P-63 Kingcobra - In Defense of America's Overlooked Fighter 

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Just had The Force disturbance with Marines and 1 or 2 USN sailors about the Bell Cobra and upgrades. But all good. Cris.

MATH - Military Aviation History Thursay. Might have a better, more memorable ring to it.

They don't fly, they beat the air into submission!

Could keep MAH Day as MAD. Just dedicate that day to talking about helicopters.

That’s cool.

Damn that's interesting. Could you perhaps ask your parents what they know? It will never be the same thing but they might know a bit. My grandfather served in ww1 as at a hospital, and while he never told dad much, the horror of unrestricted chemical warfare was successfully passed down to me.

Wow, what a service record!

I was lucky enough to live with my grandfather for almost two decades. He was doctor with in the U.S. Navy (rank commander I believe) and almost all I know about his service in WW II was that he was in Panama working on helping service men from both theaters during WW II. He almost never talked about his service other than having a great distain for death and suffering. I need to check his service record because I really should know the full extent of his service. I wonder if you were able to know your grandfather better, if he he would have been forthcoming about what he saw, many WW II vets were not and felt very badly when they did discuss it. So don't feel to bad about not being able to speak to him about the war. Although I will say this, I miss my grandfather and wish I knew him better and talked to him more often because he was a great man, much like your grandfather I suspect.

@@scottperry7311 , my impression is that he, like many combat veterans of the war, had seen more than he wanted and was quite ready to put much of that behind him. However, there are a few stories that were told to his wife and daughter and therefore passed to me. Living on an RAF base with RAF personnel in England in the summer of 1942 made an impression. Apparently at some point he was asked in front of my grandmother if he had ever been in a dogfight. He responded with a story about being in a turning fight with a 109 in which neither he nor the German pilot could gain the advantage. He said that he and the other pilot eventually broke off - saluting each other as they departed. Maybe there is some truth to that, but it also sounds like a story appropriate for the ears of his wife and daughters. His logbook records several strafing missions - and a claim of a victory of a 109 - which seems to have been credited officially as “damaged.” These sorts of stories were not shared. Other records suggest that he crashed a Spitfire on takeoff or landing at some point. On the other hand, he seems to have been proud of his service. I have a large painting depicting “his” Spitfire that a friend made in the 1960s. He named a beloved hunting dog “Major” - and it seems some close friends referred to him by that rank after the war. I tend to think that had I known him when I was a teen, I probably would not have been told of the real horrors of war, but I might have gotten a few airplane stories. And I would have had a chance to know the man.

Yeah the problem was they didn't have enough get up and go at high altitude...however with that cannon in the nose they would have made pretty good fighter bombers...I've often used both the P-39 & 63 in that roll on War Thunder and killed quite a few tanks with them.

This comment is pretty much describe this plane, soviet use it on frontline and have a huge success with it even double aces love it too. so it not a bad pane it's just not what us need it.

Bell got jacked by the Army. They were told to add no boosting at all in the 39. So as built the P 39 had no high altitude performance at all. In the Pacific 39's were utilized as excellent ground attack plane. But they were useles in air to air combat.

The unimpressive Airacobra series did well in the fighter bomber roll...Ive always wondered if the BF-110 was rescued from its ill advised roll as a day fighter and the Germans went totally in as a fighter bomber especially on the Russian front,if it would have done far better like the cobra.

One of the commentators mentioned that the Army specified that the P-39 was not to have a supercharger making it a low altitude fighter when the rest of world aviation was wanting high altitude aircraft capability. That sounds like typical army air corps stupidity of that era. The commentator also mentioned that it was a lousy fighter. The reality is due to army incompetence the aircraft couldn't meet the requirements of the PTO effectively. The pilots loved to fly it. The Soviets used it to its full potential. Many of their aces flew the P-39 and doubled or tripled the kills of the Allied aircraft in Europe against the same German aircraft. Either the Soviet pilots were vastly superior to Yank or Brit pilots or the P-39 outperformed the Allied aircraft at the lower tactical airwar the Soviets waged. Since 80% of the ETO was fought on the Soviet front, the P-39 was one of the most decisive fighter aircraft of WWII. Any Best of fighter aircraft not listing the P-39 is irrelevant.

