F4U Corsair: 'Black Sheep' adopted by the Royal Navy

[Music] [Music] the corsair was um a inverted gull wing aircraft top speed was about 420 it was an aircraft that the americans refused to land on a carrier because it had some rather vicious characteristics um it would stall and spin at relatively low speeds uh and was not easy to get out of the spin and it also had oleos which is the undercarriage suspension which was badly designed and the result was that when you landed if you landed several feet a few feet above the ground it would land it would then bounce a bit higher than before it landed and it went along like a kangaroo bouncing and it wasn't a happy airplane at all the royal navy took it sorted out both of the problems before it's been sorted out the american navy didn't use it but the american marines used it in the pacific extensively it was the most delightful airplane to fly but you did have to respect it it's a big tough heavily built shipboard fighter pulling 2 000 horsepower on the takeoff greater power and higher wing loading means she'll land faster and stall quicker than the older slower types of fighters and of course the corsair was the first single seat fighter to exceed 400 miles an hour straight level in its day it was the fastest single street fighter in the world and certainly a a very advanced aircraft for of its time it carried six 0.5 machine guns half inch machine guns three in each wing and many experienced american pilots preferred that to cannon it was a balance between rate of fire and weight of fire and they thought this was a better compromising cannon because you you've got a better chance of hitting the targets as well and it is on record that corsairs with those machine guns could sink a destroyer just by putting holes into the side it had that had been recorded the f3a corsair fighter american aircraft made by transport the aircraft were made the airframes by the refrigerator division of general motors frigidaire refrigerator people but they were mentioned by probably the american equivalent of the rolls-royce merlin a superb radial engine the pratt whitney 2800 which was a multi-cylinder 18-cylinder radial engine of great reliability and wonderful resistance to having cylinders shot away no oil pressure for ours etc etc well i had flown it before of course i found the very early ones which we were taking over from the uh us u.s navy uh who really decided that they were not suitable for landing on carriers because they had a very long nose of radial engine nose and they're overheated if you didn't open their cowls and opening the cows all around gave you even less fission than you had before so um they decided that the hellcat was which had much better forward vision was the one they were going to use and they gave us their courses and as it happened we had no trouble landing the crosshairs on the deck and so later the americans decided to take more of the corsairs and give us more the hellcats we were very very lucky to get those aircraft very lucky indeed thanks to a particular naval officer of the fleet air arm dick smeaton who when naval air attache in washington saw that these aircraft were proving a bit unpopular with the americans who were by that time going largely for the hellcat fighter he opted to buy the corsair on his own slop without reference to their lordships in the treasury in fact he ordered the first 200 of his own responsibility before getting it in endorsed by their lordships and the government of the day a very bold decision and one that was of immense value to the british navy how did you discover that well i was around when he was doing it uh i was the chief of staff well the first characteristic is so big it's bigger than anything we've seen before bigger than any other single seat aircraft being flown by the rdf and the in order to accommodate this radial engine which was 18 cylinders in two rows two rows of nine inch producing more than two thousand horsepower he needed big propeller and instead of putting in a full blade which perhaps wasn't available immediately he put in a three bed propeller which is about four feet fourteen foot diameter the biggest propeller available which dictated the rest of the design the designers were aiming to put the biggest engine into the smallest body and to give clearance it meant that without any other consideration an enormously long undercarriage would have been needed so to solve that problem uh the cross-section of the fuselage was circular so the wings that came out of the fuselage at right angles which is the most efficient way downwards and then swept up like a gold wing upside down this meant that the lowered the undercarriage attachment by a fulton probably two feet which made the undercarriage much shorter and more efficient and still getting ground clear for the from the propeller the angle of incidence between the wing and the body was the most efficient way for streamlining and lift any other angle produces turbulence and is less efficient it resulted in a most unusual design but the most efficient one there was another characteristic about it and i'm not sure why this