Corsair and Hellcat Vs. Bf 109 and Fw 190

greetings this is greg how would the f4u corsair or the f6f hellcat have fared against the bf-109 or the fw-190 if we look at speed climb rates and maneuverability initially it looks as if both the us navy fighters would have been lethal opponents for the luftwaffe's front line fighters furthermore the u.s navy evaluated the corsair in hellcat against the fw 190 and in another test evaluated the corsair against the p-51b mustang that's the early merlin-powered variant the navy fighters came out on top in both cases yet except for a few isolated incidents corsairs and hellcats didn't face off against the germans at all and were not used by the united states army air force could they really have taken on the luftwaffe and if so why didn't they these are the subjects of this video as with all world war ii airplane comparisons a lot depends on just what versions we look at i'm not going to be using the water injected super powerful versions of the corsair and hellcat these variants entered service around april of 1944 and by then i think the course of the air war over europe was already set if the us army air force was going to use these planes it would have had to base that decision on mid 1943 variants so that's what i'll be using on the german side i'll be using mainly the bf-109 g6 and fw 190 a5 neither of these represent the zeniths of their respective series but i want to represent commonly used 1943 variants let's take a quick look at some key performance factors i don't think i need to talk about the corsair's design too much here as i have an entire video about that the key points are that the corsair was the first single engine us fighter with the ability to exceed 400 miles per hour in level flight it does this via a low drag design with a very closely cowled 2000 horsepower radial engine using one of the best supercharging systems of the war chance vaught designers maintained the narrow fuselage cross section by locating the inner coolers and oil cooler inlets in the leading edges of the wing roots they also use flush rivets on nearly all exterior surfaces the corsair was fast and not just fast for a naval fighter it was fast or faster than most land-based airplanes when introduced which was in fact a design goal it's capable of 350 miles per hour at sea level and the maximum level flight speed of 414 miles per hour at 22 800 feet note that we're using the 2 000 horsepower non-water injected numbers here for the f4u-1 version this is probably a good time to mention that i'm making this video with the assumption that you've already seen some other stuff on this channel like my p47 series or at least have a general knowledge of supercharging systems and some basic aerodynamics i can't go over the basics in every single video that wouldn't be fair to my long-term viewers i'll put links in the description to help out let's move on to the hellcat as this is the first time discussing the hellcat on this channel i'll have to give it some extra time here we're using the f6f-3 model as compared with the corsair the hellcat appears to be a bit of a chunky monkey this is because the hellcat's fat fuselage has to be large enough to fit the oil cooler air intake and intercooler inlets plus those components into or near the chin of the cowling aft of the engine the fuselage is large enough to fit its 250 gallon internal fuel capacity more or less right under the pilot they couldn't do that with the corsair and keep the center of gravity in limits while carrying enough fuel thus in the corsair the 237 gallon fuselage tank is located forward of the cockpit this difference not only contributes to the very different appearance of the two planes it gives the hellcat's pilot a better view over the nose which really matters especially in carrier operations both planes run the pratt whitney r 2800 engine they only vary slightly between the two planes one has an updraft carb one has a downdraft and of course they have the different intercooler arrangements both are rated at 2000 horsepower without water injection in reality the corsair has a slight power advantage which i'll come to later both planes use the same basic supercharger configurations they run a supercharger that's always spinning with the engine this can be called the primary or first stage blower in the period manuals it's often called neutral blower then there is a second stage supercharger called the second stage or auxiliary supercharger this second stage has two speeds giving us three levels of supercharging the primary blower is optimized for very low altitudes this was arguably the best supercharging system to see widespread use during world war ii and supercharging is a big factor in world war ii aircraft performance the airframes are about the same weight both planes weigh about nine thousand pounds empty and around twelve thousand two hundred pounds ready for battle grumman's design philosophy for the hellcat was a bit different than that of chance fought with the corsair the corsair was intended to be a naval fighter with all the performance they could get out of it on the other hand roman was concerned with not only the performance but they were willing to sacrifice some performance to make the plane easy to fly for a new 300 hour pilot the hellcat was much easier to land on a carrier due to its lower stall speed and the better view for the pilot it also has better ergonomics meaning cockpit layout and some other advantages as well the hellcat was the only us fighter to see combat in world war ii that was designed primarily after us entry into the war this plus the fact that they had access to a captured mitsubishi a6m0 let drummond know exactly what they needed to focus on with the hellcat the hellcat is a real success story it was designed and built very quickly the design was sound and there were only two main variants in the war the dash 3 and the dash 5 with little difference between them you can recognize the dash 3s by the little cockpit window here um just after the cockpit it was omitted on the dash fives the big upgrade on the dash five was the addition of water injection this isn't to say that no dash threes had it some did for testing and it's possible some of those went into service but for the purposes of this video we're using using the dash 3 with no water injection let's take a look at its comparative performance with the corsair starting with speed in testing the f6f-3 does 314 miles per hour at sea level and 377 miles per hour at 23 400 feet why is the hellcat slower than the corsair well its fuselage is a bit fatter it has a little more wing area and it has a combination of flush and non-flush rivets in short it simply has more drag the hellcat's big wing pays off as its stall speed with flaps up is only 87 miles per hour versus 99 miles per hour for the corsair that's a pretty big difference that gives its advantages that we'll talk about later in fact the hellcat has a lot of advantages and a solid argument can be made that it was not only the better naval fighter but the best naval fighter to see combat during the war but right now we're talking about speed another factor giving the corsair a bit of extra speed is the fact that it has its rated horsepower and the hellcat-3 variant seems to fall short so although both engines have the same rated power in reality the corsair is slightly ahead here in at least two u.s navy tests f6f-3 hellcats were found to have less than their 2000 horsepower rating one test had it 140 horsepower low and the test i used for comparison here had it 50 horsepower low i actually couldn't find any test where it actually made its rated horsepower this issue did continue on with the later f6f-5 model and i may talk about the technical reasons for it another time there is a theory out there that the hellcat was actually just as fast as the corsair but the differences in published speeds were due to air speed indications or other shenanigans this isn't true but it's so prevalent that i have to take some time to talk about it here this theory can be broken down into three schools of thought the first involves comparing faster versions of hellcats against slower corsair variants for example a water injected f6f-5 running 60 inches of manifold pressure versus an early corsair of 52 inches is going to favor the hellcat even then it's still pretty close and the corsair is still a bit faster but obviously such comparisons are invalid and usually result from someone not being dishonest but just comparing the first two charts they come across not realizing the variations in aircraft performance across the range of variants another argument i hear sometimes is that hellcats were just as fast as corsairs in air racing this is an interesting argument first of all i haven't ever seen a hellcat race plane i have seen a corsair race plane but let's just assume that there were hellcat race planes and that they were about equal in speed to corsairs well so what those planes are often so modified that they barely resemble a factory warplane another factor i think that needs to be considered is that race planes usually race on a course it's not a straight line turning increases induced drag which is normally a small factor in straight line speed but a bigger factor when you're turning so i don't think the race plane argument has a shred of validity the third argument i hear and the most solid one is that the difference in speed had more to do with air speed indication errors and not actual speed there are a few versions of this story