the AF Museum. Unfortunately he became ill the last two days there and died a week later at age 82.

The P-38 was an amazing aircraft and most people do not realize it could out-turn a Spifire through use of maneuvering flaps and J models and later had hydraulically boosted ailerons to make maneuvering easier. The
P-38 was not well suited to the high altitude escort role because of insufficient cockpit heat and defrosting. It also had a slow initial roll rate, which allowed German fighters to disengage too easily if they saw the P-38 coming. It excelled at low to medium altitude combat, though, in North Africa, Italy, and the Pacific and its concentrated firepower really knocked out a target quickly.

Taz
Terry Phillips

 

God Bless your dad for all that he did. I hope that you get all this written down because it is quite a story. Blummer's story substantiates your comments, Terry. His melee over the airfield was from 1500 feet to 10,000 as he looped in and out of the fight shooting airplanes down at the bottom and then at the top. His first victim was milling around low over the airfield when Larry arrived at the end of a diving approach. He said that he caught the FW in the corner of his eye coming in at 90 deg. and instinctively squeezed off a burst and flew through the debris of the disintegrated fighter. He then pulled up into a loop and encountered another on the way up and shot him down. Continuing the loops he shot three more down and realized that he was still at war emergency power and low on fuel so he made a pass over the field and shot up some more airplanes and a hangar and left with his group. If I remember correctly they lost three airplanes but shot down 17 of the 30+ enemy aircraft that had enticed two of his group over to an ambush. Larry had a temper and loved to fight( not always in an airplane) and the thought of the Germans playing them for suckers enraged him and went in to kick ass.
Every P-38 pilot that I met complained bitterly about the lack of heat in the cockpit and having ice all over everything inside. BUT they loved the close grouped firepower and when they hit something, in Larry's words, "It disappeared."
He loved to strafe with it and lost one airplane by going down into a valley in Germany to shoot up a column of tanks and vehicles. The Germans had set up 88's on the ridges and let him have it as came down. He was quickly hit and set on fire. As he climbed for altitude to bail out , the right engine came off the airplane and he was able to bail out safely. He landed behind the lines and evaded capture by crawling through foliage and digging out holes in which to hide. He made it to the British lines in rags.
He was quite a guy and fun to chat with. He died two years ago at 85.
I'm now 82 3/4 and in the 75th grade and hope I can keep things going for at least 15 more.
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Bob- Keep it up. I Intend to live a lot longer myself and will be 62 this year. Your friend lived through some real adventures. Getting shot down then was bad, and it is even worse now. His war lasted four years, mine lasted 40 days. Quite a difference

You might enjoy this book. I bought a copy for my father and believe Blummer is in it. There were a lot fewer ETO Lightning aces than P-47 or P-51 aces because there were a lot fewer aircraft. They fought early, too, so the odds were usually stacked against them. A very high percentage of the early MTO P-38 pilots flying out of North Africa were killed. I bought my father a ton of P-38 books becasue he really loved that airplane, even though he went to war in a P-47D. I should also post the photo of my dad inside the cowling of his P-47D. He probably weighed 120 lbs when the photo was taken.

http://www.amazon.com/P-38-Lightning-Aces-Osprey-Aircraft/dp/1855326981/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239484358&sr=1-1

Taz
Terry Phillips

 

The Germans called it the "FORK TAILED DEVIL"

 

I'll try to remember the German version..
" Der Gabelshwantze Teufel" My late and good friend Lew Morse was a B-24 pilot in the 15th and we worked together for a long time at Boeing in Industrial Engineering trying to set up a training program. He got to chatting with one of the IE types and of course it segued to the flying days in the war and Lew mentioned being escorted home by a P-38 after they had been heavily damaged in a raid on Ploesti. The engineer asked Lew what he flew and mentioned how he had done that a couple of times for damaged B-24's. They got to trading info and dates and when Lew brought in a picture, it turned out that the guy flying the P-38 was the very guy he was talking to, Don Huntsman.
Unlike Larry Blumer, Lew Morse wasn't a war lover. He had some awfully tough incidents and never was comfortable with the memories.

