Lockheed P-38 Lightning & Vought F4U Corsair design
This was an article I wrote for a competition here, and now I'm posting it.
The Lockheed P-38 Lightning was and is widely considered one of the best fighters of the second world war, and as such, it was very different from other fighters of the time. First of all, you’ll probably notice the distinctive twin-boom design, which housed two 1000 HP Allison V-1710 turbo-supercharged engines, which were also used in the P-40 Warhawk, and the P-51 Mustang (altough the Mustang later used Rolls-Royce Merlin engines). The superchargers also made it possible to go higher altitudes, and made the engines much quieter, and resulting in the P-38 being the first fighter to fly faster than 400 mph in level flight, and reaching over 475 mph in a dive. The two 1000 HP engines produced a lot of torque, which is why the engineers made the propellers counter-rotating. The models with non counter-rotating propellers were marked “Restricted” because the left-turning propellers would cause the plane to turn left in flight. The landing gear were arranged in a tricycle formation, which pilots said made it easier to land. It was armed with four .50 caliber Browning machine guns and one .20 mm Hispano cannon, and could fire at a rate of about 4000 rounds per minute. The guns were also in the nose, unlike other U.S. fighters, and because they were in the nose, they didn’t need to converge as other aircraft’s guns did, which allowed it to fire reliably at around 1000 yards, whereas other fighters had a limited range of about 700 yards. On the wings it could carry around 3000 lbs. of bombs and rockets. In the cockpit, there was an unconventional flight yoke, resembling a wheel rather than the traditional stick. One of the P-38’s aces, Robin Olds, said it was useful in that you could “Manhandle” the yoke and have more control than a stick. There was also a problem called a “compressability stall”, where as the airplane approached Mach 0.68, the control surfaces would lock up, causing the aircraft to go in a steep dive. hope this isn’t too boring
It was also one of the only fighters that had a bubble canopy from the start. The advantage of the bubble canopy was that you had a greater field of view, and a greater field of view meant that you could see your enemies before they engaged with you.
The Vought F4U Corsair was also an extremely successful U.S. fighter. It is also probably the most recognizable aircraft from World War Two, due to the inverted gull-wings. The incredibly long nose held the two Pratt&Whitney R-2800 18-cylinder radial engines which produced almost 2000 HP, as well as extra fuel for the gigantic engine, which, for balance purposes, was placed in the traditional area for the cockpit, which meant the cockpit had to be moved backward. The inverted gull-wings were made so the landing gear wouldn’t have to be telescoping, as the P-47 Thunderbolt and F6F Hellcat’s were. Telescoping gear were too fragile for carrier landings. And as the P-38 was a plane of many firsts, so was the Corsair. The wings also held the 6 .50 caliber Browning machine guns. The P-38 and the F4U Corsair were planes with lots of firsts. the F4U Corsair was the first single-engine, single-seat fighter to fly in excess of 400 mph in level flight. In most fighters of that era there were self-sealing fuel tanks, which meant that if they got shot, they wouldn’t catch on fire. The fuel tanks in the wings of the corsair were not self-sealing, so the engineers created a purging system. This worked by pumping carbon dioxide into the fuel tanks so there would be an inert gas above the fuel, therefore being non-combustable. The Corsair also had the verticalstabilizer set incredibly far from the end of the tail. This was most likely because the tail put great strain on that part of the frame and there isn’t much to bolt the tail into on the end of the tail on the Corsair.
All in all, the P-38 Lightning and the F4U Corsair were two of the best fighters of the second world war.