but i think they're all wrong all airspeed indicators from this period have some errors in them what the pilot sees on the airspeed indicator is indicated airspeed when a correction factor is applied to correct the error it's then called calibrated airspeed planes had charts so that pilots would know the amount of error and could flight plan accordingly for example if we look at this corsair chart we can see that at 200 knots indicated it's five knots low the corsair's gauge reads low except at some very slow speeds where it reads slightly high there are a couple ways of determining the amount of error in most cases during testing and final development of the plane the plane is flown with extrapedo tubes and static ports that are far away from the airframe so that their readings will not be interfered with you can see such devices here on this late model corsair in testing judging from pictures of early corsairs this is how they did it it's still done this way here's a grumman f-14a prototype note the extended pitot tube that's not present on the production versions this is pretty standard standard in aviation like i say even even in modern times this method is reliable and based on period photos i think it's how it was done on both the corsair and on the hellcat the airspeed indicator on the hellcat reads even lower than the corsairs here's the chart from the f6f-3 manual this may be the source of some of this confusion the hellcat's airspeed indicator does read lower than the corsairs at 220 knots the hellcats reads 15 knots low versus only 5 knots for the corsair however the performance data for the airplanes is based on true airspeed which by definition is calibrated not indicated airspeed then further corrected for air pressure and temperature so it doesn't matter what the airspeed indicator shows when looking at performance charts based on true airspeed now there is a school of thought that the airspeed calibration charts were way off specifically that the hellcats indicator reads even lower than what was thought which would be surprising because it already reads really low i find this hard to believe for several reasons first grumman and everybody else back then knew how to do this stuff i don't think they would have screwed it up that badly but if they did screw it up that badly it would have been discovered by the pilots planes back then and especially carrier aircraft often had to navigate by dead reckoning this means you take off fly a planned indicated airspeed on a specific course and in some amount of time you should be at your destination be that an island aircraft carrier or a rendezvous point to meet up with bombers or other aircraft you have to escort or whatever pilots would have noticed that the time speed and distance calculations were always off in the hellcat and they would have noticed that fuel usage was always less than planned for a given distance flown because we're not talking about two or three knots here for this theory to hold water the hellcat's airspeed indicator would have had to be reading an extra 30 knots low at sea level to make up the speed difference between these two airplanes and i just don't think that's remotely realistic another theory i hear is that the two planes are equal in speed because when two individuals in modern times fly them at the same power settings side by side they have about the same air speed well that makes some sense there's a good reason for it though the hellcat has less total drag at very low speeds because it has less induced drag the corsair has less total drag at high speeds because it has less parasite drag thus there is a crossover point when the two planes have about the same amount of drag they are not running these planes at 52 inches of manifold pressure down on the deck for one thing i'm not sure they could even do that on modern fuels and even if they could that would be putting a lot of wear and tear on valuable and historic aircraft i don't think the people that own these airplanes would be prone to doing that very often also they can't fly them legally that fast at low altitudes in the u.s airspace system or anywhere else i know of so these anecdotal cases are two planes at cruise power and low altitude and not relevant to the discussion of top speed when the engines are screaming and putting out 2 000 horsepower the last theory i've heard which i think is incredibly weak is that because the hellcat had only one static port its airspeed indicator was subjected to further errors which caused its speed to be underrated airspeed indicators in world war ii and almost entirely on modern airplanes as well are the pitostatic type that means they get their readings by comparing ram pressure in the pitot tube with ambient pressure at the static port some planes have a static port on only one side and thus are subject to air speed indication errors as a result of uncoordinated flight meaning flight in a slip or a skid in other words the airplane airplane's going a little bit sideways the hellcat is well it's pitostatic system i should say is set up this way but it's not at all unusual a slip or a skid can affect the air speed indication because it alters the pressure at the static port this isn't a big deal and it was known and specifically listed in the hellcat's flight manual as you can see here for this to have affected the results of the hellcat speed testing would mean that a the pilots didn't know about this which seems unlikely for a grumman test pilot and b that the test pilots when doing top speed runs were so incompetent that they flew in a slip or a skid that seems even less likely i don't think any of these theories hold water but this one least of all every test of these two airplanes i could find that's of remotely comparable variants shows that the corsair was the faster of the two and i can't find any hard evidence that disputes this only some theories all of which seem weak to me this chart shows the relative speeds of these two fighters at altitudes as you can see the corsair is 30 to 40 miles per hour faster just about everywhere the corsairs data from the test i used ended at 26 000 feet probably because chance vaught didn't think the navy would be interested in power at higher altitudes but the curve above that would have been about the same up to 29 000 which is indicated in other tests of this airplane note that this chart isn't perfect as i only graphed it in 1 000 foot increments but it's certainly good enough for comparative purposes and it's easy to read i'll post the originals at the end of this video but they are really tough to read on screen which is why i just made my own crafts here enough about that how fast were they compared to the 109 g6 and focal wolf fw 190 a5 this is important because a fighter can't shoot down what it can't catch not unless it has missiles let's take a look at the bf 109 g6 i have to say that i really hated to use this particular variant but i felt i had to because the g6 is the version that best represents what the usaf would have been looking at had they been considering using corsairs and hellcats in europe after the trident conference and if you don't know what that's all about please watch part 8 of my p47 videos the g6 was a relative low point in 109 performance i don't think i've talked much about 109 development before so let's have a quick summary of the 109's history up until this point the 109 first flew in 1935. in 1938 the 109 e e as an echo came out this was a major redesign new engine redesigned wings fuel injection and more this is the variant that served in the luftwaffe at the beginning of world war ii and in the battle of britain the e-model was a huge improvement over earlier versions and had parody with any fighters of the time and that includes the british spitfire and hurricane next we have the f model this probably represents the high point but well the relative high point relative to other aircraft in 109 development when it debuted it was superior to the spitfire mark v p40 and any soviet fighter the f model is another significant redesign as with all of these models there are multiple sub variants but most f's had the newer versions of the db601 engine with more power the wing was new it had slightly less area redesigned slats rounded tips and freeze type ailerons the tail was different the bracing struts were eliminated and it now featured a semi-retractable tail wheel in short the f model was an all-new airplane i get a lot of comments saying it's unfair that i compare the 109 with later us airplanes like the p51 the reality is that these two planes the 109 f and the p51 had their first flights within about a year of each other the 109f's had little to do with the early 1935 airplane the overall shape is the same but not much else the plane had been almost totally redesigned twice by this point it just so happens that they continued to use the 109 designation on that subject that's a big part of the reason the 109 is considered the most produced fighter in history they built almost 34 000 of them however that's largely because all the variants count as one type they're all counted as 109s which i think for historical purposes makes talking about the planes a little bit confusing for comparison in the soviet union yak built the yak-1 yak-1b yak-7 and yak-9 all of these are about as closely related to each other as the 109s are but simply because the names are different they don't all count as one type if it wasn't for that the yak would probably be the most produced fighter in history my point is that the 