I've heard that too, likely because they weren't used to flying a plane with mid-engine design. It throws a lot of pilots off. We lost a few USAAF pilots who had not become used to how it feels and flies. However, I also heard that Soviet pilots loved the P-39's. They called them the most comfortable fighter in the Soviet Air Force.

@@onewaynestreet that's the value you get when crew comfort was a design consideration. the biggest thing I believe was that it had a cockpit heater which I'm sure was very appreciated on the eastern front.

Although the role it played in Korea (ground support/attack/interdiction) was one it was NOT ideally suited for, and the Air Force was stuck with Mustangs in this role because it had overcommitted to them as THE legacy fighter during the jet transition period.

I built a model kit of that fighter in South Korean markings before. Very cool build 😎 It was called a different name than the P-51 though

​@@jagtoneBut a P-47 Thunderbolt requires more high octane fuel to operate, which often would need to be shipped overseas.😉

@@martijn9568 They were already shipping jet fuel overseas.

The real issue was that the p47 was like almost twice the price of a p51? They still used them in Taiwan for a while, I'd argue it was superior to the rest of the prop fighters at the time.

Thank you for your volunteer work, y’all do an excellent job with your aircraft!

Relentless pragmatism wins wars.

@@rand0mn0 this is true

That should teach us something especially with the issues with the f35

We have to be careful how we interpret what is pragmatic. If we have 10bil to spend on planes, buying a 1000 cheap planes could possibly be better than 100 expensive ones. But we have to look at that in some depth to assess it. Yes, it is helpful to just have more stuff. But you also need more pilots, more fuel, more runways, etc. Even if the cheap fighters are (per dollar) exactly as effective, you have to put ten times more planes in the sky all the time to match the opposition. It's very very hard to assess stealth as an outsider (and even for those in the service) because we've never actually fought a proper war with stealth involved. But, to look at it purely pragmatically, if stealth works "pretty well" (ie, it reduces the effective range of radar and BVR missiles by a meaningful margin) then it probably is the right choice to pursue it for the front line air force. I say that because technology is a force multiplier, and success compounds. You lose fewer aircraft while succeeding on more missions, and then you have more aircraft to keep sending out so they can keep being successful. If stealth makes no difference at all, then sure the F35 is trash. But we are as sure as we can be that stealth has at least some impact. The only time when stealth makes no difference to the mission is when you have air superiority, but achieving that is very very difficult and stealth definitely does help with that. At any other time, when the opposition has any air force and any SAM capacity, stealth helps keep your guys alive and forces the enemy to spread resources very thin. While of course the F35 has cost too much damn money, it is also the only game in town in terms of being stealthy and also a useful multirole fighter.

@@ericwethington The F-35 is the best fighter in the world?

Love his videos!

Had the Allison gotten the 2-stage supercharger they were supposed to get, the P-51 never would have used the Merlin, and the 2-stage Allison Mustangs would have blown the Merlin mustangs out of the water in terms of performance, including having longer range, higher speed and climb rate. North American only looked at the Merlin after realizing they weren't going to get the 2-stage supercharged Allison they wanted. And North American started the work to install the Merlin 6months prior to the British first mentioning the idea of putting a Merlin into the Mustang.

I do believe that the P-63 did have a remote second stage blower, unlike the P-39.

@@mattgbarr Yeah, I also remember the P-63 had the auxiliary stage supercharger. Not packaged as compact as the Merlin 2-stage supercharger, but definitely added altitude performance. Allison's aux supercharger also had a variable speed hydraulic drive coupling, so it could smoothly perform altitude compensation instead of the sawtooth profile the step-ratio Merlin had.

@@SoloRenegadeTHANK YOU for mentioning the merits of the Allison. The USAAF vetoed the development of the 2stg, 2spd even a 3spd version.

gasping for breath above 15,000 feet

Agree, great place to visit!

pretty ironic after the cold war was in full swing.

Yeah even had NATO code name Fred

You should. I live in the area and occasionally when I don't have anything going on I'll volunteer there for a day. As far as flight museums go it's on the smaller end, but the staff are very engaging and super passionate.

