P-39 Airacobra: In Defense of America's Worst Fighter? 

From the research I've done the p39 and 400 s main issues was the pilots were trained on front engine aircraft and even though the mid engine design gave it an advantage they didn't really know how to use it

Sometimes this is just what I need, love you Bismarck very good video as always!

You're never gonna stop teasing him about that username, are you?

the P-39 sure looks good! I'm glad some pilots liked it and found its strengths.

Nice one. Another good reference book is 'Bell P-39 Airacobra' by Robert F. Dorr and Jerry C.Scutts in the Crowwood Aviation Series, ISBN 1 86126 348 1. I've always thought the P-39 got a partly-unjustified bad rap, and this book does much to confirm that. What particularly annoys me is when people use the P-39's poor reputation to undermine the validity of the mid-engined concept in general, when in fact, many of the P-39's issues were due to detail design decisions, NOT inevitable consequences of it's layout, and many of the layout-related problems were either illusory or exaggerated.

Its honestly so clever

i had forgotten that joke until he said it. definitely a stroke of genius in it

Great insight into the past and its humor

ja ja ja ja ja good one!!!!

I have have a question the p-400 & p-40, is like the same aircraft know?

Glad to read your comment, and especially that your father is still available to you. When I was a kid, one of the instructors at my school started out as a P-39 pilot in the Southwest Pacific. Col. Haney said little but that flying low and sneaky was what he learned.

Sounds like whoever made that comment about ground looping the P-39 was either confusing it with a tail dragger fighter, or simply has his head were the sun don't shine. The P-39 has tricycle gear. You have to be a total idiot to ground loop a plane with tricycle gear.

@@charleskuss8538 G'day, Bullshit. Go and check the Statistics. When General Aviation transitioned from Conventional Taildraggers to Tricycles (with a Training-Wheel under the Nose...) the Ground-Loop rate per 1,000 Hours of operation actually increased markedly. Partly from people exceeding allowable Crosswind Component & Airframe capabilities, and weathercocking..., partly from people failing to flare, or flaring too high bouncing, and "Wheelbarrowing" on the Nosewheel & only one Mainwheel..., and partly because Ham-fisted Buffoons who would have been weeded out by Taildragger Training Aircraft could, when everything went right, be taught to drive themself up into the Sky, and given a reasonable Descent-Rate, with the Nose up & some Power left on, if aligned more or less with the Runway Centreline and arriving somewhere near the correct Threshold - then the Trike-ised Trainers will land themselves. Thus, setting the Clumsy Ham-Fisted Aviator Wannabes up for an expensive Lesson whenever they let their Misunderconstumblings lead them astray ; and then the Aeroplane Bit them on the Bum. Just(ifiably ?) sayin', Have a good one... Stay safe. ;-p Ciao !

@@WarblesOnALot Nicely said there sir!!

@@dandel351 G'day, Thanks mate. Have a good one... Stay safe. ;-p Ciao !

I've read similar stories. The Russians would literally burn out the engines. After late 1942 i think the US was delivering two spare engines for every P-39 because of it. On a positive note P-39 losses were nowhere near as heavy as other aircraft types in Russian service. I don't have the numbers handy but i believe it was only around 28% being written off, and yes that's low for the Russians lol!

They were also operating over much shorter ranges than in the Pacific.

I might add a quote of a veteran soviet pilot: "You either make the engine last the promised 200 hours or don't get shot down"

There are other reasons why the Soviets liked the P-39: 1) The radio in the P-39 actually worked - good comms is a force multiplier; Soviet radios weren't and reliable; 2) The perspex used in the cockpit of the P-39 didn't yellow with age, as did the low-quality perspex used in native-build Soviet fighters - good visibility is important in an fighter, 3) The Soviets stripped away a lot of extraneous weight, which improved its performance a bit (some of that extraneous weight was some of the guns).

@@killersalmon4359 basically, you stated a single real advantage being radio. Or do you really think a fighter on the Eastern front would last that long for perspex to go yellow?

Yes, in Gen. Yeager's autobiography he stated that the P39 was his favorite. This might not have had armor

I also had conversation with fighter pilots over 30 years in the RCAF. At some point, I learned that there is a world of difference between flying and fighting a plane. Ex: An F-18 is easy to fly (made that way) but hard to learn to fight it with all its potential. And that's the point of a fighter. Boyington said the Brewster Buffalo was a sweet plane too, before they put armor plating, guns and self-sealing fuel tanks on it.

@@PappyGunn If Boyington flew one it must have been with the Marines prior to his going to the AVG. Those USN/USMC aircraft were the heaviest which also Included a liferaft as part of their equipment. The Finns stripped their Buffaloes down with good results.