109f and later models are contemporaries of the p51 and even if they weren't i don't have some weird obligation to create a fictional fair comparison i'm trying to deal with actual history here that brings us up to the g models as allied aircraft caught up to the f model i'm sure the german pilots were anxiously awaiting the new g models they were probably expecting the same jump in performance that they had seen or heard about from the d to the e and then from the e to the f they must have been horribly disappointed when the g came out and barely if at all outperformed the f the g model is basically the f airframe with some extra strengthening and armor it also has a new larger displacement engine the db605 so the g model is heavier than the f but it's not a lot heavier in compared not in comparative terms for example the weight increase from the f to the g was far less than it was when the spitfire went from the mark 5 to the mark 9 and a lot less than the p51s jump when it went from the b and c models to the d so the increase in weight wasn't the biggest issue the g model was also more cluttered aerodynamically but the big problem was that the new db605 had a lot of development issues the quick fix for this was to limit manifold pressure and thus power power was limited for almost a year to 1.3 ata which gave about 1310 horsepower slightly less than the most powerful f model and in a heavier airplane with more drag imagine the disappointment that that must have been for the pilots now i need to be clear that there are many different g model variants and each one has a large performance variation based on configuration gun pod versus no gun pod manifold pressure limits water methanol injection and more the later g6 with water methanol injection was a much more formidable airplane than the one we're looking at here eventually the germans combined all of these improvements they had been making to the g models and came out with the g14 in early 1944 however for this test we're using a g6 with 1.3 ata which is about the worst variant possible the g6 speed is just about smack in the middle here at sea level it's about equal to the hellcat and then pulls away as altitude increases the 109 supercharger drive system gives it a nice curve but it's slower than the corsair everywhere i think that the general takeaway here is that although the 109 g6's speeds are pretty close to the corsairs the 109 cannot escape by running away in level flight the 109 is faster than the hellcat at all altitudes but only very slightly faster down low now what about the fw 190a5 we are always hearing about how weak it is at high altitude and relative to a p47 a late war spitfire or a merlin power p51 that's true but in this comparison it does pretty well the fw 190 has a dual speed single stage supercharger it's primitive in comparison with the other planes here but overall the plane does a lot with what it has before i put up the comparative chart we need to look at the official data for the 190. again i'll put up the original charts at the end but we need to look at the 190s chart now as you can see there's a shaded area with the speeds and what we're looking at is the 1.42 ata numbers as we need the maximum speeds that shaded area gets wider with an increase in altitude and with an increase in speed it then gets thinner as the aircraft continues to climb due to the decrease in speed so which side of that shaded area we do this matters because it's about a 15 kph difference at the point where the plane reaches its maximum speed that's about 9 miles per hour if i'm translating the german correctly here i think we need to use the line on the left translating stuff from german isn't as easy as you might think it's not an issue of the language itself german itself is actually a very direct language it's an issue of aviation terminology and this has bitten me before when i based a 109's best glidespeed on an english translation of a finnish manual that was translated from german something was lost in those translations in modern aviation best glide speed means the speed that gives you the most distance forward for the altitude lost and i use the speed in that sense turned out that it meant something very different and was way below the best actual glide speed so the best defense against this is to do the math and i'll get to it on this channel we've talked about various types of air speeds so you should be familiar with them indicated air speed calibrated air speed true air speed ground speed and mach numbers but there is another type and it's not used much this is eas or equivalent airspeed eas is calibrated air speed corrected for compressibility effects this is not a factor at sea level but as you climb it becomes a factor most modern pilots don't really worry about this because any plane that goes that high and fast enough for it to be a significant factor probably has either a mock meter or an air data computer and the air data computer will do the compensation for you so most airline pilots don't really think about this below 10 000 feet and 200 knots it's just not meaningful thus private pilots in cessna skyhawks and beechcraft bonanzas don't think about it much either in fact i hadn't thought about this much in a while now to avoid confusion i need to be really clear really clear here the difference between indicated and calibrated air speeds are due to instrument mechanical and pedostatic errors these are compensated for by charts in the pilot manuals as seen here for the corsair that's different from the correction for compressibility we need to convert calibrated air speed for compressibility to get equivalent airspeed i think the lines on the chart are for true air speed based on calibrated on one side the left side correction calibrated on the right side and equivalent air speed on the left side here are the notes from the chart and i'm sure a german speaking pilot may chime into the comments section that's always welcome on this channel and i truly appreciate the sort of community aspect and help we have here the way i read it is that the left side has compensation for compressibility which means it's true airspeed based on equivalent airspeed thus it's what we need now it's time to do the math and make sure i'm right i'm going to use an online calculator here because it's easy and it's fast and you can see all the numbers so we start by putting in the highest speed we can find from the left side of the shaded area we get 655 kph or kmh if you prefer at that speed our cas is 484 and our eas is 474. so if the plane's actual truce airspeed is 655 kph meaning we're using the correct side of the chart we should be able to take that calibrated airspeed put it into the eas position and if our theory is sound we'll get a speed equal to the right side of the shaded area so let's do that we'll take 484 and put it into the eas box once we do that we get just over 669 kph that matches up with the factory data so it's conclusive or as conclusive as we can be here uh we need to use the left side of the chart for true airspeed so that's what i'll be doing i guess the reason folk folkerwolf made the chart this way was to make it easy for pilots to see how far off they would be if they just just skipped out on the equivalent airspeed calculations i can't really think of any other reason to do it this way if for some reason you need to calculate equivalent airspeed manually there is a chart for it in naval aviators and it's easy to use now an obvious question is that if the 109s charts are the only ones to take into account equivalent airspeed data on the chart itself does that mean that the charts for other aircraft are going to be optimistic no i don't think it means that i think that all u.s world war ii aircraft speed tests factor this in this is a test of a brewster buffalo in which the naka test pilot put they took this thing up to 550 miles per hour in a dive that's 885 kph um which equates to mach 0.74 that means they had to have done this down at about 6 000 feet which is just crazy that's very low to be diving at the ground at that speed especially in a brewster buffalo anyhow later in the report they stated that the controls became almost immovable yeah that makes sense and it was only by dumb luck that they happened to have an exceptionally strong test pilot who was able to save the airplane i have to admit i never realized how fast a brewster buffalo could dive in terms of airspeed i thought that 500 miles per hour had to be in excess of the recommended speed or correction 550 miles per hour but shockingly when i checked the flight manual i found that the brewster's buffalo dive speed is listed as unlimited having flown a few airplanes from the period i know what that actually means it means that the plane is not limited by the airframe but by engine rpm in other words even with the throttle at idle the prop will windmill so fast it will eventually over rev the engine above some speed but apparently in the buffalo that speed is really high thus airspeed isn't exactly limiting in a dive it's the engine speed that does it anyway the buffalo's dive speed is pretty impressive okay we got a little off track there the point i'm trying to make is that this particular test describes explains and shows the instrumentation that naca was using to account for compressibility or equivalent airspeed i see that same or very similar instrumentation was used in testing on nearly every world war ii u.s airplane so i'm confident that performance numbers for us airplanes take this into account i'm not