U.S. "Superprop" Fighters P-51H, XP-72, and more 

Yes!!! I would love to have seen my fav, the P-61, with upgraded engines!!! Yes I am fan boi lol

there were quite a few "superprops". Spit XVI, Hawker Tempest, Do 335, TA152, Ki-84, A7M, LA-9 I'd even class the pancake in this class as well. Some amazing designs.

I'd like to think that if I was an engineer with Republic or indeed any manufacturer I would have abandoned any further 'hedging my bets' on piston engines and thrown myself and my design and development teams into turbojet technology, particularly axial flow compressors. The thing is the piston engine was pretty much at its developmental limit. They were also pretty expensive and difficult to build when held against the axial flow turbojet, which had the potential to be lighter, cheaper, faster and able to perform better at higher altitudes, due to no need for a heavy supercharger plumbing. The jet engine could only get much better, but the piston engine was only going to be improved in slight increments. However, the propellor is still the most efficient method of turning power to thrust. Which is why turboprops continue to be flown and the ducted fan of modern airliners is power derived mostly from a propellor or turbine in a Benoulli tube that is turned by an axial flow compressor. Incidentally, the piston engine is a four stage power cycle: Induction, compression ignition, exhaust. The axial flow compressor is exactly the same. Suck, squeeze, bang, blow but is laid out in a linear or axial fashion. This is why jet engines are lighter, less complicated and use less materials.

@@damndirtyrandy7721 sorry but the airacobra is a TERRIBLE aircraft. i totally understand what they were going for with the mid engine layout thinking itd improve performance like it does with cars, but what it did do was create a very dangerous aircraft that loved exiting controlled flight because the engine would push the inertia of the aircraft outside the flight envelope. Think of a paper airplane, where instead of the nose being a little heavier which really helps guide the aircraft, put that weight in the middle and watch it flutter around doing spins and backflips etc while falling forwards, this is an easy way to demonstrate how unstable and dangerous those designs were and are.

@@PORRRIDGE_GUN lol yup you're right. my grandfather was an engineer with Fairchild after his service in ww2, he was one of the alamo scouts, a pretty legendary group yet unheard of

That's crazy! There was an Alfa Romeo Grand Prix inline 8 that did the same.

That's the XP-47J. Not the H. I'm an Allpar fan and that reference is not backed up by any paper test data. The ONLY test data, obviously from one of the preliminary flights, quotes 414 mph at altitude..They never completely dialed it in. The war was over.

Thanks for watching this video. I'll have another superprop video up quite soon.

He knocks it out of the park every time. Great teacher.

Explaining things to people is an art and a skill. Simple yet informative

@@pleaseenteranamelol711 moreso it takes a true master to break things down in a manner that can still be picked back up, so to speak.

More likely Marketing Department.

I would like to think a hemispherical cylinder head is still in use, though it would have been a pain to manufacture. It would have better amplified the internal combustion (spherical blast) than a flat head.

@@dadillen5902 Marketing Department(s) doesn't watch videoes like this!

@@MultiZirkon Perhap not yours

Ford Motor Company lawyers hands twitching on their cell phones waiting to file trademark infringement... The Fairlane Thunderbolt tore up the dragstrip in the early sixties

When you realize that practically all military contracts were rife with corruption, cronyism, cocaine, and prostitutes (just a day at the office in DC), it is important to destroy all traces of that, if we are to keep our rose tinted view of the war.

@@princeofcupspoc9073 Military contractors are dealers in DEATH. Their sole purpose is to make money off of the worst kind of human conflict possible. They make tobacco companies look like an organization of volunteers that rescues lost puppies and kittens. They are already at the maximum evil level of murder so all crimes against humanity and nature below that are just annoyances to them like a parking ticket.

@@toolbaggers to be fair, military contractors are also the ones making defensive weapons. It is a dirty business, but one necessary for the survival of nations

@@toolbaggers And as investors in those companies, we earn fantastic returns.

@@toolbaggers what a hippy. Workers go where there's work. When the government dumps billions into fighter planes then a lot of aerospace people will end up working on it.

And Rolls Royce too! Don't forget the Rolls Royce Crécy sleeve valve engines. And Argyll Motors engines, designed by Burt and McCollum. And Harry Ricardo's "The High Speed Internal Combustion Engine", a really great book, specially the 1951 edition...