Yeager wasn't an average pilot. Hoover, a highly gifted stick and rudder man, also said the P-39 wasn't a problem - also far above average. The P-39 had extremely light elevator stick forces when pulling g's, and required very quick feet to counter its nasty habits during air combat manouvers. The average pilot couldn't perform well, and the P-39 accident rate proves it. It was also condemned by the test pilots at Wright field.

If already in the air and being pursued, the P-40's disadvantages could be somewhat compensated by proper tactics. I am sure that these tactics were learned at the cost of quite a few lives.

The lion's share of the Tainan Kokutai Zero aces' kills (including those of Saburo Sakai) were Airacobras.

Brit humour.

The RAF were using Brewster buffalos against zeros in 1942...

Well, it's very common for one side to field equipment that is inferior to their opponents. Genoese crossbowmen tried to face off against English longbow men at Crecy, the Iraqi army in the Gulf War, The early Viet-Minh against the French army to name but a handful. No question those fliers were bloody brave, but they weren't exceptionally brave, there will be countless examples if men being just as brave in combat all throughout history.

Thank you for that comment. It gets to the heart of the matter.

Great story, thanks much.

My mother bucked rivets on P-39's in Buffalo (she was a pixie and spent most of her shift in the tail cone. Every once in a while "Pursuit" pilots would visit the factory as morale boosters. She told me the Army Air Corp loved the P-39, BUT when they changed the spec and dropped it down to a single-stage supercharger which made it worthless as a Pursuit above 10k feet.. She had a pilot tell her the P-39 well well-armed and could really dive so they'd try to get above, make a diving gun-run, and scram. He said that Zeroes were too light to dive - they had to be "flown downwards".

However, Russians liked that plane. One of the best Russian pilots in WWII - Pokryshkin flew on P-39N-0 (btw he asked mechanics to take off 7,92 machineguns, so his cobra had only 2 12,7 Brownings and 37mm gun

Unfortunately the equipment wasn't unneeded, it was equipment that combat experience had shown was needed if an aircraft was to be viable.

I believe Larry Bell had it designed as a high altitude interceptor. A bomber destroyer if you will. The prototype had a turbo-supercharger on it for high performance at 20,000 feet. Unfortunately the Army decided to have the Airacobra as a ground support aircraft therefor taking the turbo off and fitting it with a low altitude rated Allison engine. It did have good performance at low altitude which is why the Russians did so well with it since most of the combat on the Eastern front took place at low to medium altitudes, but wasn't suited for combat in the Pacific against high altitude Japanese aircraft.

It's a pretty good one, aye :)

Nice, apparently I'm the only one who got this!

@@TheReal_Pim_Tool The Jackass movie guys did a spoof on the hanging 'old man ballz'.

In a P-36, no less.

The Zero pilot Rasmussen shot down was either Takashi Atsumi or Saburo Ishii from the Soryu Fighter Squadron (both of them were lost in that particular action). In turn, ace pilot Iyozo Fujita from the same unit shot Rasmussen's plane up and downed Rasmussen's comrade Gordon Sterling. Rasmussen and Fujita befriended one another after the war.

The Soviets used their own autocannon that didn't jam after firing a few rounds and had better range. They also modified the Allison V12 to increase it's performance and run-time between rebuilding.

@@billwilson3609, no we didn't use own autocannon. First Aircobras were delivered with 20mm British cannon, later it was replaced with 37mm American M4. Nobody has replaced them in Soviet VVS neither by ShVAK nor by NS-37. The only 2 common weapon modifications were removing wing MGs and also getting autocannon and MGs fire switches under 1 trigger button instead of 2 to fire them simultaneously. Not every unit or pilots inside units used those modifications, but they were quite common. There have been also no modifications to the engine. Pilots simply ignored any limitations in battle reducing it resource. So, run-time between rebuilding was actually reduced not increased. It is true not only for P-39 but also for P-40 as well.

There's also the fact that Soviet Union received a handfull of P-400 but the vast majority of planes they got were later P-39's with more powerfull engines and somewhat lightened airframes.

The Soviets were fighting a defensive land war. The p-39 could be used as ground attack from the beginning.

@@TomTerrific-vm3qg The VVS rarely used P-39's for ground attack missions, by the time the P-39 became avialable in numbers they were mostly using purpose made ground-to-air aicraft (like the IL-2 and the Pe-2) and, less commonly and generally in lower intensity parts of the front, fighter types that were considered obsolete (like the I-153 and I-16). Keep in mind that the Aircobre was only really becoming available in large numbers as the tide of the war was swinging decissively in favour of the Soviets, during the dark time of 1941 and early 1942 all available aicraft were used to try to stop the advance of the Wehrmacht.

In each postwar Thompson Trophy race, the first plane to the first pylon was a P-39.