at all confident that numbers for other world war ii airplanes do this because i can't find any pictures of non-us airplanes flying with similar equipment and testing i'll talk about this a bit more when i get to dive speeds let's put up the full speed comparison chart as you can see the 190 is just slightly faster than the corsair on the deck but as the planes climb they're about even the 190 can outrun the hellcat at any altitude so in terms of speed it's clear that the corsair is a match for either contemporary a contemporary 109 or 190 the hellcat is the slowest plane here but it's at least competitive with the 109 g6 especially at lower altitudes we do have a u.s navy evaluation of the corsair and hellcat against an fw 190 so let's see what they say about the speeds keep in mind they're testing a corsair and hellcat each running about 60 inches of manifold pressure with water injection in our comparison we're using 52 inches no water injection so the planes in this test are faster the 190 they're using is an a4 model and the text says that it was a converted fire bomber they don't give a lot of other details i'm going to assume that that means it has some extra armor plate or something that's probably slowing it down slightly the 190 also experienced rough running which they thought was due to spark plug fouling for an unknown reason and or correction for an unknown reason it would suddenly lose all power at 33 000 feet so i guess it wasn't a cherry example of a 190. here are the results let's graph this only the points at 5 000 foot increments are accurate as those are the only ones given in the report the lines in between are going to be off but you know not too badly so the big picture is much like the results we saw earlier the u.s planes are generally faster now because of the water injection this combined with the a4 running slower than the a5's published numbers puts it about dead even with the hellcat of course the corsair is still faster down low as we climb the relationship of the hellcat and 190 are much like what we saw before the gap is closer but the 190 is still faster at all altitudes above sea level the corsair's relationship is similar as well the big changes at sea level the non-water injected corsair was about dead even with the 190 a5 but against this slower running a4 the water injected corsair is much faster then we climb and the 190 gains the edge above 15 000 feet so at this point we've looked at two different 190s and two different versions of the corsair and hellcat i think it's clear that the corsair was competitive in speed with any 1943 german fighter and the hellcat is in the game but it's a little bit behind now i know we've beat top speed to death here but i want to be complete let's go back to our original chart and add in the 109 g14 as with water methanol injection it's here on the purple line this is relevant because while the 109 g6 is the version that u.s planners would have been looking at had corsairs and hellcats actually gone to europe they would have faced g14s which were on the scene a few months before the us navy fighters got water injection so this is sort of a worst case for the navy fighters now even in this case which again is really a worst case for the the navy planes a slower corsair variant um up against a faster 109 variant and the corsair doesn't look too bad so let's move on what about dive speeds this really matters because over europe fighters would have to escort bombers and those bombers were cruising at 25 000 feet german fighters could dive on the bombers from above pass through the formation and just keep on going without comparable dive performance the us fighters would not be able to effectively give chase i must confess that before making this video i never really thought much about high altitude dive performance of the us navy fighters they were not normally used that way in the pacific so i sort of ignored it i suspected that they would have low mach numbers and that the german planes would run away from them but that's not the case the 109 gs g's dive performance is quite decent with an airspeed limit of 466 miles an hour or 750 kph below 10 000 feet which is about 3 000 meters and a mach limit of about 0.76 up high keep in mind that mock limits are not published for any of these airplanes so i had to convert the dive speed limits at altitude to mach numbers and in the case of the 109 i took the highest speed in terms of mach from a german document which was 700 kph at 5 000 meters i have no choice but to assume that that 700 kph is both indicated and calibrated in other words maybe the 109 has a super accurate airspeed indicator there's no correction chart for the me109 anywhere that i can find either it's just not out there or it's possible that the corrections were so minimal that they just didn't publish them plugging those numbers into a mock calculator gives us 0.7 mach the fw 190 has the same low altitude limit as the 109g of 466 miles per hour but its airspeed indicator is reading 12 miles per hour slow at that speed so it's really 478 and its mach limit works out 2.79 the hellcat can dive at miles per hour down low grumman doesn't give us a mock limit or much information about dive speeds at altitudes but that's not a problem we do know it can do 391 knots indicated at 15 000 feet and not be exceeding a mock limit we add 15 knots to that for instrument error and we have 406 knots we know the speed of sound at various altitudes in the standard atmosphere remember the speed of sound varies with temperature we've discussed that before but we can figure out what percentage of the speed of sound that speed is if we plug this into a calculator we get mach .79 the corsair's dive performance is pretty good as well it can dive at 418 knots down low that's 481 miles an hour or 774 uh kmh chancevaul gives us a pretty good dive chart it even includes g limits with speeds and that's unusual its maximum mach number is 0.75 the slowest of the planes here but still in the game in regards to diving the corsair does have a special trick up its sleeve its landing gear has a dive brake mode allowing it to descend very steeply without over speeding so in terms of sustainable dive angles i'm sure it's the best here in this mode which doesn't extend the tail wheel the gear can be lowered at 260 knots and it will fully extend but the tail wheel stays retracted there's no air speed limit with the gear in this configuration air speed limit for the gear the airplane still of course has one now that's a big benefit of the short stout gear design that's allowable with the inverted call wings now if the gear is lowered into the dive brake position above 260 knots it will still work but may not extend fully that might be useful if the plane is approaching its its limits to help get the plane back under control speaking of control uh there is an issue of roll control the hellcat and 109 will come out way behind here both the corsair and 190 have excellent roll rates at high speeds more on this when we get to maneuverability so the hellcat can dive faster than either german airplane at any altitude the corsair can't do that at high altitude but can do it down low to understand how close all these planes actually are to each other let's graph them out you may remember how to use this naca mock chart let's add a line for 25 000 feet that goes down to mach 0.70 lower than any of the planes here we'll graph the fw 190 first and in yellow remember it can do mach .79 with a calibrated air speed limit of 478. keep in mind this chart assumes calibrated and indicated are equal i'll put a line coming up from 478 miles per hour because we're using calibrated to the mach limit of 0.79 now i'll put an arrow where those two lines meet that's at about 13 000 feet so above 13 000 feet the fw 190 is mach limited below that it's air speed limited it has to operate in the area both below the mach limit line and to the left of the air speed limit line just take a moment to look at this and it should be clear pause if you need to as the plane descends in altitude its mach limit of 0.79 as it descends at its mach limit i should say of 0.79 it's flying at a higher and higher indicated or calibrated airspeed until it reaches the point at which calibrated airspeed becomes the limit now let's put the corsair up in light blue it can do 481 miles an hour down low and mach 0.75 that 481 is functionally the same as the fw 190s limit of 478 and i can't show that difference on that on this graph anyway it's not the best quality copy and my paint skills are not that precise the mock limit line is easy to see i tried to put a thin blue line there for the air speed i'm not sure if you can see it but it overlays the fw 190s yellow speed line on the right side so what this shows us is that the fw 190 can out dive the corsair until about 11 000 feet where i put the blue arrow if you look at any altitude above that the fw 190 has a higher maximum limit for example let's add a black line for 15 000 feet as you can see it intersects the fw 190s limit at a higher air speed than the corsairs about 25 miles per hour cas higher if you go straight down on the chart you'll find that the hellcat is doing about 470 miles per hour or excuse me the corsair is doing about 470 miles per hour versus about 445 for the 190. let's add the hellcat in dark blue its mach limit of 0.79 overlays the fw190s and its air speed limit of 496 is slightly higher by the way it's due to rounding that both aircraft have mach limits of 0.79 the hellcat was actually a couple hundredths