Corsair

Whistling death. (Photo by Philip Makanna©.)

“Won’t it catch fire?” I worriedly asked our military guide at Willow Grove Naval Air Station northwest of Philadelphia.
A fighter-jock had just climbed into the cockpit of his Chance Vought F4U Corsair fighter-plane, and was firing it up.
A giant gout of yellow flame cascaded along the plane’s fuselage, as it’s Pratt and Whitney R-2800-8 roared to life. 2,000 horsepower, 2,800 cubic-inches, 18 cylinders in a two-row air-cooled radial. Incredible racket!
It was 1951. I was seven. My cub-scout troop had gone to Willow Grove for a field-trip.
The pilot was gonna practice tailhook landings on Willow Grove’s runway. An arresting cable had been strung across the runway, just like an aircraft carrier, except it wasn’t a ship. You didn’t shoot toward the ocean if the cable didn’t catch.
Soon the Corsair was roaring over our heads. Funny how things like this are what’s remembered from my childhood.

We visit Willow Grove Naval Air Station. (We are in front of a Twin-Beech.)

The Corsair fighter-plane can possibly be traced to problems the Navy had operating the Grumman F4F Wildcat off aircraft-carriers. A plane had to be slammed onto the carrier-deck when landing. It could bounce.
The landing-gear on a Wildcat was narrow; it retracted into the plane’s belly. With narrow landing-gear a Wildcat could easily tip over. Drag a wing into the deck, and crash! Often into the sea.
To land on carrier-decks, the landing-gear had to be wide — retracting into the wings.
Grumman was dealing with this too. The F6F Hellcat followed the Wildcat. Landing-gear had been relocated into the wings, with wings rooted at the plane’s belly. On the Wildcat wings were centered.
A Hellcat wasn’t as fast as the Corsair, but it was easier to land and maneuver on a carrier-deck.
Like the Hellcat the Corsair was also response to a naval air specification. It also took advantage of huge leaps in air-cooled radial engine output. The Hellcat also uses the Pratt and Whitney R-2800-8 , as does Republic’s P-47 Thunderbolt.
The Corsair lacks the grace of the later P-51 Mustang. But the Corsair’s motor is air-cooled. The P-51 is water-cooled, as are a number of earlier Army Air Corps fighter-planes.
The Navy avoided water-cooling. All one had to do was disable the water-cooling — shoot it up — and that fabulous water-cooled motor was silenced. It took a lot to cripple an air-cooled fighter-plane.
The Corsair is rife with compromise. That’s mainly due to its giant 14-foot propeller. In order to clear that prop, it needed longer landing-gear — or the wings had to be drooped.
That’s the Corsair’s famous inverted gull-wing. Lengthening the landing-gear begged collapse. It also compromised wing-chord. Instead the wing got drooped to avoid these problems — mainly turning the landing-gear into stilts.
The Corsair was more-or-less a hotrod. Plain and unattractive, but a terror in air-to-air combat. Japanese fighter-pilots called it “Whistling-death.” A Corsair in hot pursuit emitted a whistling sound.
The Corsair pictured appears to be the three-bladed prop. Four-bladed Corsairs are even more powerful. I’ve never seen a recent four-bladed Corsair. No idea what the Willow Grove Corsair was.