The P39D was the model that most Americans operated early in the war. It was under-powered. The P39Q did not show up until 1944. By then the aircraft already had a bad rep. So most went to Russia. The early P39D did not have a supercharger or turbo charger. As such its performance fell off above 10,000 feet. Above 10,000 feet it was outclassed by almost everything. The cannon firing thru the propeller hub also was prone to jamming issues. The P63 was the final variant of this line. All the issues that the P39D had were fixed in the P63. But it still had to overcome the bad rep its predecessor created.

@@danhammond9066 > The early P39D did not have a supercharger or turbo charger. It had a supercharger. EVERYTHING in military aviation did. What it lacked was a second supercharger and/or variable speed. All navy planes in WWII had two superchargers with second having dual speed plus off, I believe. Thunderbolts and Lightnings had a supercharger attached to the block, plus a turbocharger. But at lowest altitude, all planes could run at their maximum allowed manifold pressure with just one 'charger and anything above that was dead weight--and dead weight the P-39 didn't have.

The post war race winning P-39 aircraft were fitted with late model high horsepower Allison engines. ALL Allison engines are equipped with a supercharger. But where the early Allison F series V-1710 engines were making 1250 to 1450 HP, the late model F series could make 1875 HP, and the H series could easily exceed 2000 HP. And that was within the military accepted operating and tuning ranges. They were commonly pushed harder. Even during the war. There were crew chiefs and pilots who were rigging and flying the P-38L-1Lo (and some late J models) at 80" of manifold pressure and 3200 RPM in combat with 150 octane fuel. The military didn't like anything over 66"-70" and 3,000 RPM, despite Allison proving to them that 80" and 3,400 RPM was possible, and they were reliable there.

Air racing in a modified stripped down aircraft vs combat. Apples vs trucks. LOL

Brown used one as his own personal transport, until he asked a visiting Bell test pilot to try it out. 'I have never flown in an aeroplane in such an advanced stage of decay' said the white-faced pilot, so Brown took it up for one last aerobatic session and then scrapped it.

It's been a few decades since I read his autobiography but my memory of it was that Yeager hated the P39 and was thrilled that after training he got to fly the P51 instead.

@@talmagecleverly7718 I remember him saying just about the opposite of that in his autobio. I don't remember him comparing the two, but just saying that he really liked the P39.

@@scottkremer8660 He flew P-39's in training. IIRC - he talked about getting air sick but that all the time he got to spend flying a real fighter plane like a P-39 was "hog heaven" - so - he may have been talking about the experience of getting to fly something better than a trainer - or - just fly in general. I don't recall him ever contrasting a P-39 with a P-51 - but I can't remember him ever specifically saying anything against either one of them. I think Yeager's attitude was that he loved flying and flew what he was told to fly, pretty much just like everyone else. I think he was on ... like ... his 5th mission when his formation got jumped by some 190's and they blew the wing off his '51 (iirc) and he had to bail out over France. .

The decrepid Bell plane that the Farnborough crowd pranked the Bell company pilot with was an _on its last legs_ primitive P-59 Airacomet JET. JET !!!

good suggestion!

One thing I've always wanted to know about motor cannon mounts... How much more of a headache is that for the ground crew to service? There's also something else I wonder about - barrel harmonics and temperature. Even in a simple rifle, you putting pressure on the barrel can change the point of impact. And, even in a rifle, at longer ranges, heating of the barrel can cause changes in the point of impact (although the ranges where most firing was done with aircraft would see very little change to the point where it probably would rarely make any difference). I have to wonder how much more difficult it was getting a cannoning through an engine block and getting that to work properly.

@@matchesburn , I used to work on aircraft weapon systems and have looked at the M2, the 20mm, and the 37 auto cannons on the old aircraft. The M2s have belts of ammo, not too bad to load. Also, the .50 cals (M2) have timing gears that controlled the firing. That didn't look too difficult to work on. The hard thing is "boresighting" the systems. That can take an afternoon. The 20mm guns were actually somewhat standardized. They were also fed from a feed tray, not too bad. Loading the 37mm gun was hated by the crews. You had to feed in one round at a time and mechanically move the drum. On the P-63 the system was redesigned. The gun system was a real issue in a bore sight. The P-39 could have been a real killer because the guns fired on the same axis of the airplane. Wing mounted machine-guns have to converge on a cone from 250 to 500 yards in front of an aircraft. Had the P-39 used a 20mm gun which had very similar flight ballistics to the .50 caliber then the P-39 would have been a real savage beast. If Bell had been able to knock 1,000 pounds of weight off the P-39, install a 20mm cannon, and shoe horn in the 1400 HP merlin then the P-39 would have been a real snake in the air. The British let the USAAF/USN copy their electronic gunsight and that allowed easy "deflection" (off to the side) shots.

