WWII Kodachrome warbird photos

Curtiss Seahawk scout plane - reconnaissance float aircraft that flew off the fantails of battleships and heavy cruisers that early in the War typically were fleet flagships. It soon became clear that carriers were the 'battleships' of WWII and the ships which fleet commanders made their flagships. These aircraft were launched by catapult aft on the fantail and recovered from their sea landings by cranes, also located aft. As the carrier task forces became the instrument of American naval power in the Pacific, reconnaissance began to be carried out by carrier-based aircraft and PBY Catalina flying boats.

 

Grumman JF

M

 

Interesting, Tom, I didn't realize the Royal Navy flew TBF's

 

After looking at these WW2 pictures I got to thinking about the constant parade of airplanes that flew over and in front of us when we lived on Siesta key during the war. Many of them were right on the beach at maybe 100 feet alt. or less. I remember; Martin B-26, B-25, B-17, P-39, P-40, P-47, P-51, SBD, A-20, A-26. They liked to buzz the beaches as they went north or south and I remember one P-47 at sunrise coming up the beach in the cool moist air leaving twisted wing tip streamers as he did slow rolls. The sound of big engines close and far was a daily occurrence.

 

Bob- Always amazing how the high wing loading aircraft make maneuvering wing contrails while the low wing loading aircraft do not. At Incirlik AB, Turkey with a squadron of F-111Fs and one of F-4Es on a weapons training detachment, it chapped off the F-4 drivers that we were conning on pitch-outs from overheads and they were not. Our wing loading was nearly double theirs. P-47s had pretty high wing loading, too, one reason nothing kept up with them in a dive.

 

I heard it many times at work..."Delta P". Lots more pressure on the bottom than on the top and the higher pressure air tries to curl around the tip to seek the sweet spot. The jets are good at that now.

 

Tom, just looked again at your photos. The last one is not exceptionally clear but would that be a P-61 Black Widow, sort of the Army Air Corps' radial-engine night fighter development of the Lightning?

 

That's correct.

 

The P-61 wasn't a development of the P-38. It was a Northrop design with a mission entirely different than that of the P-38. A honking big piece of machinery with as much HP in one engine as the total of both in the P-38. Four to six Cal.50's in the nose, a turret full of 50.'s on top, an internal bomb bay, and a crew of four sometimes.

 

Thanks to the capability of the P-38 Lightning.

 

The P-61 is, I have to say, bad-ass!

 

As Bob pointed out, the P-61 shared only the twin-boom layout of the P-38; they had nothing else in common.

But Lockheed did build a larger airplane, the XP-58 Chain Lightning, which is sometimes described as a P-38 development, but that is stretching the truth quite a bit. At least it was a Lockheed design. It was intended more as a long-range escort fighter, but I suppose it would have made a decent night fighter as well. Like a lot of late-war experimentals, it had engine issues, and never went into production.

 

Engine issues... that was the 24 cylinder 'Double Allison' W configuration engine.

There were some very different engines appearing in those days... I think there was even a 42 cylinder radial, liquid-cooled engine (7 banks of 6 inline cylinders), all in the quest for monster horsepower... but lacking reliability.

 

There were several attempts to improve on some successful designs. The Chain Lightning was one and the P-51H was another. I never saw the Chain Lightning but we did see the P-51H being tested at NACA and the engineers there didn't have much good to say about it. Not any better then the older Mustang.

 

Buddy of my uncle's flew P-51D's and a P-51H. (My Uncle, on the other hand flew an L-5... other end of the spectrum.)

Said the H handled better with the big rudder and was 40 or so mph faster than the D.

He did not think it would do as well in combat as the D, though. Lightening the plane made it not as robust, in his opinion.

Weren't there several hundred of them made?

 

The H weighed considerably less than the P-51D and had a more powerful engine and that gave it advantages in climb, speed, and range. It also had a crude tail-warning radar. Most of that production contract was cancelled when the war ended. One reason there were so many more Ds than Hs in the postwar AF. The F-82 was a P-51H development with both Merlin and Allison variants.

 

I remember this because it's a round number: 555 P-51H's were built.

 

I think you are thinking of this beast, the Lycoming R-7755, the largest aircraft piston engine ever built. It was indeed liquid-cooled, with 9 radially-disposed inline banks of 4 cylinders each. Needless to say, it didn't work very well. It is on display (as you can tell) at the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy facility.

(In automotive terms, this engine's displacement is no less than 127 liters!)
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Lockheed Constitution... only a few built.

Double deck airliner/transport...


Is that a Scarab?

 

I took a photo once of that Constitution sitting at Opa-Locka; unfortunately I didn't have a long lens at the time so the image was rather small. It was sad that after surviving for all that time, the aircraft was eventually scrapped anyway.

The aircraft's original designation was R6O (and that's "oh" and not "zero"), later changed to R6V.