higher than the 190. so now this shows us that the hellcat and 190 are functionally the same in terms of die speed limits above 12 000 feet and from there on down the hellcat's a bit faster i'll put the 109 in at 466 miles per hour and mach 0.76 in orange as you can see the 109 will never out dive the hellcat or fw 190 but it will out dive the corsair down to the point where the orange and light blue lines intersect at about 12 000 feet from there on down the corsair is faster so the hellcat is fastest in a dive anywhere on this chart both german planes can out dive the corsair up high but not down low and the 109 is only faster literally only a tenth of a mach faster than the corsair up high so i think the main takeaway should be that dive speed limitations would not have been a real reason to use a real reason not to use naval fighters over europe while they can't dive quite as fast as the p-47 or p-51 they are solidly in the fight before i close this chart out let me throw a few metric measurements up there for our european and asian friends as a u.s citizen it's easy to forget that not everyone knows both systems outside of the aviation world where knots are standard for air speed and feet for altitude not too many people use both systems as we do in the us so i'll try to include both when i can so at this point in the video the u.s navy fighters compare pretty well in terms of maximum level speed and dive speeds to the german fighters although it could be argued that the hellcat's maximum level flight speeds at high altitude could have been a problem but even then it's pretty close what about maneuverability both the hellcat and corsair can perform any normal aerobatic maneuver that would be used in combat this page is from the hellcat manual the page out of the corsair manual says pretty much the same thing both planes in fact all the planes here can only stay in negative g for a few seconds because of oil starvation although all will keep running during hard negative g pushovers the corsair should not be intentionally spun but that's not a very useful combat maneuver anyway and the corsair can recover from a spin pretty quickly if one is accidentally entered it's just important to make the recovery right away the german manuals that i have don't mention any prohibitions of spins for either of the fighters or much of anything else in regards to prohibited maneuvers in terms of combat maneuvers all of these planes are capable of doing the same basic things the variations here are enroll rates and turn performance i'm not going to get into a complex mathematical analysis of term performance i've done that in other videos and because of reasons that are going to become clear i don't think we need to here we have two planes with excellent roll rates one with poor roll rates and then we have the bf 109 which is the one that's complicated in regards to this subject the 190 and corsair have comparable roll rates and are both far superior in this regard to the hellcat this is the chart from earlier and it's clear that the fw 190 is better than the hellcat sadly the corsair and 109 are not on the chart however in the case of the corsair we do have a lot of data regarding its roll rate relative to the other two airplanes meaning the 190 in the and the hellcat this test compares navy planes to the 190 and it says that the 190 and corsair were about equal to each other and both superior to the hellcat similar wording can be found in other u.s navy tests comparing the corsair and hellcat to various japanese fighters so i think it's clear that the corsair is the much faster rolling of the two in a comparison with p-51 the u.s navy found that the corsair's maneuverability was superior everywhere which i think has to include roll rates normally in these comparison tests the navy specifies when the plane has a turn or roll rate advantage in terms of speed and altitude here they just said it's superior everywhere to the p51 which i think says something let's go back to our naca roll chart i put the p51b in light blue we know that the corsair was above that light blue line and about even with the 190. i suppose i could argue that means that at very high speeds the corsair could slightly out roll the 190 but overall i think the two planes were about even in roll rate and the hellcat is way behind here that brings us to the 109. i read all the time about how the 109 has a terrible roll rate and i know that's how it's represented in the simulators that i fly however i have to say i'm not so sure that's accurate just looking at the plane nothing really stands out to me that indicates it has a poor roll rate the size and locations of the ailerons don't look bad neither do the wings there isn't a lot of weight in the wings either it doesn't have wing fuel tanks or a lot of weaponry way outboard of course they would sometimes fit underwing gun pods but that's not the configuration we're looking at today 109 starting with the f series had freeze type ailerons so i'm pretty sure the g models have those too and that type of aileron works really well let's see what some tests from the period actually say about it we have a us army air force test which states quote the aileron and rudder control is good the aileron forces are light and the aircraft gives the impression of having a very high rate of roll at cruising speeds the forces increase at high speed becoming very heavy around 500 kph indicated unquote if the usaf describes the aileron response as good and giving the impression of having a very high roll rate at cruise speeds then i think it has to be about equal to a typical us army air force fighter at those speeds now they say the ailerons do get very heavy around 500 kph that's in harmony about it with about everything else i've read in fact i think it's a characteristic it's the characteristic that's giving a lot of people the impression that the 109 has a poor roll rate in all conditions but i just don't see evidence for that i have no doubt the ailerons get heavy at high speeds and that roll rate up there suffers but 500 kph is 310 miles per hour and we're talking about indicated speeds here and at lower altitudes that's pretty darn close to the g6's maximum level flight speed the plane is never going to get anywhere near that in level flight at altitude so this is primarily an issue when diving in a typical dog fight it's not going to be a serious limitation unless the 109 is trying to escape by diving which is usually not its best plan air show pilot mark hannah who had a lot of experience in flying 109s in post-war exhibitions had this to say his opinion was based on flying these planes um and you know actually flying the real airplanes and his opinion was that the 109's roll rate was at least at low speeds superior to the p51 there are many videos in flying of him flying 109s and rolling them so i'm confident he knew what he was talking about this british wartime test of a 109 g6 said in comparison to the p51 quote the rate of roll of both aircraft is almost identical unquote in short everything i can find shows that without gun pods a 109 f or g's roll rate is decent but not stellar below 500 kph i have the p51s roll data highlighted here in light blue since it seems that the 109's roll rate was at least on par with the p51s up until 310 miles per hour i think it's safe to say that it will easily outroll the hellcat but not the other two planes in this comparison in terms of roll rates i think the 190 and corsair are functionally tied with the 109 lagging behind them and the hellcat at the bottom of this category no discussion of maneuverability would be complete without discussing turn rate and radius a high turn rate and a small turn radius are desirable in fighter planes any time we want to compare turning performance it helps to look at the stall speeds of the various airplanes i'll go with the power off stall speeds as power on numbers are not published for all the planes power on lowers the stall speed partially because of the accelerated slip stream from the prop over the wings logically in single-engine fighters short-nosed airplanes like the fw 190 see the largest benefit but i don't have any good way of accounting for it here the hellcat stalls at 64 knots indicated which corrected for instrument error is 75 knots or 87 miles an hour the corsair comes in at 87 knots indicated which corrects 285 knots or 98 miles per hour notice that even when the manuals do give power on stall speeds they're doing it with very little power on 18 inches of manifold pressure is just above idle power at sea level yet that slight amount of power reduces the stall speed by three knots part of the reason the hellcat was considered a better carrier fighter is because its stall speed was so low that translates into a lower approach speed and a lower landing speed and the hellcat's 12 mile per hour advantage here over the corsair is pretty meaningful the 109 stall speed isn't published in any german manual i could find secondary sources put the speed for a g6 at 160 kph that's 99 miles per hour with no airspeed indicator correction data available so while i'm not 100 sure on this 99 miles per hour is what i have to go with the fw 190 has the highest stall speed here a us wartime test gives us 118 miles per hour indicated the airspeed chart doesn't go that low they usually don't because nobody's calculating dead reckoning navigation down at those speeds but i think it's safe to say that its clean stall speed is around 114 miles an hour calibrated it may be a little lower depending