Yummy H24 Sabre lump😎

i hope for napier nomad and such engines...

If anyone's got any Sabre parts, there's a bloke in Canada who'd love to hear from u!

klegdixal - Huge displacement engines like the Napier Sabre, P&W Corncob, Wright 2160 were just too complex and extremely expensive to produce but they did make a few. A single engine usually cost more than the whole airframe.

It gets mentioned in this video, just mentioned though.

I agree 👍!

@@iconoclastpleonast8726 Quite a unique sound, not at all like the equivalent P&W or Wright engines. Much smoother and more muted.

The sleeve-valved Hawkers whistled rather than roared. Exhaust sleeve valve opening was less dramatic than a poppet popping open maybe (which can have advantages in tuning non supercharged engines - sharp opening poppets that is).

And the Hawker Fury I with the Napier Sabre engine

Wow, I certainly know who you are,, I saw Dreadnought at Reno around 1991. It's a very exciting plane from a spectator standpoint, even watching and hearing it taxi is exciting. I would like to talk to you. I'll shoot you an email once I get back to the US sometime middle of next month.

Good to hear from you. FYI I retired from the family business a few years ago so you will need to contact me on my personal email. Smokemaster70@gmail.com

All you need is a bunch of money.

@@greatgandalf5233 Indeed. That seems to be the requirement for most of my wishlist items.

531 mph at ground level!

Unfortunately there is no motivation to fund further development of piston powered propeller prototypes. It would for sure make for an interesting class.

We already have R3350 powered Bearcats, Griffon powered Mustangs, and R4360 powered Corsairs and Sea Furies; functionally the same thing.

The performance of the 51H is exceptional but that's on its testing flights. Built from the start to last only 500 hours the 51H was unsuccessful in operational service. Not rugged,and with a finicky engine fitting very tight with limited access panels it only had a 30% availability rate. So it went to the air guard and they had problems with it as well. Pretty much,with the 51D,North American took that airframe as far as it would go. Trying to squeeze out more performance, they went to lightening the aircraft up.If the Pacific Theater would have lasted a little longer you would have seen the 47N totally take out the Mustang.

I have heard of this but not seen it. Think of several people all taking different elevators to go to the same floor. Less efficient than them all being directed to the same elevator as done in this Sicilian example.

@@bobzwicker807 Seems the tradeoff would be much lower total elevator usage, since you can't have a single car serve multiple sequential destinations. You get in the car and when the doors open you get out and assume you are on your desired floor.

Yes, I have run into these in several 4-star hotels, mostly in north America but also in Asia. I think the system works fine when the number of riders are low. The issue arise when you have many who want to ride the elevators like at a conference in a hotel after the sessions has ended. Then many persons needs to get to control to input where they are going. And then managed to get to the right elevator through the crowed in the elevator bay. Also the intelligent control doesn't know how many people a single press for flor 5 means. Thus, it has issues filling the elevators to capacity. Yes, it can optimize the number of stops when it gets many riders inputting where to go. Also if you make an input error you are sending an elevator on ghost chase.

There is one building, here in Cape Town, that my son and I use frequently, which has this system. I'm not terribly keen on its, as waiting times seem to have increased considerably over the conventional system, in the same building, that it replaced.

I live in downtown Chicago and most new buildings along with older buildings that can afford it are converting to this system - it is more efficient. Willis Tower (former Sears Tower) recently finished their conversion.

The problem with the british is that consolidation after WW2 was forced and most of the time was nationalization. This greatly damaged the development of planes as government people got in charge of running plane and plane engine factories. The British should have given incentive for their companies to merge sort of like the Americand did with their companies.

@@aceofhearts573 well yeah, but two problems - a) the politics and chicanery with centre-left post war Government. b) we were completely broke after the war. On the macro level our star was fading. What was left of the empire was breaking up. We had introduced the welfare state/NHS. From a purely practical sense, there was some logic in smashing together all the small-middling aero manufacturers into something that in theory could compete with the big American firms, and nationalising would generate revenue for the state coffers. In hindsight its easy to see how flawed that was, and the net result is BAe, universally referred to in defence circles here as Big And expensive.

I think it was Bill Gunston who said that Boeing had more engineers working on the wing flaps of the B-52 then the entire British aero industry had. Then you have the Sandystorm where the government ran around canceling everything that looked like it might work. TSR.2 could have been everything the F-111 was supposed to be.