 

Taz, I misspelled Larry's name. It was LARRY BLUMER. He ended up as a captain with 7 victories. I'll have to dig up some pictures of him and us. My favorite story about Blumer was how he had the radios removed from the area behind the seat prior to a sweep over eastern France. As he told it." What a nice surprise when I turned to get lined up on the strip, THERE was my cute little blonde French girl friend standing in the tall grass waiting for me with a little basket. Well, she scampered up the stinger that just happened to deployed and hopped in and we went on a joy ride and had a picnic in a field on the way back." He had pictures too. Lots of stories and you're right, Terry, the war was the only thing in his life. He bought a P-38 in the 60's and kept it at Thun Field and flew it only once when it was up at Paine Field . He was still pretty good.He was 27 when he got out of cadets...seven years older then his cohorts.

 

In addition to the Mosquito and the other types I mentioned in reply #12 above, I have to add an aircraft which never entered service, but still gets my vote as the most beautiful aircraft ever built, the Republic XF-12 Rainbow.

Conceived for a USAAF contract for a high-altitude, long-range reconnaisance aircraft, Republic went in a different direction than the competition, Hughes' XF-11. Republic decided to make the Rainbow large enough to carry an on-board photo lab, so that the images could be processed before the aircraft even returned to base!

The result was probably the fastest 4-engined piston aircraft ever built, with a cruising speed of over 450 MPH. As with a lot of other late-war contracts, this one was cancelled when WW II ended and a surplus of B-29s were available to be converted to the same role rather inexpensively. Only 2 were built and both eventually crashed.

If the Rainbow had entered military service, there were several airlines interested in a commercial version called the RC-2, and ads were prepared for both American and Pan American. But of course the cancellation of the military contract put an end to that.

The delightful website http://www.madoc.us/profiles.html has some hypothetical color schemes for Rainbows, both military and commercial.
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Beautiful, fast, and sexy, BUT as an airliner it wouldn't have worked. That bullet shaped fuselage was not shaped to carry a lot of people in a long tube that you must use to achieve REVENUE. The R-4360 was an absolute nightmare and, as it did in the Stratocruiser, would have killed the Rainbow with high maintenance and operational costs. A turbo prop version with a more cost effective fuselage would have worked for a while until the swept wing things arrived and then it would have disappeared anyway.
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what about the Thunderbolt?

 

Currently reading a biography on the Spitfire which is a great read and one of my favourites. But also like the F4U, P51D, P38, and the P39 - a plane designed around a gun
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Post #17

 

Like Chuck Yeager said - crash land this one and you get Allison stamped all over your butt...

 

I saw that happen several times during the war and on rough ground they could trip and tumble too, ending up on their back. Pretty airplane in the air, sometimes had a distinct whistle. Could have been gearbox whine. The Russians liked them for tank busting.

 

Actually, Yeager writes about it with some pretty fond memories. He did mention that is would have been extremely difficult to bail out of with that car-door cockpit access. I don't think I have ever seen one fly...wonder if there are many left nowadays?

When I went back to research the F-82 (from that thread on the transcontinental speed records) the Wiki said that there were only 5 of those left in all the world (and maybe only one still airworthy).

 

If I recall correctly they had a pop off door set up where the hinges, which on the front edge, released so that the door blew off. Those were heavy doors and in a high speed situation you couldn't open it. Good chance that the pilot could hit the horizontal tail on the way out if he didn't catch any down flow from the wing. My old friend, Larry Blumer, flew them out of Tonapah, Nevada and Muroc and was with Yeager for a while. When he was told that the P-39 could be tumbled but they should never do it, Blumer did it but he said that you had to work at it. One of his tales that he told me was an incident that happened when he was returning from the firing range and happened to see the town water tank ahead and thought that he would make a practice " dry run" on it since his guns were empty. He lined up on it and squeezed the trigger and low and behold he still had some rounds left in the 20 mm in the nose and nailed it dead on. He said that he made a quick low level turn away from town and set up a long circular route to approach from a different direction and got away with it. He said that they often landed the '39's on the road where a good hamburger joint was and they had a quick lunch . He liked the P-39 but his favorite was the P-38.
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Better yet, the P-63 King Cobra.
Dimensions:
Length: 32.81ft (10.00m)
Width: 38.39ft (11.70m)
Height: 12.47ft (3.80m)
Performance:
Max Speed: 410mph (660kmh; 356kts)
Max Range: 450miles (725km)
Rate-of-Climb: 2,500ft/min (762m/min)
Ceiling: 42,979ft (13,100m; 8.1miles)