on how we interpolate that correction chart in fact i could argue that maybe it should be 112 and then with the effect of the prop blast at high power and 190 short nose it's possible that it's actual stall speed and low speed turn fight would be close to that of a 109 or corsair but that's just speculation i'm going with 114 miles an hour for now let's take a look at each plane's maximum turn rate and minimal possible term radius as usual i'm going to use seven g's as it's considered the maximum practical g limit before the pilot passes out i do think that the german planes would have had a slight advantage here due to the pilot seating position can't quantify that plus later in the war u.s pilots sometimes had g suits of course then there's the issue of time how long can the pilot hold the 7gs i'm going to dumb these variables down and assume a 7g limit for the pilots in all four planes i'm not going to go through all the calculations and aerodynamics for naval aviators i'm sure those of you who've already watched my p47 series know that the stall speed increases by the square root of the increased load factor the square root of 7 is about 2.65 you may also remember that a plane's maximum turn performance happens at the lowest speed at which it can pull maximum g so to find the maximum performance turn data for each airplane we multiply the clean stall speed by 2.65 put it on the chart here's what we have in the upper left corner i put the best speeds for each airplane you can really see how much the speed difference here matters i'll add in yellow lines to show where 82 degrees of bank is in a level horizontal coordinated turn 82 degrees of bank will result in about seven g's keep in mind the turn will not likely be perfectly level the pilot isn't going to aim for a specific bank angle he's going to pull back to about 7 g's and if in a turn as described it will be level so for chart purposes we use 80 degrees of bank because that's just the way the chart works keep in mind what we're really looking at is seven g's i thought we were done with knots but i guess not we convert the hellcats 231 miles per hour we get 201 knots we'll run a blue line from 201 at the bottom up to our 82 degree of degree bank aka the 7g line then over and we have a turn radius of about 500 feet at the top we run the blue line down to our 7g line and over and we have a turn rate of a massive 36 degrees per second to double check i put this into an electronic calculator i got a radius of 505 feet turn rate of 38 degrees per second the slight variation is just due to my poor drawing skills and paint and the fact that i have the 7g line for turn rate slightly misplaced so here they are as you can see the hellcat is incredible it has the fastest rate of turn and the tightest radius by a large margin the 109 and corsair are functionally tied here which actually surprises me the focal wolf isn't really in this contest it just doesn't have the wing to try and turn fight with a corsair or hellcat there are a few more things to consider first all of these planes will have the same turn performance above 302 miles per hour because all will be g limited so that's going to come down to the pilot and i really do think that favors the germans the 109 will have this advantage down to 262 miles per hour so if the german planes can keep the fight at very high speeds they will be competitive however turn fights by their nature tend to slow down and or start descending which means that to keep the fight at high speed they will have to descend and will eventually run out of room in terms of sustained turn performance the corsair and hellcat have the edge over the german planes as well among us aircraft to see combat in world war ii the hellcat was the only u.s front line fighter to have its first flight after the u.s entered the war thus its designers benefited from examining its main adversary the mitsubishi zero now they couldn't match the zeros low speed turn performance but they did make an effort to get it into the same ballpark for reference a typical zero had a flaps up stall speed around 65 miles an hour indicated the hellcat could turn with the zero at higher speeds certainly anything above 230 miles per hour but as the speeds bled off the zero slow turn speed advantage would show up still the two planes are not that far apart for example in a u.s navy test they found that even during low speed turns it would take three and a half turns for the zero to gain one turn on the hellcat in practical terms that means the zero will never get a shot at some point during those three and a half turns another hellcat will probably show up even if it's a pure 1v1 once the zero is at the 180 degree point the hellcat can stop his turn and run away in a straight line as long as the hellcat pilot does that soon enough he will escape every time for example if he does it at 250 miles an hour he will be about 700 meters away before the zero can line up his sights even if he waits until the turn fight slows to 200 miles per hour he will still be over 500 meters away in gaining distance fast my point is that the hellcat's comparative turn performance really was hard to beat let's move on to climb rate this is one of the most important factors for fighters they have to be able to climb fast to intercept enemy bombers and climb performance can allow them to gain an energy advantage before the dog fight starts gain position during the fight or escape a bad situation it's a pretty big deal the two german fighters really clean up here i looked at climb rates at sea level fifteen thousand twenty thousand and twenty five thousand feet at each of these altitudes the 109 g has the best rate of climb the fw 190 is second best beating the navy planes overall however it loses out slightly to the hellcat at 15 000 feet that has a lot to do with the supercharger speeds the 190s bmw engine is at a disadvantage here with only a single stage in dual speeds it can't be optimized throughout a as wide a range of altitudes as the other planes here then above twenty thousand feet it starts to run out of breath which is why its climb at twenty five thousand is really falling off the hellcat is slightly better than the corsair in terms of klein rates but only slightly the corsair and hellcat's climb rates are right out of u.s navy tests both are at military power which is nearly the same in both airplanes roughly 52 inches of manifold pressure 2700 rpm that power setting which the navy calls military power was initially limited to five minutes in the corsair however at some point in the war it was raised to 30 minutes which was actually still pretty conservative for this engine i don't have any early flight manuals for the hellcat the later manual gives a 30 minute limitation for military power but i'm quite sure it was 5 minutes during mid-1943 i think it was uh for one thing it makes sense as both planes run essentially the same engine yes they have different oil coolers and intercoolers but the hellcat's coolers are not better and in any case those items have their own temperature limits separate from time and power limitations additionally hellcat testing in august of 43 shows that they ran military power and climb up to 7 500 feet then pulled the throttle and rpm back to rated power in later climb tests they ran military power all the way up thus i think that both planes were limited to 5 minutes for military power in mid 43 which is the time period we're looking at here the data for the corsair was pretty straight straightforward the hellcat wasn't for this video i used test data from a late war test of an f6f-3 and i chose this test because it had complete performance data without water injection and because its engine was the closest to making the rated 2000 horsepower it still didn't make it but it was closer than the other tests a lot of the tests of this airplane were just too far below the hellcats rated power for me to feel that they were a comparable example the drawback to this test that i did use was that the plane was equipped with four 20 millimeter cannons or correction it was equipped with two 20 millimeter cannons 450 cals that was not a normal hellcat configuration it added a little bit of weight however the test concluded that the performance of the plane did not differ markedly from the standard hellcat and this particular test actually had the best climb results i could find at those power settings probably because its engine wasn't as low on power as the others the fw 190 data is from a german test nowhere in the test do they clarify the power setting which is odd however by comparing it to the excellent data i do have for the later a8 variant i'm certain that this data is for 1.42 ata which is as high as they went without c3 injection it could run on this power for three minutes after that it would have to throttle back to 1.32 the 109 was pretty straightforward we're looking at a g6 running pretty low power 1.3 atta which it could do for 30 minutes they did allow 1.42 for one minute sometimes but i felt that it's so little time that it's not practical to count it here and it doesn't matter much the 109 wins the climb contest on 1.3 atta easily so there was no need to really get into that extra one minute at 1.42 an often overlooked factor in climb performance is the speed at which the best rate is achieved this is important because the plane climbing at the higher speed can gain distance on the enemy if that's combined with a higher climb rate both distance and height can be gained allowing the higher plane to