@@MilitaryAviationHistory What I'd like to suggest might not be worth a whole video, if there even is much written about it, but maybe you or Justin can give an insight about it: Fuel tank fire extinguishers! Quite many people don't even believe they were a thing in WWII fighters, but they were indeed. I have only read about Japanese using them in Ki-61, Ki-100, N1K2-J and late A6M variants. Obviously it was not meant to replace self sealing tanks, because all but the Zero already had them from the beginning, but simply to further improve their survivability. It would be nice to know how successful they were and if other nations experimented with them at all.

@@Teh0X The Russians used cooled exhaust gases to purge the fuel tanks on some of their airplanes.

Thank you another book to read added to my list I just read Neptunes Inferno great read.

Great combat story! Sounds like the motorized sub-chaser model I had in my youth; it motored pretty well until I decided to send it on a suicide mission behind my grandfather's camp on Cox Brook (probably to blow up the Bismarck, my obsession of the moment - right around the time the song "Sink the Bismarck!" was on the radio!). It was stuffed to the scuppers with firecrackers (including an illicit atomic-caliber cherry bomb or two) and made a highly satisfactory explosion . . . far short of its intended target, alas, and sank to the depths of the brook, whilst the "Bismarck" continued on its path of destruction.

@@richardcleveland8549 haha Nice !!!

@@dave131 Don't know why I sacrificed that sub chaser . . . it was a trim little craft with lots of missions left in it! Prob'ly coulda taken down Cox Brook's most notorious predator, Moby Minnow!

Your brother sounds like he was a visionary .

Modeled the P-39 in 1967 and recently scanned the pics I took of it back then. It was probably my best plastic model and I was very proud of it as a 16 year old high school student. Full camo paint scheme! Wish I could upload a couple of those pics to share.

Which is what the Army Air Force wanted. Why do you need a turbocharger for a ground attack plane? The P40 was in the same situation. The only true interceptor the AAF had available at the start of the war was the P-38 with its turbos. And it was designed as a bomber interceptor.

@@2lotusman851 similar story with the F-105 perfectly good interceptor that got a bad reputation because someone had the brilliant idea of using them for ground attack roles It’s almost like using a machine for a purpose it wasn’t designed for doesn’t work

@@2lotusman851 No. Both the P-38 and P-39 were designed as intercepters and all aircraft started to become multirole as there was nothing to shoot down.

@Cancer McAids oh yeah your right my bad

@@killdizzle reminds me of the time they decided to take a rifle design to be a simiauto battle rifle and turn it into a magical do everything gun that was supposed to be a sub machine gun, assault rifle, support machine gun and marksman rifle only to realize it was terrible at all those rolls and promptly unadopted it but some poor grunt is still being issued an mk14 EBR today dispite the AR-10 and HK 417 being better .308 platforms because the army will never admit that it’s wrong The army r&d devision are the type of people who would suggest getting rid of screw drivers because you can nail screws in with a hammer

Fairchild: "There is that crass gatling gun, if that could fly, it would be a bummer" Result: A-10. Funny: I get offered an A-10 video on the right.

@@feedingravens the algorithm is becoming to aware need to get the BBRRT Box to set it in its place lol

@@feedingravens Corsair: the largest winged engine you can find.

@@feedingravens A-10, Cold War Stuka. If you can hear it, you're a friendly.

@@Joshua_N-A But the Ju-87G variant, that had 2 37mm-cannons added.

Well, the Bell Beauties sure has hell never liked it on top.

Yet another reason to love that P-39, the automobile standard of manufacturing in the cannon.

I assume he was RAF. What Sqn... 242? 605?

Back in another life I was in the USAF and worked on weapon systems. The sergeant of the shop was in Vietnam & stationed in Thailand. Over beer he told us it was the best time he ever had and the worst he ever had. He lived like a king in Thailand. Conversely, he worked on F-105s and hated the airplane. 12 aircraft would go on a strike, 11 would come back. The next day 12 would go on a strike and all would come back. The day after 12 would go on a strike, 11 would come back,. On one of the strikes all came back, one had damage with a hung bomb, it landed hard, the bomb exploded, killed the pilot, and the munitions crews who "safe-ed" the aircraft at end of runway. Yep, 30 years later after WWII with same types of results.

My grand uncle was a desk jockey in the PTO. He was in SE Asia in '42 and Stillwell's air officer for part of '43. I think he said morale was so bad that he was scared of theater wide collapse. He didn't fly there, he had a perhaps worse job, he drafted or helped draft the flight rosters and thus was deciding who'd likely die that day. He got pretty dark thinking about it and he told me some of his stories 40 years ago. Mostly I only remember how sad he was about the affair.

@@vicnighthorse Young men, who should be starting their lives are sent out to fight against other young men and too many never come home. War is horrible and should only be undertaken when there are no other options.

