Fisher P-75 Eagle - Warbird Wednesday Episode #107

well hello there and welcome to another edition of warbird wednesday my name is fred bell i am the vice chairman of the palm springs air museum and i am back greg has returned greg i did that thing with jason last week you know we did the video it just wasn't the same i i missed you so welcome back he missed me too there you go now of course with that greg has i gone completely over the top what is this a floral toque perhaps i don't know what this is i am nanuk of the forest i'm not really sure but uh he's gone over the top with the hat today my enervated assistant here we go we're gonna toss to see if it goes off camera there you go good catch by the kenny so uh we are now done with ukraine and we're going back and starting to talk about experimental airplanes as we go towards our f-117 opening we're gonna the opening of the hangar we're gonna go through that today we are talking about the fischer the p75 or the xp-75 the eagle because they actually built a couple of different versions of this airplanes i will talk with this airplane i will talk about that now i'm going to use this is not a p75 but it is close enough this is a p-39 so i'm going to use this aircraft to show some of the features they shared in common obviously a planned view greg can throw a planned view up of the airplane now we've got to get back into that familiar feel greg we've been out kind of doing all these modern weapons now the p-75 eagle was a kind of earl late late at the end of the beginning or the middle of the war 1940s late 1942-1943 design review that was put out that needed a heavy fighter that was fast and had a really great rate of climb and there were a number of companies that chased us chased it one of them was the fisher body division of general motors now i'm a camaro freak i have camaros and if you go in the little door sill there it says fischer on the little door sill on the body that they made primarily car bodies for general motors but like everything else in world war ii all these factories they were building weapons at that time so fischer decided that they were going to go and get into the airplane business now they also did another thing and this is where it gets kind of weird greg this airplane is the epitome of weird if there was ever a franken plane this might be it let me explain why the outer panels of the airplane were going to be from a p-51 but they decided later to substitute a p-40 the tail would be from an a24 which is an sbd so you're following me now fighter fighter wing panels the tail of a an a24 the undercarriage of an f4u corsair okay so you're with me right there and the reason we chose this airplane today this had the that bell kind of mid-engine design dry train the only difference in the p75 is it had counter rotating propellers so that that's kind of interesting now my question for you is greg what could go wrong take a whole bunch of dissimilar aircraft parts and put them all together and voila you're going to have a new airplane and it's going to work great well maybe maybe not we're going to find out so uh remember it was big on ready to climb and it and it was also heavily armed 10 50 caliber machine guns so this thing was a monster now how are we going to power it we're going to power it with a v a 3420 24 cylinder engine okay so now we've gone from a 12 cylinder to a 24 cylinder engine now it was a tail dragger configuration you know there were some things about it but what could go wrong right well let's talk about what went wrong it um first of all when they put all that together they had a bad uh center of mass on the airplane there was the center of gravity and the airplane was off they had enormous cooling problems with the airplane it did not produce the amount of power that they expected in the xp series of airplanes that they initially designed and the last problem was and this is a problem with the those bell aircraft the 63 and the 39 it had bad spin characteristics so right out of the gate the first flight on the airplane was in 1943 they had a lot of trouble with it so much trouble that they said they built eight xp 75s and they went this isn't going to work so what they did is they went back and they completely re-engineered the airplane they went away from that kind of canopy that was further back on the fuselage they came up with a bubble canopy or as they change the center of gravity in the airplane and they pretty much solved most of the challenges but the airplane continued to underperform i wouldn't say it was a great airplane they um they still thought though they had a winner and they kept playing with this airplane for about a year now why would you say would you put all of those in different parts together into an airplane one thing greg they're already built if you know anything about manufacturing and we've got our our t6 opened up here you can see all the cool stuff behind me that you don't normally see with the skins on it we're servicing it you if you have all that stuff designed and sitting in a factory and you could put all these panels together you have the jigs all the manufacturing stamps you could build a completely new airplane and you didn't really have to do a lot of new engineering right makes perfect sense in reality it was probably one of the worst ideas that they could have ever come up with and the airplane continued to soldier on a little bit in in flight tests but it never really reached its potential so this was one of these kind of great ideas that that just never went anywhere but one thing that jumps out of this that's really important is the uh the american workers and the plants whether you know we talked about fisher being part of this and that is the kind of rosy riveter aspect and the the american workers in these plants remember we had taken a lot of plants that were making refrigerators or automobiles or whatever and we retooled them in a relatively short period of time to where in many cases we were turning out one airplane a day or two or three or five airplanes a day and it's one of the reasons why the united states ended up with so many airplanes and why we won the war that was