SUU23
LE
Curtiss CW21, interceptor. 1x30 cal, 1x 50 cal. 4,500 ft per minute climb rate (Spitfire 2,600 ft per minute climb rate)
Most Beautiful Aircraft
- Thread starter theiftaker
- Start date
LE
SUU23
LE
I did consider that, but thought bugger it!
Cloth bomber
LE
I thought the cockpit/ nose looked very Voight ( Corsair).
As opposed to John?
The tail will fall off that design. Pretty on paper though.
Cockpit and canopy definitely, bags of vision.
The Old Man was intended to go to Germany to fly them but he and his mate Ron, from Hatfield, volunteered to go to Malaya to fly Hornets. As he has always said : “If you’re still alive, you made the right decision.”
ISTR the press got it wrong, Tuck's squadron shot them down, but he wasn't flying (injured? can't remember - I'll dig out his memoir). Tuck was a famous fighter pilot, and the press were a sucker for an Errol Flynn moustache:
TamH70
MIA
The F-86 Sabre? In British service?
Yep we had some just like the B29, B47 and I'm sure a bunch of other stuff I can't be bothered to remember right now.
These guys would have remembered such.
We had 370 of them ordered, built in Canada. We retired them 22 June 56.
My friend has her dad’s Mach 1 certificate from Canadair in ‘55.
beefer
LE
There was a problem with early models...
“In his memoirs, Gen. Chuck Yeager relates to a story where the flight didn’t go according to plan, or his expectations. As a young USAF test pilot, he was asked to fly the then new F-86 Saber to determine why several had unexpectedly crashed. Several Sabers had last been seen flying at low altitude, inverted before crashing with no survivors. Yeager mounted his Saber to determine the cause of these tragic accidents. I short order, he had his answer. Once inverted, the ailerons on his Saber would lock up and become immovable. Once the aircraft was rolled right-side-up, he regained aileron control. Upon detailed inspection after the flight, it was determined that a crucial bolt in the aileron assembly process had been installed incorrectly, leading to the jamming of the controls when inverted. When the manufacturing process was inspected at North American Aviation, it was determined that a factory worker was installing the bolts upside-down, because they were installed that way on every other NA aircraft he had built in his lengthy career at NA (P-51, T-6, etc.)”
Basically the fitting instructions called for the bolt to be fitted upside-down and held in place by the nut. The old guy thought best practice would be to put the bolt in from above so that if the nut came off it wouldn’t drop out. This killed a couple of pilots but the guy wasn’t told, they just retired him early (or so it says in the biography)
Wightsparker
LE
Possibly Swifts? I think the latter were intended as a fall-back in case the Hunter was not successful. Scimitar was an RN strike fighter.