@@moistmike4150 wars should be fought by the old men who start them, not the young men who end them.

@@The_Original_Brad_Miller Truer words were never spoken.

Wow. Guardian angels workin' overtime that day!

Dean Grennell was a noted firearms writer. In one chapter of one of his books he was telling of how he conducted machine gun training for troops at a camp in the desert southwest. The troops had the machine guns set up and he was having them fire, one crew at a time, at downrange targets. When the first crew fired a few rounds at a target, a coyote who had been resting behind the target, took off running. As I recall, Grennell put it something like this: "It would have taken the best disciplined troops in the world for every crew to refrain from lining up on the coyote and squeezing the trigger. This was boot camp with untrained troops. Every crew opened up on the coyote. There would be a cloud of dust, the crews would cease firing and the coyote would emerge running from the cloud of dust. This was repeated until the gunners ran out of ammo. You will have to take my word for it that several hundred rounds of ammo from those machine guns were fired at that coyote and not one hit."

@@ksman9087 I can believe it. I have a similar story that occurred at Camp Bullis outside of San Antonio, TX. A group of Air Force based defenders (Security Police, now called Security Force) were training with M60 machine guns. As hundreds of rounds pelted the dirt backstop, an Army UH1 helicopter which, unknown to them, had previously landed behind the berm, unwisely decided to take off from its relative safety. As it rose above the berm, errant rounds struck it and the craft sank back down. All firing ceased while the range officers inspected the damage. Aside from a few holes in the aircraft, nobody was hurt. I attribute this good fortune to the fact that the trainees were not aiming at the Huey, otherwise I suspect they would have completely missed.

I love em'..... I think with the capable pilot they were quite deadly down low

Me too and I had built a plastic model of it.

I remember viewing a P-63 King Cobra at an airshow in NAS Pensacola when I was a flight student. A plaque explained that the P-63 was one of the fastest piston fighters in the War. It looked like a P-39 with a different tail.

It you were shooting at another plane one round from that 37mm should get the job done.

I suspect grapes taste better.

John McMickle though you must hit

@@johnmcmickle5685 sure, if you hit the first round that is.

@@comediangj4955 that's why succesfull ace pilots opened fire from close range, 100m or so., when the target filled the crosshairs.

@@stuartnoelte3932 If you like good war writing, the best book I've read on PT boats was "PT-105" by Dick Keresey. You feel like you are riding along with them.

I was going to mention that too. A really interesting and well written book. Park described it as "An exaggeration" but there's clearly a lot of truth in there.

Enjoyed that book.

It's not just in flight sims. Taildraggers have certain advantages when you're doing bush flying, but they can be a real bear in a crosswind. You have to always apply precisely the right amount of rudder precisely when it is needed. No more, no less, not a second too soon, and not a second too late. I can be done and plenty of people fly taildraggers all the time, but there is a significant learning curve. There's a reason why it requires a special endorsement in the civilian flying world.

Well the tricycle landing gear was new & scary at the time ... everyone learned & trained in tail draggers!

You miss a tail dragger flight instructor in a PC sim.

Depends what you're used to, I suppose...

Does flight sim simulate snapping off nose gear on rough field?

For those of you who do not know Angels was WWII pilot slang for a thousand feet of altitude. Angels 20 would be 20,000 feet.

"Nanette" and "Angels 20", both by Edwards Park, are two of my favorite WWII aviation books. Anyone curious about this airplane would enjoy these books.

The Corsairs didn't fly out of Guadalcanal until the month the Japanese evacuated, Feb 1943.

Well they might find a low flying straggler, but there were other things to shoot. It could be troops in the open or boats of some type.

No Corsairs at that point im afraid. The P-39 stood no chance at intercepting high altitude bombers but Japanese dive bombers and strafing fighters quickly found out to their dismay that the P-39 was very lethal low down.

@@adamjaquay4279 The first F4U Corsairs arrived on Guadalcanal in February 1943.

@@johnmcmickle5685 interesting. Im taking this was after both sides had beat each other into a bloody pulp. Were they actively involved in combat?

I remember building the wee 1/72 Heller P-39Q in Olive Drab topsides and grey undersides, with white nose cone, tail and wingtips. It was the cutest little thing!!!

@sean burke that’s in the eye of the beholder. To me it’s almost unbelievably ugly. Looks like what it is: a flying death trap

It has an art deco fighter look.the allison engine and the cooling system was its problem, the first ace in the Pacific was in an airocobra.

agreed it looks incredibly modern compared to other fighters around that time

@@harv5425 I remember a war movie from ww2 it was in black and white it focused on a ace in the Pacific flying airocobras,the car like doors are what cought my eye.they just look cool

The problem with stall characteristics was not so much with wing guns, but the engine placement which made the aircraft naturally tail heavy. And as you spend fuel and ammo, CG moves even further towards the tail.