@@pyronuke4768 Thank you. I will and then in a few years when the grandkids are old enough to benefit from the long drive.

The Kingcobras arrived too late to have any appreciable impact on the Eastern Front. The majority appear to have been retained by air defense units, usually stationed around Moscow (e.g. 17th, 27th, 821st Fighter Air Regiment). However, they were used against Japan during the USSRs short Far East campaign.

@@MilitaryAviationHistory That’s awesome. Thanks for the additional information, y’all! I’m off to learn more about that aspect of their career.

P-63 arrived too late to do much, but the Russians operated the P-63 into the Korean war, and a famous incident occured with a US pilot got lost and strafed soviet P-63s at a soviet airfield inside russia.

​@@MilitaryAviationHistory I don't remember where exactly I read this, so take it with a whole shaker of salt. However, I vaguely recall reading that the US specified P-63s were to be saved for the far east campaign, so the soviets logged any P-63 frontline units/kills/etc as being "P-39"s. Again, no idea if that's true and would be difficult to verify, even if it was.

​@@djbiscuit1818It wouldn't surprise me if some was done, but on a large scale it doesn't make a whole lot of sense given the timelines. In smaller numbers, it makes total sense. Getting experience using them in combat would be hugely useful. No amount of training in the Far East could compare to actual combat experience. I am also skeptical of the claims about them being common because of how unreliable identification of specific aircraft and vehicles and such was throughout the war.

A great 100% impartial evaluation of how 100% perfect the P-47 was and how everything else was 100% rubbish unless it came from Germany.

I would disagree with you. Not a particularly great gun. And you have the need to synchronize your other guns.

I would also disagree with you. It was not late to the party as it was a development of the airacobra and a very similar story to the hellcat. But the series lacking high altitude performance meant that it was too limited in what roles it could perform and it was simply easier to produce more mustangs and thunderbolts. It was however an excellent backup project and it was put to good use through lend lease.

A high rate of fire, high muzzle velocity 20 mm (imported and therefore reliable version) Hispano would have been far more useful.

@@givenfirstnamefamilyfirstn3935 my memory is fuzzy but, I do recall there was a version of the P-39 with one. They call them p400s.

@@WALTERBROADDUS A rejected export spec’ version, it had Australian fittings oxygen equipment so it couldn’t fly above 10,000 feet in USAAF service. They were probably British made guns which in 1942 were reliable. A very small number made it into P-51A/A-36s.

Bell made money, not much value though.

Except the most important statistic.. range.

@@guaporeturns9472*most important to the majority of operations for the USAAF For the era, as pointed out by Winkle Brown, speed was the most important in combat. Plus, the USAAF nearly deployed a squadron for D-Day, but that was cancelled due to production delays

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Glad to hear it! Thank you!

@@MilitaryAviationHistory keep up the great work!!!

Thank you, and thanks for supporting for over 3 years! Appreciate it so much, that's just...wow!

@@MilitaryAviationHistory I'm happy to do so. I've been a student of military aviation since I saved up my allowance to start acquiring William Green's first volumes on Fighters of WWII starting in 1962. I appreciate your scholarship and enjoy your sense of humor and the way you keep your presentations informative and entertaining. My thanks to you as well.

The p39s tail spin was actually recoverable, it was written in the manuals on how to recover from it. The problem is that with a lot of aircraft, people got comfortable with riding right on the edge of a stall in manoeuvres. This is because the typical weight distribution means that the stall would come on gradually, and be very saveable due to it just nosing down (giving speed and recovering from the stall). The P39s could actually rotate better due to their centre of balance and get closer to a stall with less of the symptoms of a stall, however this meant a stall would appear to come on suddenly and violently. It is a bit like a front engined car and a rear engined car in that way. Front engines are a lot more user friendly, but rear wheel drives have better performance with a worse temperament. If you respect the stall speeds and understand the aircraft, it's a very very capable fighter. The pilots that understood this learnt they could get great turns and balance as long as they didn't brute force it in turns like a traditional plane.

