Posted on 08/09/2017 9:33:40 AM PDT by simpson96
This plane is not a 51. It is not upside down. High wing monoplane with what looks like a rather long greenhouse with what could be a rearward firing machine gun ,
BTW, In the late 60’s I had a collection of 1/72 scale models of WWII aircraft. I had over 150 of them. There were even a lot of Italian and Soviet aircraft in my collection. I was sort of a nut on WWII aircraft. I still am, somewhat, to this day. I’ve put hundreds of hours in in the cockpit of various WWII fighters (mostly Spitfire Mark XI) on online gaming. If I was not at work I was going to pull out some of my books. But you and I seem to be the only ones that believe it is not upside down and is a high wing monoplane.
Maybe a B-24.
Just kidding. ;-)
The leading and trailing edges on the wings on that plane look surprisingly parallel. One of the easiest ways to identify WWII planes, at least for me, is wing shape.
LOL, this is why I love FR. Any subject will bring us in, but when the aviation related threads come up, we swarm to them like flies to honey!
Before I continue: I looked mostly at the aft end of the wing root to rule out an Avenger, because an Avenger wing appears to go straight in without tapering...same for a variety of other planes.
Also, I was certain there was no way it was inverted, but...I realize I could likely be wrong. Now I tend to agree that it IS inverted, because the forward side of the wing root is nearly flush with the fuselage, and at the aft end, it is more towards the center of the fuselage. That would be an EXTREMELY weird configuration if the plane were right side up, so...my apologies for the scare quotes around “expert”.
Also, if it were a purpose built variant of float plane, from a fighter platform then it would have no gear, only the struts for the floats.
I was clearly wrong there, I think...:)
Sorry. Therefore it likely is some Japanese variant...
Sheesh...you think they could have gotten a better photo of the darn thing?
Also, how on earth would a Japanese plane have lasted that long? you would thing the skin would have all disappeared a long, long time ago!
Great discussion though! Love it...:)
Search ww2 plane found on Palau. Different sites are all saying Avenger. I can see that with wing shape, long greenhouse and rear gun.
It’s in fresh water, not salt, so it tends to preserve...............plus no marine organisms...............
On third or fourth look though those sharply curved wing roots don’t look Avenger.
The wing root, where it attaches to the fuselage does not match an Avenger.............
LOL! I have been an aviation nut since I was a kid.
I was up in downtown Bath, Maine last week, and I heard a distinctive sound...only one kind of engine makes that sound, a reciprocating engine, and...there was more than one!
I swiveled my head around expecting to see some twin engine plane, but it was a P-51 Mustang and an F4U Corsair flying together, about a thousand feet up heading in a southwesterly direction!
I nearly killed myself trying, but just couldn’t get my phone out. I have no idea what they were doing or where they were going...it was Tuesday or Wednesday.
believed to be a Japanese Aichi E13A long range reconnaissance seaplane
Well, if it is, they seriously modified the wing root. It is not a factory version.
Actually, if you look at the JPG I posted, there is almost nothing similar in the wing of the crashed plane and a TBM avenger.
Caveat: This plane is so deteriorated that I really would need to see a lot of pictures from different angles to know what it is. I am confident it is not a B-17, a Sopwith Camel or a B-52. I can confidently identify some planes that it is NOT. I’m just having a harder time, with a single photo, determining what plane it IS. But that large radius at the wing root is really suggesting that it can’t be the avenger.
That being said, when I searched on your recommendation, I did find pictures of an avenger, but it looks like different wreckage.
When I looked that one up, I confess that of all the suggestions, that one is most likely.
The sweep at the rear of the wing into the fuselage is wrong for a Dauntless. I am trying to find US aircraft in my collection of ID drawings and can't find any to match. I think it is Japanese.
Looks like an upside down B5N (Kate). The engine/prop assembly is broken upwards with respect to the aircrafts top.
That’s just all kinds of eerie creepy.
Still waiting for someone to find Amelia Earhart’s plane.
"We gotta go back, Kate! We gotta go back!"
I tend to agree...it does look Japanese because we didn’t have any floatplanes like that one. I just don’t know which one, the Japanese (as might be expected from an island country) had a lot of floatplane variants, and I don’t know them that well. Yes, I am parochial in this type of thing...:)
I thought about the configuration of the flaps as well when I first saw the picture, and I just thought that is how they fell over time as decay occurred because the plane was inverted and gravity took them down.
Here is another view of one, it could be the same plane (because the photos are from Palau also, but...it was a major seaplane base IIRC, and while this looks similar, there are marked differences in the wreckage, but there are very similar things in structure, so I thought this might help us. This one is "known" to be a Aichi E13A by the photographer.
For comparison, here is the one from the article. From the wreckage patterns, I think they are different:
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