Many things contributed to the stall, tumble & spin of the P-39. CofG moved aft when ammo was depleted, the roll-yaw coupling was pronounced near the stall, extremely light stick forces while pulling g's, and an airfoil (NACA 0015) that exacerbated recovery from the stall, to name a few.

they matter ;)

@@MilitaryAviationHistory "You see comrade, who will need a heater when there is a constant 50°C in the cabin?" - Lavochkin, probably

There is an excellent book called red star against the swastika that covers sturmovik pilots in the Red Air Force. Some pilots removed their barely workable soviet radios out of fear that the Germans could tap in and listen to them or track them!

@@JAV1L15 to be honest sounds like bullshit, if it's said about the war period (and not the pre-war one). Germans were listening to most radios the soviets had, both soviet and american models. Having dug in various memoirs of fighter pilots, none of them has ever mentioned such actions performed by any kind of a pilot. The only more or less fitting example is in Pokryshkin's memoirs, when a pilot decided to cut his shoulder belts off to "look behind easier", that exact person soon flipped over the plane at landing and got crushed because he slipped out

It took time for the P38 to have a dependable set up for the allison. Over Europe the P 38 would blow engines up at high altitude

Apart from "good climb rate" (albeit at low-med alt), I don't see any accurate statements there about the P-38. The Allison continued to have issues and was never a good high altitude engine.

@@bobsakamanos4469 Frankly, who gives a shit whether "you see accurate statements" (i.e. your opinion) - compared to actual measured performance metrics and the associated documented statistical data on the topic (of P-38 performance at altitude)?

@@TyroneSayWTF I don't write opinions, just researched facts. Clearly, you haven't done your homework. There's a reason that the P-38s were replaced as high alt escorts in the ETO.

@@TyroneSayWTF not my opinion, just the facts. Even the P-82 engines were a maintenance nightmare. On the P-38, they were known as the Allison time bombs. Allison finally developed a new intake manifold and implemented it by mid-late '44. The P-38 dive brake helped control it at tactical mach, but it remained the poorest diving fighter until the end of the war, making it unsuitable for high altitude dog fights. One of the reasons that Kindelberger started looking for an alternate engine in '41 was the Allison design team. Good 'ol GM ! So no, NOT my opinion, son. Facts.

I just wanted to post some agreement with this; 'Fire in the Sky' provides very effective context for a theatre which is normally ignored by a lot of WW2 aviation historians.

I just took delivery of this.

And also note that p40 did struggle to get to attitude when not getting advanced warning , the book rising sun , falling skies covers the south east Asia campaign covers that pretty well

Ok , I would also like to add that bell must have got some of this feedback and that is what lead to the p63 king cobra , it must be added that in life in general , once something has got a stigma attached to it , it’s very hard to remove it. I think that the p39 suffered from that but also because it was seen by some pilots as a unique one for its big cannon , but also for the tricycle landing gear , car door and the engine behind the pilot, the tricycle landing gear might be seen as negatively because of the different technique to landing but also the training aircraft as was most aircraft in ww2 were tail draggers , the engine behind the pilot with the shaft going through the cockpit might have caused some consternation. Mechanics might have had a bad reputation for the engine being in a odd place but also the cannon which might have caused supply chains, (American planes normally used 30 and 50 cal machine guns ,the p38 is the only other plane in the USAAF that used cannons). What’s more with the p39 is that you should have mentioned that the RAAF had some in its inventory at one point , but also the RAF had received some p39 in Europe and rejecting them some similar reasons the Americans. I have read the report and also seen a picture of one in raf mid war camo. There’s a lot of planes that had stigma attached that stopped them for getting their full potential or to be accepted. 1. Vought f4u Corsair , rejected originally for carrier use , due to cockpit visibility and its tendency to bounce , its bad reputation for being a beast was given to the marines who first flew them and it was quickly changed. The British saw them as carrier based planes and immediately put them into service , they addressed the issues and showed that it was very capable, thus the Americans accepted the Corsair as a Carrier based fighter in 1944 with techniques developed by the brits. 2. Hawker typhoon, early structural issues but mostly to do with the unreliability of its power plant , the Napier Sabre. 3. Fw190 d9 , most pilots didn’t like the engine as it was a bomber engine ( the avia s199 comes to mind as it had the bad character landing traits of the bf109 but with a bomber engine with more torque , hence it nickname mule ) and also the decreasing of its agility. 4. Republic p47 because of its sheer size , minor issues and finally too pilots not using it to its strength. 5. Martin b26 marauder , pilots not use to landing the way it should be due to high wing loading 6. Curtiss sb2c helldiver , hated by its pilots because of being underpowered , improved with better propeller , however it took a long time to fix die to issues with Curtis , but also because it was seen negatively by the pilots who flew previously the Grumman avenger or the Douglas dauntless which were easy to fly and loved by their pilots , but also had a longer range. Hence its nickname “son of a bitch , second class “ That’s a few

Good testimony.

