Posted on 01/24/2009 9:25:30 AM PST by Dysart
DALLAS — After four years of painstaking labor, artisans of the Vought Aircraft Retirees Club have restored an icon of U.S. aviation history, a World War II-vintage F4U Corsair fighter plane.
Working with pieces and parts from several wrecked and scrapped aircraft and building many others themselves from drawings, the retirees have spent thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars re-creating a version of the distinctive, gull-winged plane that Japanese soldiers and sailors dubbed "Whistling Death."
Rebuilding the Corsair, one of two great fighter planes — the other was the Grumman F6F Hellcat — that enabled Navy and Marine pilots to dominate the skies in the Pacific theater, "has been a real work of love for the last four years," said Hank Merbler, president of the Vought Aircraft Heritage Foundation.
The recently completed plane, which isn’t flyable and will eventually end up in an area museum, will be rolled out for several hundred invited guests today in a hangar at Vought Aircraft Industries west Dallas complex.
Launched in 1938 to meet Navy requirements for a high-speed fighter airplane, the Corsair is the most famous aircraft designed and produced by the company founded by the aviation pioneer Chance Vought.
"It’s an airplane I’m really proud of. If you read all the history of it, it’s really something," said Dillon Smith, a 34-year employee of Vought who retired in 1994.
"It did what it was designed to do and that was defeat the Japanese Zero," Smith said.
The first new, highly capable fighter aircraft to reach the Pacific theater early in 1943, the Corsair was initially deployed with ground-based Marine squadrons.
Corsairs were flown by the famous "Black Sheep" Squadron, led by Marine Maj. Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, whose exploits were the basis for the mid-1970s television show Baa Baa Black Sheep.
(Excerpt) Read more at star-telegram.com ...
I thought that for awhile, but the air intake just behind the props isn't right for the Grumman.
tanknetter set me straight that the SB2C-1 version had a three-blade prop.
That looks like the front half of a P-47 Thunderbolt.
Similar design constraints. The supercharger ductwork required a relatively large fuselage and cowling.
“I also learned this week that the F-4U is the only piston-engined fighter to shoot down a jet fighter. It happened against a Mig-15 during the Korean War.”
P-51’s recorded kills against German ME 262s several years earlier.
Ivan Kozhedub of the USSR seems to have had an Me-262 kill in a Lavochkin-7 as well.
Yeah, the long nose obstructed the pilot’s view of the carrier deck and the Landing Signal Officer, so Corsair pilots had to adopt the tactic of approaching the carrier immediately behind the flight deck from the port side and at a 45 degree angle, then banking hard and flaring for a blind slam down. Small wonder they were reassigned to land-based duty!
I remember reading about how the guys who were test flying the Akutan Zero in San Diego were a little surprised (and maybe disappointed) that no citizen recognized the distinctive profile of the zero and reported it.
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