The P-51 did come out with a spoon blade late in the war. It resembled a regular prop with a big paddle at the tip.

The US did add cuffs to the propellor blades, which acted as a crude imitation of the cooling fan used on the FW190.

@@fafner1 which planes did they put those on? Corsairs and the naval Cat fighters (F4F, F6F, etc.)?

Adam and Greg crossover episode when?

@@wetzel1628 two goats finally collab

Imagine the XP72 with quad 37's in War Thunder

Watching both you and Greg is an absolute treat for an undergraduate aerospace engineer!

You ever going to admit you were wrong about the "P51 vs Bf109 what can germany do" video? Or is your ego still too massive?

You horned like disappointed now ^^

I love Italy and only have good to say about it, even Sicily.

The Targa Florio was THE road race. Would have loved to see it during the sixties!

When you get to the R4360 you've gone beyond the apex...I can envision a T56 on just about any of these...

Sorry the timing didn't work out for you. I can't really make it right for everyone, so I alternate start times with these videos.

@@GregsAirplanesandAutomobiles you provide excellent videos and need not apologize. Nobody can please everyone all the time. Downloaded the premier and will watch on my next leg. I have friend who is a WWII vet he is 98 and flew 100 missions in the P47 spanning two tours. Then he was MX officer for the same squadron on a third tour. If I could pick a single seat fighter just to sit in, it would be a P-47. Flying one, unthinkable joy. Again, thank you for posting

@@GregsAirplanesandAutomobiles Excellent video! It was worth the wait.

If you have noticed modern versions of superprops are reemerging again on some of newest versions of transport aircraft. The latest C130 variants are sporting I believe 6 paddle blade props, and performance is up.

Ahh, a man of culture I see :)

Marvelous choice!

I always assume that plane is the very definition of “ engine failure on take off = disaster”

One of, if not the most prey twin engine fighter!

@@jonathangriffiths2499 Good job the Merlin was pretty reliable. Any twin engine plane at high speed on takeoff with engine failure tends to swing.

Yes they were. The Goodyear F2G Corsair, often referred to as the "Super Corsair", is a development by the Goodyear Aircraft Company of the Vought F4U Corsair fighter aircraft. The F2G was intended as a low-altitude interceptor and was equipped with a 28-cylinder, four-row Pratt & Whitney R-4360 air-cooled radial engine. Such a fighter was first conceived in 1939, when Pratt & Whitney first proposed the immense, 3,000 hp (2,200 kW) R-4360,[1] and design work began in early 1944.

Didn't the Centaurus Tempest have an engine driven cooling fan?

What Brian said.

Yeah I'm interested too, I have an Uncle who was a Carrier pilot and fighter ace who also flew the first FJ1 Fury and early Sabres from North American Aircraft. The FJ1 was an interesting adaptation of the P(F)-51's aerodynamics as NAA sought to enter the jet age with an post WWII carrier fighter jet. Grumman beat them with their F9F Panther.

Bon mot!

Holy merde, Bat Man, well said..

An unintentional ( maybe) pun there. “....set you back on your heels. How else can you take a dump in a hole in the floor? Lol

That's the way we used to do it all the time.

@@stephenanderle5422 still the best way to do it, the way Mother Nature intended. It's just much harder to participate in a zoom call at the same time.

Cool story!

@@bBersZ as a dad, I approve.

i see whats going on here

Your joke is wrong on multiple levels.

I'm actually scared of elevators, I'm taking steps to avoid them now.

Or perhaps your mind got "stuck between floors" while conjuring that response. Let's hope you don't fall down that "shaft" in the future. I hope this joke didn't push any of your buttons.

[flips through the comment section] [keeps scrolling] [sees this comment] [almost spits his coffee everywhere] [thinks to himself] "well played sir, well played indeed"

Get a life

To which I will add this tidbit for you dubious Yanks. In Cape Town, when the Royal Family was on a State Visit, he also flew the Meteor for them in a demonstration, which is why he was invited to the Ball, where he danced with the future Queen of England, Princess Elizabeth. Grandor (my Grandmother) was asked to dance by a handsome young man; she declined because she was watching her dashing husband dance with the Princess - only to discover it was actually Peter Townsend, the King's Equerry - and quite a Fighter Pilot himself.