Will do

yeah in that certain game like the 20mm armed p39 and is fast at low level, it gives fw190 a good run for its money

Issue is in that game ypu spawn stupidly close to your enemies. IRL you would be engaging after already climed to your prefered altitude. Something american plames are usualy slow at. Buffing planes with high climb rate artificaly/unrealisticly. And the aircobrs/kingcoba have better climb than other american planes.

Rubbish. Chuck Yeager never flew a P-39 “in combat.” He trained as a fighter pilot in a P-39 with the 357th Fighter Group at Tonopah, Nevada. When the 357th FG shipped out to the UK in late 1943, they did not take their P-39s with them. Yeager’s squadron was sent to RAF Leiston where he flew only P-51 Mustangs.

@@orcinus6802 sorry I ruined your day, bro. It's been a long time since I read it. Lol

Hard to find personal accounts are so cool

I remember from that book a part where Sakai was chasing a P-39 whose pilot panicked and bailed out. Sakai noted that the P-39 was faster and would have been fine if the pilot had continued flying straight.

same

First book I read that I chose. Great book. Still have it, what’s left of it, in box in the basement.

@@auerstadt06 Except that he was flying in the wrong direction to return to his base.

Congress told them they would NOT proceed with that development

GM controlled congress. Just look at who was head of the War Production Board - ex president of GM, William Kundsen..

Zero was an excellent fighter throughout most of the war. Whereas American pilots were not as experienced.

You start to fight with what you have based on the plans that you had before you started that fight. It is easy to be dismissive of many early to even mid war types, but many lessons have to be learned the hard way through experience. Sometimes your design is based on a flawed concept, or even a good concept that comes with a price - compromise - again, hindsight has 20/20 vision. F4Us and F8Fs in 1941/42, sure. That is not meant as disrespect, but of course these mid to late war designs were far superior to their early war counterparts. That the A6M had to soldier on until the end of the war wasn’t ideal nor by choice, but again, you have to fight with what you have. As for this video, if there was one weak point it was that it only mentioned the A6M-series as the Pacific adversary.

wishful thinking for the Bearcat aside, most of his other opinions are acceptable as opinions.

Good, accurate testimony.

The P-39 had poor handling qualities. Wt & bal was an issue when cannon rounds were used up and even the P-63 had stability issues. The P-39 pilots' mantra was "It’ll tumble and spin and soon auger in.’”

I've dreamed about building a kit plane based on the p39 aerocobra with a LS Chevy mid mounted. There's even some guy's in Australia who have made a V12 using 2 LS aluminum blocks cut and joined together with a custom crank. ...from Wyoming USA 🇺🇸 🤠

That's actually from a WW2 song, "Give Me Operations". There's a verse for every aircraft type. "Peter-Four-Oh" is my favorite verse.

NO! Don’t give me a P-39 The engine is mounted behind She’ll tumble and roll And dig a big hole Don’t give me a P-39 NO! Give me Operations Way out on some lonely atoll- For I am too young to die I just want to grow old!

I'd always heard it as "Don't give me a P-39, the engine is mounted behind, it'll tumble and spin and auger you in, don't give me a P-39" It was told to me as a rhyme that was usually drunkenly sung/recited by pilots stateside in the US

“Don’t give me a P-51 The airplane that’s second to none She’ll loop, roll, and spin But she’ll auger you in- Don’t give me a P-51”

It was a verse from an Army Air Corps drinking song, had verses about all fighter types, the Aircobra verse was def the least flattering: Don't give me a P-39, with an engine that's mounted behind..... It will tumble and roll and then dig a big hole, so don't give me a p-39..Ah, hell for the sake o completeness......Don't give me a P-38 with props that counter-rotate They'll loop, roll and spin but they'll soon auger in Don't give me a P-38! CHORUS: Just make me Operations Way out on some lonely atoll For I am too young to die I just want to go home.* Don't give me a P-39 with an engine that's mounted behind It will tumble and roll and dig a big hole Don't give me a P-39. Don't give me an old Thunderbolt. It gave many pilots a jolt It looks like a jug and it flies like a tug Don't give me an old Thunderbolt! Don't give me a Peter Four Oh, a hell of an airplane, I know A ground loopin' bastard. You're sure to get plastered Don't give me a Peter Four Oh. Don't give me a P-51, it was all right for fighting the hun But with coolant tank dry. you'll run out of sky Don't give me a P-51. Don't give me a P-61, for night flying is no fun They say it's a lark. but I'm scared of the dark Don't give me a P-61. Note: Oscar Brand sings," I just want to grow old" which is a less bad rhyme. DE WWII, Pacific Theater From There I was, Flat on My Back, Bob Stevens.