re-engage with a big energy advantage as you can see this factor also favors the german planes as long as they're outside of the enemy's gun range they can exploit this high climb speed to gain advantage and then re-engage at will i personally use this tactic all the time on il-2's berloga server against p-39s p-40s and yaks enemy pilots find it very frustrating to be chasing an fw 190 not gaining on it and finding themselves farther and farther below it it's so frustrating that they often just despawn when they realize they've been duped into a long stern chase that puts them at a disadvantage the u.s navy tested the climb performance of these planes at various speeds let's remember that both the us planes are water injected models and that the 190 is an a4 set up for ground attack they test decline performance at various speeds starting at 140 knots that's 161 kph correction 161 mph 257 kph at this speed the corsair and hellcat were about even uh with each other both outclimbed the 190 which makes sense as 161 miles an hour is well below the best rate speed for the 190 and pretty darn close to the optimal speed for the navy fighters next they tested them at 160 knots that's 184 miles an hour which is about the ideal speed for the 190. in this case the 190 outclimbed both navy planes the next test was at 180 knots this seemed to give the 190 the greatest advantage as it had marked superiority up to 10 000 feet with its advantage decreasing slowly to parity with the corsair at about twenty five thousand at two hundred knots it was much the same it's clear that the 190 can escape either u.s navy fighter with a high speed climb it's worth pointing out that once the speeds go above best rate of climb speeds the corsair outclimbed the hellcat the two navy planes have very similar maximum climb rates but in a high speed climb the corsair has the advantage of course the 109 wasn't mentioned in this test because it wasn't there but there's no question that its performance in climbs would have been better than the 190 thus either plane either german plane can escape and gain an energy advantage with the high-speed climb let's move on to firepower for a moment all of these planes have decent firepower the 650 caliber arrangement in the navy fighters proved effective against all aircraft encountered in world war ii i cover this extensively in a p-47 episode so i'll be brief here the hail of bullets from 650 caliber guns increases the chances of hits the planes fire armor piercing incendiary rounds they will punch through the armor of any german plane at 500 yards if they hit the armor at a right angle and the bullet's not already disfigured when it gets there and they also tend to catch things on fire this gun configuration has the added benefit of having no vertical convergence issues because all six guns are the same type both german airplanes put out fewer rounds per minute making it a little bit more difficult to hit but they have cannons that add not only weight of shot but they fire shells that explode on impact the fw 190 with its two machine guns and two 220 millimeter cannons puts out more damage per time period than the u.s navy planes but with fewer rounds per minute going out it's going to be a little bit harder to get hits on a on a hard maneuvering fighter the 109 has minimal horizontal convergence but some vertical convergence due to the different types of guns the 109 is usually behind in firepower sort of it does pack twin 13 millimeter machine guns which are about equal to the us-50 caliber it also has a 20 millimeter cannon firing through the spinner which is a good weapon but in total weight of shot or rounds per second it's behind all the other planes here however it has the least overall convergence so that's a plus the big thing the 109 has going for it was the optional 30 millimeter cannon which could come which could replace the 20 millimeter the mk 108 cannon packed a big punch it was a short-range weapon with very limited ammo but it could easily one shot kill a typical enemy fighter here's a ground test of this cannon on a spitfire this damage was done by a single shell if this was in the air the plane would have been shot down a single heat to the few hit single hit to the fuselage in during the same test blew the entire tail off so whether the shell hits the wing or fuselage the spitfire spitfire's done in one shot while the corsair and hellcat were certainly more rugged than the spitfire a single hit with this weapon would still be likely to bring them down at most it'll take two or three and it's putting out 11 rounds per second i really think firepower is awash the us navy planes probably more likely to get hits but will need more time on target to deliver a decisive blow armor has to go to the u.s fighter both have armor plate rated to withstand 50 caliber fire the german machine guns will have a hard time punching through although the 109s 13 millimeters might do it at very close range the cannons on the german airplanes typically fired high explosive and not armor-piercing shells on the other hand us-50 cals will go through the armor of any german of either german fighter here or any german airplane of the war that i know of if they hit it at or near a right angle assuming again that the bullet doesn't get massively deformed going through other structures before it gets to the armor now i find it interesting that u.s navy planes were armored against 50 cal when most u.s army air force airplanes were only armored against 30 caliber i think this may have been related to the way the u.s navy armored ships according to the curator of the uss new jersey the navy would normally armor ships against its own caliber in other words a ship with 11 inch guns would be expected to have armor capable of withstanding 11 inch guns it seems that they did that with their aircraft as well all in all i think the comparative performance shows that u.s navy planes would have been competitive with luftwaffe fighters the only real solid advantage the german planes have is climb rate and climb speed and those are important advantages but they're not decisive 109s could out climb thunderbolts and mustangs as well i don't know of any encounters between corsairs and german fighters british hellcats did encounter german fighters on at least one occasion two hellcats were lost fighting a group of 109s and 190s the hellcats shot down two 109s in a single 190. i don't think this single encounter is strictly meaningful but it certainly doesn't invalidate the idea that u.s navy fighters would have been competitive now what about range if the corsair and hellcat were to be used in europe could they have escorted bombers at 25 000 feet with enough range to get the job done the early corsair carries 237 gallons in its self-sealing fuselage tank it has wing tanks which could hold an additional 62 gallons each but these were not self-sealing additionally it could carry a single drop tank and these were usually 165 gallons at first this seems like a fuel correction at first it seems like a lot of fuel but it's not so simple there are some problems the wing tanks and drop tank are not pressurized and have issues if used at high power and high altitude which would be the conditions when escorting us heavy bombers over europe to guard against vapor lock in these conditions the manual says to run the aux fuel pump and keep an eye on fuel pressure of course if fuel pressure drops the pilot isn't going to be able to do much about it because the aux pump is already on so the engine may cut out and even if it doesn't a descent is probably going to be necessary the corsairs wing and drop tanks are just not set up for high altitude escort work now this isn't really a deal breaker the main tank is pressurized and it would not have been a terrible job to plumb lines to pressurize the drop tank but the wing tanks are another matter the wing tanks are not self-sealing instead the air in them above the fuel can be purged and the tanks can be filled with carbon dioxide to make them far less likely to explode if hit by enemy fire this system cannot be used while the engine is getting fuel from that tank and i'm not sure if the shape and strength of the tank would be suitable for pressurizing with air for high altitude operations but even if it was there's an extra complication because you'd have to shut that off when you want to use the carbon dioxide purge we also have the issue of fuel leaks from the tank once hit with the bullet and the fact that a high explosive 20 meter ship millimeter shell is going to render that carbon dioxide system almost pointless at some point and i'm not sure exactly when but probably between early and mid 1944 they changed the fuel system in the corsair to this one the wing tanks are gone but the plane could now carry two drop tanks usually these were twin 154 gallon tanks sometimes 171s provisions for the center line tank were retained and the plane could take triple tanks although i don't think that was common this is the version i think we have to look at in regards to the corsair's escort potential in europe the wing tanks would not have been suitable for that work and i don't want to invent a fantasy corsair with modified wing tanks as it is we're slightly in fantasyland here with the pressurized drop tank on the corsair but i'm certain that could have been done easily as it was done with other aircraft and maybe it was done with the corsair at some point in the war although i never found any evidence of it the hellcat's internal fuel system holds 250 gallons that