Posted on 07/02/2018 10:25:08 AM PDT by DFG
“Nothing like the sound of a big v12 water cooled engine.”
Unless it’s the sound of a 2000 or 2200 H.P. WASP radial that powered the P 47 Thunderbolt, the Corsair F4U, the Hellcat F6U, or any other of the numerous storied WWII planes.......WASPs rule the skies.
The Merlin was just the best the British could do....
My first flight instructor flew Me-110’s toward the end of the war.
Said he had gotten four Lancasters and three other aircraft I don’t recall.
Before war’s end, the British had the Bristol Centaurus at 2,500+ HP; the Hawker Tempest and Hawker Sea Fury were very high performance machines. They also had the Rolls Royce Griffin.
The Double Wasp was certainly one of the greatest piston engines of all time: milled fins instead of cast, as I recall, allowing higher heat dissipation and therefore higher power production.
My favorite type using it never saw WWII combat: F8F Bearcat: area-ruled fuselage, 12’+ propeller.
The Wright Twin Cyclone R-2600 gets little respect, but it got heavy use with bombers: Douglas A-20, North American B-25, Grumman TBF(TBM), Curtiss SB2U. It was also the engine of the XF6F-1 Hellcat.
If the war had continued, it might have gotten wider use: The R-2600-22 with a two-stage supercharger was being developed for the SB2U-6 Helldiver; all the extant units had a single-stage one.
As with most engines of the era, it was the supercharging that set them apart at altitude; the Double Wasp was well-developed in that regard (and the P-47 went further with the turbo-supercharger: 2,800 HP).
The key to high performance was high altitude, and the key to high altitude was a two-stage supercharger (which is different from a two-speed supercharger).
Night fighter?
I took a ride in the Collings P51C Betty Jane some years ago.
Was very impressed with the aircraft and responsiveness
I don’t know if you’ve come across Len Deighton’s novel ‘Bomber’, but it describes a Lancaster raid killed in exactly that way.
Yep.
“Bomber” is one of Deighton’s best, IMO; I’ve read the book several times. Also, BBC Radio 4 did an excellent adaptation of the novel that aired on Armistice Day in 2011. The radio play was divided into segments and synchronized with the time of day (or night) when events in the novel occurred. So, the afternoon installment focused on ground crews and aircrews preparing for the night’s operations—on both sides of the conflict. The actual raid sequence aired in the evening, at the time the “Lancs” would have been over the target and encountering fierce German resistance.
One more bit of trivia; “Bomber” was the first novel ever created on a word processor. Len Deighton was given a prototype of an early IBM machine, and composed the book on that device.
The book’s sub-title is the “events relating to the last flight of an RAF Bomber over Germany on the night of June 31st, 1943,” a deliberately impossible date (by design, of course).
B or C?
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