One of the prototypes for the later P-63 Kingcobra used a (Packard) Merlin Engine, but the idea was scrapped since those engines were prioritized for other planes like the P-51. The Allison engine the P-63 got later wasn't a bad deal because it was so powerful at low- to-mid altitude

Ones of the Merlins weaknesses was that it ran “hot” and required lots of cooling ie wouldn’t have been suitable for an enclosed engine location

@@neilturner6749 actually, the Packard Merlin ran hotter than the RR Merlin. Lancaster FE's and pilots were always concerned with their one P-Merlin running hotter than the other 3 RR Merlins. It was the perfect environment for comparison. As for the Allison, a Merlin is designed to have 10% of it's heat removed through the oil; the Allison 25%, so the Allisons ran hot in the climb. The P-63 had an aux s/c but no intercooler, no aftercooler, no backfire screens and no extra radiator to cool it. Detonation problems with Allisons at altitude, even in the P-82.

Imagine what the fuel consumption would be on boost!

Do you know why they didn’t?

@@glennsimpson7659 after it first flew NACA test it aerodynamic and found that removing the turbo supercharger (meaning removing its intake) could make it past the speed requirement And you know what happen after that

The Soviets used the plane the way it was intended. For whatever reason the US in the pacific refused to listen to logic.

No, the turbocharger didn't fit. Simple as that. Look at a plane like the P-38 for an idea of the size of a turbocharger for a A-1710 at the time.

@@sheeplord4976 They did test the first XP-39 with a turbocharger installed in early 1939, but they had major reliability problems, constantly having to remove the engine for servicing and repair. I think NACA also did a study pointing out that the lack of available space in the P-39 restricted the volume of ingested air that could be compressed by the turbocharger. The turbocharger installations in the P-38 and P-47 were troublesome, but they offered a lot more potential, largely down to the space factor as you point out.

@@gavinbailey8827 it is a shame that the metalurgy just wasn't there at the time.

GE sold the Army on turbosupercharging and they told Alison to not work on two stage supercharging (like the Merlin had) but to concentrate on turbo for their high altitude engines. The P-38 and the P-39 went to production about the same time and production of turbo engines would not support both programs so the Army told Bell to do what they could using the single stage supercharged V-1710 engine and that is how the P-39 turned out the way it did. P-51 was built by N. American Aviation (which was owned by GM which also owned Alison) and after being told not to build a two stage supercharged V-1710 there was a reluctance to put a Merlin into the Mustang. That's a big part of why the P-51A had an Alison and the RAF bought them and converted them to Merlin power. Anyway lots of corporate politics weaved into the history of the high altitude versions of the Alison V-1710 and the planes built with or without them.

The Soviets loved it. They used it as a system. The soviets had a copy of the British radar and radio systems. So, the P-39s were vectored to the German aircraft. Also, the war in the east was a tactical air war. The Ju-87s, He-111s, Ju-88s all operated low. A vectored in P-39 with good ground control is going into a fight with situational awareness. Good systems are always a war winner.

Wasn't copied off a british design.

Battlefield forward radar sets gave the Luftwaffe a pounding in the west too. Read Pierre Clostermann’s ‘The Big Show’. They ran down any German fighters in Hawker Tempests, the powerful fighter the Sea Fury was developed from.

Razgriz well said! 👍 I feel the same way

Parasitic drag increases at higher speeds, yes, but induced drag decreases; there's a balance

Google ‘best range power curve’, a picture is worth, well you know what a picture is worth.

Well, yes, agreed in that if their specialist fighter guys were put on fighter-bomber or ground attack duty, then yes, they called for the P-39. As a straight fighter.... not so much. But, yes, the Russians loved the plane and got the best out of it.

@@robertwilloughby8050 german ace Hartman admits you could not out loop the P-39 with a Mess 109g.

@@robertwilloughby8050 The Soviets actually used it as a straight up fighter, and did quite well with it. There was a miscommunication where Americans thought "ground support" meant being a ground attacker, but in Soviet Doctrine "ground support" also includes combat air patrols.

@@mikkykyluc5804 Fair enough! Yes, I guessed that ground support for the Soviets also meant what us in the UK would have called "Rhubarbs". Have a nice day, bud.

@@robertwilloughby8050 You too comrade!

Interesting. Could ''Iron Dog'' have been meant in both ways. As in it was very sturdy, but also a bit fat (For atleast the initial variants).

@@martijn9568 Seems reasonable

Beautiful airplane. I built a plastic model of it when I was 11 or 12. I put the Russian decals on it because the blurb on the box mentioned that they made the best use of it.

@@darko714 mine is in RAF 601 San colors