all done with the american worker and at these factories so although this was a not a very good idea at the end of the day uh taking all these distinct disparate airplanes that have been engineered for other purposes and kind of homogenizing them it is a terrific example of taking american manufacturing retooling it and actually getting something that would fly which is shocking if you if you go out and look at each one of those airplanes and you think about they got amalgamated into one airplane that actually flew it's amazing that they were able to pull that off because aircraft design isn't like that so where you can just take a piece off one airplane and one you know fly to the phoenix as an example and maybe you can do that to get out of the desert but you're not going to build a frontline fighter that way but the rosie the riveter act aspect and the manufacturing aspect we had so much capacity in the system that were able to even contemplate doing that and that in and of itself is amazing so today greg has got this goes along with the the whole floral thing a guayalako uh uh whatever huba hubba something uh soda works a lily lily koi natural soda i have no um [Music] now there isn't they didn't get the memo they're um i have no idea what this is there's uh finest hawaiian quality so hawaiians are known for their hawaiian quality we know that so this must be an amazing soda um 140 calories i have no idea when this was bottled it's not doing anything yeah greg's like don't worry about that don't bother yourself with that no fizz well there's something going on there but i had to really listen to you heard it all right i think greg's like yeah i heard it take a drink of that buddy all right so we'll see if greg knocks me off they did not get the memo about pure cane sugar today which is interesting [Music] wow that hawaiian luau has yeah greg is doing his whatever he's doing there man that's awful well i don't even know what this is um customary second step there it was no we're gonna pass i love hawaii i love everything about hawaii i i don't know who would drink this i don't know even the finish it has like a i don't even know how to describe the finish it the finish just comes back and smacks you in the face so so it's just that's kind of an interesting soda so somebody drinks it obviously they bottled it so even though as i said the p75 is a miracle of american manufacturing know-how to basically take all those pieces and parts and amalgamate them into the franken fighter right which is what we'll call it um it just even when they got it sorted out they it wasn't a great performing airplane it was only top speeds 433 miles an hour at that point the uh later versions of the p47 and the p51 were much faster being completely sorted out and the airplane the air force army air force did not need another heavy fighter so they kind of they did some additional testing they used it for testing but by october of 1944 the program had reached a dead end at that point as i said they had built eight xp 75s and they had built six p-75s which were the more refined kind of fighter version of the airplane um the airplane at that point went into history now what happened to it fortunately there is one surviving example in the air force museum it had a tremendous amount of corrosion in it and it was refurbished in i think the late 90s and it's still with the air force museum but there is one airplane on display that's highly unusual for these kind of short build airplanes especially for a national museum and that airplane if you ever get over to the air force museum check it out it still exists uh a comparable aircraft for this and we'll have greg have some fun here is the arsenal the vb-10 the volte the xp xp-81 the fock-wolf the ta-152 now that actually is a combat airplane we've talked about the with the ta-152 as well probably one of the best um german fighters built to the war although not in built any in any numbers and the republic the xp 72 noticed that most of those airplanes have an x in front of the p which means they never made it out of the prototype stage but it isn't it is um there is no there is no try there is only do we'll we'll focus yoda here yoda wasn't around back in world war ii but if he was he probably would have said there i'm sorry there is no try there's only do in this airplane they tried really hard but they didn't do greg they didn't get it done i'm sorry greg is looking at me like well it was a good idea so that is the tale of the fisher the p75 eagle now if you want to set up your little factory at home and and have your own rosie the riveter action figure which greg does he he marches his figure around the office and has her build various things you can go out click on the link jason will happily send you this action figure we can get that out to you and we love that kind of stuff if you uh we can't do any of this now this is a great example behind me of what we do this is one of our flying airplanes if you want to keep see us keep flying and keep doing the stuff we do go out to our website hit that donation button we can always use a few bucks if you came across us on facebook and you like us give us a like give us us you know tell people about the program if you came across us on youtube a lot of places to come across this did you know greg we're like on twitter and instagram and our social media person keeps putting all this stuff out but uh if you came across us on youtube subscribe if you like people or if you have folks if you like people if you like people who like aviation is that like a prerequisite it might be go ahead and forward it to them we only do military airplanes that's all we talk about and if you can get past the hats and greg trying to poison me each week where we can pull this thing off but subscribe to our youtube channel and we appreciate you giving us the time today my name is fred bell i am the vice chairman of the palm springs air museum thanks so much have a great day [Music] [Applause] so [Music] you

Channel: Palm Springs Air Museum

Views: 7,737

Keywords: Palm Springs Air Museum, Patreon

Id: oQVjRbREZR4

Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 30 2022