sounds like it's a little more than the corsairs 237 but in practical terms they're almost identical this is because the hellcat stores the fuel in three tanks and it can only feed from the end it can only feed the engine from one tank at a time thus to avoid running the engine out of fuel the pilot has to switch tanks before the tank is totally empty so there will be a little fuel left in the first two tanks before switching to the third the corsair doesn't have this issue because it only has one big tank that big tank has a 50 gallon stand pipe as a reserve that way all the fuel isn't going to drain out through a leak in the corsair single tank let's look at the usaf's fuel requirement for escort duty over europe now these changed later but for the time period we're looking at these were the requirements let's go through them and see where the corsair would have been on this chart i'm going to assume pressurized drop tanks and i want to mention that the hellcat ranges would have been extremely similar item one tells us that the b-17s will be flying at 165 miles per hour indicated that's not a problem item three tells us that the escorting fighter must be able to cro cruise at 210 miles per hour indicated or 300 true at 25 000. we know it's 25 000 because that's specified in the climb requirements that speed is not a problem for the corsair the remaining items have to do with fuel usage we can get the numbers for these things right out of the manuals and here they are notice or i should say note that the early corsair doesn't have war emergency power so i use military power for all 20 minutes of combat the corsair charts don't give data for a full power climb to 25 000 feet so i used the highest numbers that they had and i used the most economical realistic numbers for a 30 minute reserve thus this really is about best case now the corsair does perform pretty well with a drop tank but not well enough to combat a 109 or 190 it's going to have to drop them thus no matter how much fuel it has in its drop tanks ultimately its escort range will be limited by the fuel in the tanks after combat so let's assume the corsair is carrying 154 gallon drop tanks the plane will have to use internal fuel for starting warm-up taxi and takeoff all that takes about 23 gallons leaving us with 210 we subtract the fuel used for combat and the reserve and that leaves us with 95 gallons to get back to base how far can we go in a corsair with 95 gallons well if we need to return at 20 000 feet at 300 miles an hour and not accounting for headwinds which are likely they would typically be encountered going that direction over europe our range will be at 323 miles now i put that up along with the radius number for a single 165 gallon tank and on internal fuel only although i didn't put up the hellcat's data for a similar amount of drop tank fuel that's very similar it's clear that the us navy fighters just didn't have the range to escort bombers over europe it's not that they had poor range it's that the specific requirements for escorting cut into their range too much they were designed as naval fighters and not designed for long range work escorting turbo supercharged 4 engine bombers at high altitude those dual 154 gallon tanks do give the corsair long range just not long range if it has to drop them then fight for 20 minutes and return to the same base at high altitude with a 30 minute reserve so they could be used for long ferry flights or on different types of combat missions for example a mission where the plane landed somewhere different from where it took off in that case it might be able to burn all the drop tank fuel drop the tanks fight and then go to its destination it should also be pointed out that the self the corsair had self-sealing drop tanks they are specifically listed in the manual and it says they can be used in combat that's not to say that all navy drop tanks were self-sealing they absolutely were not and i don't know how common that was but i'm pointing out that it was in the manual and thus could be used in combat and even with a drop tank the corsair can still reach 431 miles per hour in a dive and pull 5g so while it couldn't fight a 109 or a 190 with a drop tank on there were emissions in the pacific where it could keep its drop tank even during combat in short the range requirements in the pacific were very different from those of escort fighters in europe and while the corsair and hellcat would have been a match for the 109 or 190 in air-to-air combat neither could have replaced the thunderbolt in europe based on the range issue alone plus the thunderbolt has higher dive speed a little better performance at high altitudes where the bomber escorting was being done so it makes sense that they selected the thunderbolt and not the navy airplanes the hellcat compares well with the corsair in terms of performance but where it really shines are in some of the less talked about factors the hellcat was easier to fly and safer to land on a carrier accidents were a big factor in aircraft and crew losses during world war ii in fact losses in accidents were often higher than those in combat and in a way worse at least an aircraft lost in combat forced the enemy to incur some expense we also have to consider cost the corsair was an expensive airplane to build its inverted gull wings compound curve sections and large use of flush riveting all contributed to its performance but at a high cost a new corsair was about 75 000 during the war the hellcat was about 50 000 and the price actually dropped over the course of the war to around 35 000 per hellcat making it probably the best bargain among us built fighters you could buy more of them would lose fewer due to accidents and it was a match for nearly any enemy aircraft it would encounter however the corsairs extra speed higher climb speed higher roll rate these things were of value and corsair's far outlasted hellcats in military service the corsair even outlasted the hellcat's successor the bearcat it's worth pointing out that for the bearcat grumman went to a layout for the coolers much like what was in the corsairs they put them in the wing roots that's all for now i want to thank my supporters especially those on patreon patreon supporters have accessed all the manuals i used for this video and often get early access to these videos if you would like to support this channel i have a teespring store with various mugs cell phone cases and posters of the planes in this video link is in the description please check that out that's all for now i hope you have a great day oh and just one more thing i'm here in baltimore and in a previous video i referred to this ship as the uss tani the correct title is uscgc taney uscgc stands for united states coast guard cutter apparently coast guard ships are not technically united states ships this is the only ship that was present at the attack on pearl harbor and still afloat although there is a tug boat that's still around but it's a boat it's a great boat with a lot of history but a boat the tanni is a ship saw combat not only at pearl harbor but throughout world war ii and was in combat at okinawa some pretty intense combat after the war she continued on in coast guard duty and was involved in drug interdiction that almost seems sad to me a proud ship went from fighting the attackers at pearl harbor and later kamikazes to trying to stop some guy from smoking pot in his parents basement that just seems like a real step down to me and yes of course i know it's more complicated than that i noticed the name on the back of the ship has been removed as i have never seen such disrespect to a fine warship i had to investigate this it turns out she is no longer to be referred to as the tani as with other ships in the treasury class she was named after a former secretary of the treasury however this particular secretary of the treasury who was pro-slavery became a chief justice of the united states and delivered a pro-slavery verdict so in an effort to sort of wash up history they have removed the name from the ship and she is now to be referred to as the whec 37. now obviously we don't want to hold up some pro-slavery civil servant or bureaucrat as a positive example of humanity but here's my problem with removing the name from the ship almost nobody has ever heard of roger b taney the man he's a forgotten footnote in some textbook somewhere or at least was mostly forgotten until somebody dug this up on the other hand a lot of people many alive today served bravely on that ship war records service records and more reference the tanny and i suspect the former crew members call her the tani today the name tani is known as a ship not as a former civil servant and i think changing the name at this point is a real disservice to history furthermore the new designation w-h-e-c and i don't know what that stands for i read it but i already forgot it didn't even come into existence until well after world war ii thus the name whec-37 is historically meaningless for the time period of greatest importance to this historical ship i think it's a travesty yes we have bigger problems in the world but this is the one that bothered me today anyway i hope everybody's having a good day and i look forward to seeing your comments below goodbye you

Channel: Greg's Airplanes and Automobiles

Views: 374,428

Rating: 4.88972 out of 5

Keywords: Corsair, Hellcat, Bf 109, Fw 190, WW2 fighters, Focke Wulf, Chance Vought

Id: i2aqeALGWL8

Length: 91min 3sec (5463 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021