was in the design but in most aircraft the the tail fin is immediately above the elevator system in the corsair it was pushed forward for some design reason which might possibly be why the spinning was forbidden i think it affected the control surfaces in the spin [Music] um well of course they wouldn't they didn't use one carriers but they used a hell of a lot on the marines on land shore bases uh as soon as they captured a battle or whatever it was in the pacific they've got a the seabees i think they're called the engineers you know and they built a runway in about 25 minutes as only the americans can do and then they use the corsairs of course the marines flew them from from land bases the trouble was not they they didn't think was not flying the thing it was landing it on carriers and they reckoned that they that the crash rate would be uh unacceptable they'd lose more aircraft than you know that was simply by by not getting it down properly on a dollar carrier but when we we sorted all that out and then they suddenly realized that they were if we could use them they could and then they stopped supplying us and we couldn't even get spare parts for them [Music] [Music] [Music] and it came to us with a very bad reputation the instructors it's heard all sorts of rumors about it i don't quite know why the rumors flew i think they mostly were i don't most of untrue i think but you know you put the wrong if you don't care if you pull the wrong switch the wings fold it back in the air and that sort of thing the instructors were more frightened of them than the pupils were i think the pupils have been brainwashed what a wonderful aeroplane it was and it was a wonderful airplane but the instructors were more scared of it than the pupils were when the wings are fully extended the small doors at the wing joints close indicating that the hinge pins are in position then these hinge pins are locked by pulling up on the d handle and turning it clockwise of course there was a brilliant place the americans couldn't handle it we learned so and of course we'd heard about corsairs how they'd killed so many american pilots the americans couldn't hack it and gave it to us and one of our most senior pilots was killed him on um over in the states but anyway we heard all about it in the long nose and how you couldn't land it and all this anyway you know we're not going to fly these down they go six planes were delivered six women got out of them there's no more grumbling [Music] it was a very good fighting plane very robust this eighteen foot and nose for pratt whitney engine you started with a cartridge started and they didn't start with the first five cartridges it got too rich and a hell of a job to start it was easy to fly you sat up in there and uh underneath the floorboards was a great belly so dropped something you never found i know once they were slow rolling the spanner arrived hit me on the head [Music] [Laughter] we were very very happy with the aircraft i had flown it previously at boscom down in 1942 when it was doing its pro prototype trials in the uk uh i had flown it for some 200 hours and knew it very well but all of the pilots i got from pensacola had been trained using the corsair and were very very happy at operating it and flying it and flew it extremely well we had to be selected for different types of aircraft which were safer corsair the torpedo bomber avenger and the hellcat the corsair apparently needed leggy pilots so the test was to sit with you back to the wall and see if your legs could reach the go no-go mark we had to riddle a bit to do it but some of us passed so we became corso pilots on the first time we saw corsair being towed backwards through the mist and we couldn't believe what we were looking at the we felt that the tail plane had disappeared into the mist before we could see the front of the plane it was an enormously long long nose with the cockpit nearer the tail than the front which is true if you look at it i'll never forget they a corsair appeared one day at one of the hangars um at kingston and we were shown this aircraft just to have a look at it and i thought and i said to somebody well i have to god i never go near that brute what a monstrous airplane god we've never seen anything like it in our lives before it was such an evil looking airplane of course that's the one i finished up on this is the way life is isn't it [Laughter] but you know this inverted gold wing gave her a huge amount of stability she was a wonderful gun platform um you you could you could really sort of sit on your honkers and aim your guns and get uh and she was as steady as a rock when she was firing too that's another good thing that weight in the aircraft gave you a hugely powerful weapon [Music] [Applause] i used to think it was a wonderful look also wouldn't i the wonderful haircut um first of all it was very rugged extremely rugged you could you could do a particularly sort of landing or well particularly landing on an aircraft carrier things didn't always go quite right the ship was going up and down 60 odd feet at the time and then you were coming in possibly not quite right