@pluemas If you read Bud Anderson book, who had 300 hours in the P-39 it was very difficult to recover and very often unrecoverable and fatal. His unit even had a song about it Augering in. Thanks but I'll believe the triple ace that actually flew them. I was actually in the Army and I can tell you that equipment manuals aren't worth the paper they are written on in practicality in the real world.

@@Captain_Deadstick Congratulations, many people were in the military. We are also specifically talking about the air force. There are also many pro P39 accounts. Particularly soviet pilots who lived its low altitude performance and were more than willing to adapt to it's quirks. It's centre of gravity being where it is did bad things specifically in stall conditions, so if you kept it out of those conditions it was a non issue. The centre of gravity also meant it was an extremely agile and easy to "point" aircraft which had very high firepower for its time. Manuals are not perfect, but the vast majority of the time people who just wholly discount them are making a mistake. I saw it personally with training on the SA80, where the instructors didn't read the manual, made assumptions, and completely ruined rifles by poor maintenance based on their assumptions. In some cases, this training got people killed. The techniques described in the manual for the P39 tell people how to avoid the flat spins, the conditions that are likely to cause the spins, and the techniques that you could use if you did end up in one of the spins. To discount those is foolish, as they do work for the P39.

@pluemas How many flight hours do you have in a P-39? Lol I'll take the Triple Ace and test pilots like Bud and Chuck word on it. They say it had a flaw, who are we to argue. Also thanks on the congregations only 1% of the population has served and they also know that equipment manuals fall short in real world experience 😉. Ok bye-bye

@@Captain_Deadstick Enjoy your ignorance I suppose. Reading a pop history book is not equivalent to looking into the manual and doing research on the systems flaws and effectiveness. 1% is still 3.4 million people. Which is around the size of LA. I'm simply pointing out that being ex military is not particularly special, and does not confer greater knowledge than someone who has done equivalent or more research. I have also been through military training, and have read military manuals for my nation. I can tell you that whilst they are dry and sometimes inflexible, they give best practice guidelines compiled with ungodly amounts of man hours of statistical analysis. Some boot thinking they know better is just that, some boot with an ego. Reading and understanding effective utilisation of the manuals, be it for FIBUA or on the vehicle you are using, is vital to being a capable soldier. Otherwise you're just a liability.

I don’t think that applies here. The cobras were not liked by the soviets just because they provided more quantity. They were excellent on the eastern front which definitely can’t be said for every lend lease aircraft they received. For example the spitfire was seen as a poor fighter by soviet pilots. So no, it wasn’t just a “decent aircraft” for them, it was very good. P-39/63 being better than the “legendary” Spitfire or other western aircraft like P-47 seems weird but it makes sense considering soviet doctrine at the time.

King Kobra was well received by the Red Army because it had no competition The Spitfire had a short range and was very sensitive to the Russian winter / and it was fighter And the King Cobra was an ideal fighter/bomber for ground support It was not as good as the Il-2 or Thunderbolt, nor as good as the Mig fighters but he was in between he dropped bombs and then either chased German fighters or shot at German tanks The 37 mm cannon in the nose was not to be ignored and the Russians could get it in large numbers And it was good enough to distract the ME109s from attacking the ILs

@@tihomirrasperic I think that the King would have been as good as the Thunder remember the King had a 37mm cannon as well as 50cal machine guns. It was a smaller target and more nimble.

It was awesome!

@@MilitaryAviationHistory Heck yeah brother you are always welcome here🤙🏼🇺🇲

So cool! I got to sit inside Ole Yeller, what a feeling! The flight must have been legendary

Uh...the P63 IS the KingCobra.

@@ERAUsnow I believe he's talking about Greg's Automobiles and Airplanes.

Greg has talked about it a little. Maybe 1 video.

And the P-47 was designed by a Georgian from the Russian Empire, Alexander Kartveli.

Is that supposed to mean something?

That immigration hurts countries where people emigrate from? Brain drain is real? If asylum seekers have the money to travel around the world through 10 different countries, maybe it’s not really asylum but greed that they seek? I’m an immigrant myself but I’m cool with the country I live in being poorer than the country I was born in.

Not to mention a bonkers a low altitude speed meaning you'll outrun almost everyone . Turns good at high speed however low speed stall isn't the best