If I decide to make a dedicated P-51H video I'll cover all that.

+ Jeffrey Fisher You can sorta get that with a turbosupercharger setup. But it's about complexity and weight. Read the experiences of the mechanics who worked on those magnificent Wright 3350-TC Turbo-Compound engines.

Weight,, and synchronicity would be a negative full circle.

I would think that between the issues of weight, and added complexity of electrical demand, and reduction of range due to fuel consumption of your extra engine, the biggest problem would be synchronizing the two engines. supplying a constant pressure air flow to an engine that uses a throttle is dangerous. it makes controlling the power applied to the prop unstable thus you get a push, pull oscilation effect due to variance of manifold pressure, and demand. sudden pressure drops caused by opening the throttle causes a sudden rush through the carb causing way too much fuel surging from the carb jets. then as pressure drops fuel mixture goes way lean because there is not as much air through the carb. the drop in pressure also changes the evaporation coefficient of the fuel, adding to throttle instability. the engine would eventually stall from wildly fluctuating fuel/air mixture. I tried an electric supercharger on my rc nitro car and it did not like it at all. no steady rpm at any range, and constant stalling. after i did some research and the fact i am an automotive tech since 1993 it was obvious to me that having two rotation dependant devices with only one generating the torqe being harvested and no type of linkage between to synchronize the demands to each other, counterproductive effects greatly outweigh any benefit

Weight

Tuning. Completely. Another engine would double the parts count there are hundreds if not thousands of parts in an engine, and a supercharger driven from the back of the engine is the simplest possible combination. Other than a properly sized Turbocharger. Again, Tuning. It's significantly easier to tune and map an engine that has a supercharger responding immediately to throttle and engine speed. An exhaust driven turbo is hard to control in it's own right, compared to a gear driven supercharger. It would be very complicated to keep a seperate engine responding precisely to the primary engine speed. And the extra engine would needs its own supercharger or turbo in order to work at altitude, lol. Try this: Fuel-inject the exhaust driven Turbocharger and add spark, and introduce some bleed air, if needed, to maintain combustion. Now you effectivly have a turbine engine which is the turbo hot side getting fuel, powering the blower side of the turbo, hahaha.

We do it all the time. You should have heard the conversation the day I designed a “nut bar” for a new design I was working on.

No. There are designs that do not make sense once you understand them. There is a world of badly engineered crap around.

@@thomasfink2385, there is that, but all professions--even engineers--are entitled to a kindly, humorous laugh at the expense of their clients--and their competitors.

@@abchaplin You are right. But this crap makes me angry.

@@thomasfink2385 I would say about 87% of everything out there is "designed" like crap in some way shape or form. Design starts with philosophy, and philosophy is practically lacking in engineering, anymore.

Yes, and how it ties in to the modern Chrysler products.

@@GregsAirplanesandAutomobiles Sweeeeet.

@@The_Bermuda_Nonagon The Pratt&Whitney R2800 along with most of the other US aircraft engines at the time already had Hemi combustion chambers. In 1910 Elbert J Hall of the Hall-Scott Motor Car Company (railroad cars not automobile cars) designed an overhead cam Hemi engine and later on along with an engineer from Packard was a part of designing the Liberty Aircraft Engine. Even though most people think that Chrysler pioneered the Hemi engine in all reality they were one of the last in line to make them, even for vehicles. Harley Davidson had a mass produced Hemi engine with the Knucklehead EL 61 ci engine in 1936, Packard, Duesenberg, Cord and many other vehicle manufacturers already had Hemi engines in production years before Chrysler did, they didn't really get into Hemi's until they were working on aircraft engines for the government during the war. As Greg pointed out the new Chrysler Hemi's aren't true Hemi engines, they have closed "bathtub" style chambers and run flat top pistons with a squish area as a result, it's much more of an efficient combustion chamber than a real Hemi, Harley Davidson did basically the same thing in 1984 when they released the Evolution engine although it's not a bathtub style chamber it's a "D" style chamber, but they did change to a bathtub style for the Twin Cam engine in 1999. The fact is a true Hemi style combustion chamber is very inefficient in a normally aspirated engine, they work well in an engine that's highly boosted running a flat top piston because then you have a large combustion chamber volume that's packed full by supercharging, but normally aspirated with a big dome on the piston sticking up into the dished out head of a Hemi causes all kinds of problems with flame propagation and the flame front having to travel around and crawl over the pistons dome, it turns the entire combustion chamber into a huge detonation trap, super high compression pistons for Hemi's like that usually have a "flame notch" in the top of the piston to minimalize as much of the problem as possible, another thing that aids with that problem is the addition of a second spark plug in the combustion chamber on the other side of the pistons dome, if the engine design allows for it those help quite a bit.