and you hit the deck as they were and it didn't bother the airplane terribly in this perhaps it would burst a tire or something but it could put put up with it you know whereas you get a seafarer and you have if you landed that heavily it it broke it up it really did so of course there was a rugged typical american it was overbuilt but it was superb for that reason performance-wise it had little um to show above this spitfire seafire type of aircraft which was a brilliant aircraft as everybody well knows but the corsair was designed from the outset as a naval aircraft it was a really rugged american-built aircraft that could stand up to any amount of punishment and could also stand up to the rigours and stresses of operating from ships the failure with the seafarer was that all that was a good performing fighter aircraft it was never quite rugged enough to stand up to ship operation in in really heavy weather which is the criterion for any naval aircraft with a result that if the weather was bad and you were at sea with spitfire seafire type aircraft you could expect a high percentage of trouble on landing with the aircraft undercarriage or tails tending to break through to the heavy impact with the deck but the corsair was strong enough to stand up to this sort of punishment and come away untroubled you've only got to look at a japanese he burst into flames when i say that i mean to say you just point yourself generally at him press the button and immediately blew up they were made seem to me made of they had no self-seeding tanks their planes were made mostly of wood or maybe bits of tin with wood around them and i've never seen aircraft just one squirt and they blow up i'm very pleased because you saved ammunition and so on but i hated bringing ammunition back i said it cost a lot of money to get these bullets out here i said we're going to use them every one of them but it wasn't really necessary i never had any trouble fighting the japanese we could out climb them for the first time i love to tell you this for the first time in the whole war except when i was doing ramrods in seafarers it was the first time in the whole war i was totally in command of the air not just all the air that was there all our own friendly air but there was no aeroplane could touch me i could out climb i could outfly uh i didn't tried well i the course there was absolutely marvelous aircrafts i could outmaneuver a great number of them but no one wouldn't like to try much thing i could certainly out dive all the japanese and i got armor plated glass and self-sealing tanks and all those usual things that this came ordinarily with with our sort of stuff whereas the said nothing like that so it was a tremendous relief that we were on top and they were getting the sort of dreadful treatment that we had to suffer in the early part of the war with inadequate aircraft so it was a completely changed war apart from the fact that of course one was it's always a hazardous business war but it was downhill war that was it and you couldn't lose then the kamikazes started i mean one occasion on the victorious we'd had a couple of kamikaze attacks and then they used to swipe the aircraft off the flight deck because they we had an arm and deck as everybody knows and they couldn't penetrate the armored plating so they really didn't do much harm um so they used to swipe from come along with a stern and all the aircraft on the deck they'd just plow into the whole lot of them they'd all catch fire and you'd lose all your aircraft well an aircraft carrier without an aircraft isn't much use and we we had lost you know say a couple of attacks and i remember commander flying on the bridge called up the uh deck officer of the band banning six corsairs they had a scare of something coming in to attack us and berlin at the other end of the flight deck sort of did this waved and said no no no and uh commander flying had forgotten to switch the mic off and he said uh report to the bridge immediately you know he was a very stuffy rn commander didn't know much about airplanes quite frankly and um banning came roughing up and he said yes sir he said when i say arrange six corsairs i mean range six courses what's all this about and then it's sorry so we've only got three left but the shortage at the end of the war was purely because the americans had started to use the aircraft as the fleet air arm they've been using yeah they they wouldn't then generally speaking didn't use them normal carriers and it was all carrier work so they they said no we want them now and luckily the war ended because i don't know what they've done [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Armoured Archivist

Views: 682,400

Keywords: Vought, Goodyear, F4U, Corsair, Fleet Air Arm, FAA, Royal Navy, RN, World War II, carrier, aircraft carrier, armoured carriers, drachinifel, fighter, strike, footage, film, original, USN, United States Navy, USMC, Marine Corps, service, kamikaze, aimages, ai images, aimages.ai, crash, landings, crash landings, mustard

Id: quo-AgC4ZiU

Length: 23min 29sec (1409 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 02 2021