Structure:
Accommodation: 1
Hardpoints: 2
Empty Weight: 6,834lbs (3,100kg)
MTOW: 8,818lbs (4,000kg)
Power:
Engine(s): 1 x Allison V-1710-117 liguid-cooled V-12 piston engine generating 1,800hp.


The Kingcobra was piloted by one crewmember and was fitted with a combination of a single 37mm cannon in the nose and an array of 4 x 12.7mm (.50 caliber) machine guns - two mounted in the wings and two synchronized to fire through the propeller).
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Since we're talking P-39s, I can't resist sharing a marching song that an old friend of my grandfather's (a P-47 pilot in the Italian theater) taught me when I was but little. (He taught it to me in order to help me 'march' along with the grownups and thereby prevent my running off all over the landscape, necessitating a 'chase' and preventing him from going fishing )

I remember the P-39 verse, probably because at a young age I'd seen many aircraft, but not a P-39. And, frankly, from the verse, it sounded wicked

It (along with others) follows:


Don't give me a P-39; with an engine that's mounted behind
She'll tumble and roll, and she'll bore a deep hole
Don't give me a P-39




Give me operations way out on some lonely atoll
For I am too young to die; I just want to grow old


-chorus-
Don't give me a P-38; the props, they counter-rotate
She's smattered and smitten from Burma to Britain
Don't give me a P-38

CHORUS

Don't give me a Peter-four-oh; it's a hell of an airplane, I know
A ground-looping *******, you're bound to get plastered
Don't give me a Peter-four-oh

CHORUS

Don't give me an old Thunderbolt; she gave many pilots a jolt
It looks like a jug, and it flies like a tug
Don't give me an old Thunderbolt

CHORUS

Don't give me a P-51; the airplane that's second to none
She'll loop, roll and spin, but she'll auger you in
Don't give me a P-51

CHORUS

Don't give me an F-82; that monster from out of the blue
You won't understand just who's in command
Don't give me an F-82

CHORUS

Don't five me an old Shooting Star; she goes, but not very far
She'll rumble and spout, and will surely flame out
Don't give me an old Shooting Star

 

This had a laminar wing section similar to the P-51. I saw one at Langley when the NACA labs were testing it with a two bladed prop. Didn't work because of low rpm oscillations that moved the nose back and forth so bad they couldn't taxi it at certain speeds. It flew okay but nothing spectacular in performance.
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About the P-39. Was a well known fact that more that a bunch that flew her gave the name 'P dash crash'. If I had one I'd trade it for a T-6 in a second.

 

The P-26 Peashooter is awesome


This airplane has a lot of firsts and lasts.


I spoke with a AAC pilot who told me on the phone, that just after Pearl Harbor, the Army Air Corps took a few out of crates, and flew combat air patrols with the Peashooter from Hickham. The last airplane he flew, was the F-100D from Tinker AFB !


P-38, P-40, Wildcat, Hellcat, Corsair, P-47, and P-51 are also classics.

 

Too many favorites to list them all but here are a couple of beauties
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I crewed three of those AT-7's at Hondo Air Base in 1944. Great little airplanes.
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Ju 87... its just soooo ugly.
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Bob- Maybe not my favorite, but definitely one of the prettiest WW-2 fighters was the DeHavilland DH-103 Hornet and Sea Hornet derivative. With two huge V-12s, counter-rotating, five-bladed props (unlike the Mosquito), clean lines, long range and top speed of 472 mph, it would have made a really good escort fighter if the war in the Pacific had stretched out a few more months. This is the prototype.

Taz
Terry Phillips
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