@@dukecraig2402 very interesting info as I have little knowledge about the HEMI...!

@@paoloviti6156 The biggest reason for creating the Hemi type combustion chamber is valve area (size), if you draw a circle that represents the bore of an engine and then draw two circles inside of it to represent the intake and exhaust valves you can only make them so big until they run into each other and the cylinder wall, by "canting" the valves at an angle you can make them much larger than if they're flat, the dishing out of the combustion chamber basically just follows suit with the canted valves. The reason that the infamous 426 ci Chrysler "Elephant" Hemi engine made the power it did wasn't so much it's Hemi design as much as the fact that it was pumped up pretty good from the factory in the first place, it had a solid lifter cam in it along with high compression that could run a decent amount of timing advance on the gas of that era, in other words they already had the rubber band wound up pretty tight from the factory. Chevy released a version of the 427 engine around 69 or 70 that had a solid lifter cam and other race goodies in it that made more power per ci than the 426 Chrysler Hemi did, the Hemi really shines through when it's boosted to high levels for the reason I gave, with a flat top piston you wind up with a large volume combustion chamber that once packed full from forced induction gives you a lot of air/fuel to burn. But normally aspirated it really isn't the engine people think it is, between the dome of the piston itself causing problems that need to be overcome there's other issues like the valve pockets that need to be cut in it for valve clearance that are so big they create two detonation traps in the combustion chamber themselves, that's yet another thing that forces you to turn back the timing advance resulting in lost power. I've been building Harley engines professionally for over 30 years, the pre Evolution engine's like the Shovelhead, Panhead, Knucklehead and Ironhead Sportster engines all are true hemispherical combustion chamber engines, anytime someone comes to me with one of the older ones and want's it built up for performance I tell them all the same thing, don't waste your money, because no matter what you do an Evolution or later engine with less modifications will beat it every time, do yourself a favor and just go for a reliable rebuild that'll last and enjoy it for what it is instead of winding up with something you've spent a lot of money on that's failure prone and will wind up getting beat anyways. By closing the combustion chamber and creating a D type or bathtub style chamber and running a flat top piston you have what's called a "squish area", when the piston gets to the top of the compression stroke the air/fuel mixture is "squished" between the top of the piston and the corresponding area of the combustion chamber resulting in it being shot into the remaining area of the combustion chamber (that's known as the "quench area") and creating turbulence, this turbulence along with a smaller area for the flame to travel across as opposed to the larger area from one side of the combustion chamber to the other and over the large dome of a piston in a true Hemi is far more efficient. 18 years ago or so when Chrysler announced they were going to build Hemi engines again a friend of mine who's into cars came running into my bike shop all excited saying how they were bringing it back, I told him, "There's no way it's going to be a true Hemi like the 426, I'll guarantee you that it'll have closed combustion chambers and flat top pistons". He said "You think so? Why's that?" I told him "Because there's no way they could get a true Hemi to pass modern emissions standards, there's just no way." Lo and behold several months later he came walking into my shop with the latest car magazine from a subscription he has that had an article on the new motor that had a cutaway drawing of the engine and don't you know, flat top pistons and closed combustion chambers. Like everyone else in the 80's I was cussing the government and the emission standards they forced the automobile manufacturers to deal with but 25 or so years ago I started realizing that it's actually a blessing, by forcing them to conform with those standards the engineers had to develop more efficient induction systems and combustion chambers, more efficiency=more power, that's why today soccer mom's are driving SUV's that can absolutely smoke the most legendary muscle cars from the 60's.

+Pat Hines That P-51H is still on display at Lackland AFB. They also have an even rarer F-82 Twin Mustang, both apparently still outside in the elements and weather. That is a travesty for airframes as rare as those two aircraft and they need to be indoors in the least. Twenty five years from now, some base commander will say they are too far gone and corroded and they will end up scrapped.

What a machine!