Luno's quote pretty much says it all about fighting the F4U. Note this man had been shot down THREE times. That speaks volumes about the amount of punishment an F4U could take and still keep the pilot alive to fight another day. A Zero pilot would be lucky to survive one shoot down, let alone three.

I took the F4U up last night in game to check all this out for myself. In level flight at 5000m I was able to attain and hold 300 mph. My controls are old and not well centered these days to keeping the slip ball in the middle was difficult at best, I could have gone faster. It does take a little while to attain this speed, but nothing out of what I would call realistic.

After this I took her on a power dive to just above sea level (Solomons 43 map) and screamed along at 430mph until speed bled off, keeping high 300s for a long time. Reminded me of how much of a performing fool the F4U can be when handled with love and care :D

After some more testing, I did find something funny. It appears that the speed gauge in the cockpit is under-reporting but a very large margin. So, actual indicated airspeed is 350 or so, but it looks like 290 on the gauge.

Maybe I'm reading it wrong though.

If you can, test with the speed-bar on and convert to TAS. :-P

The speed gauge in the F4U is in KNOTS
When flying 350 mph it should read around 300 knots.

Lol, that's a head slapper. Thanks.

A similar test was made during WWII, flying side by side a Corsair and a Hellcat.
According to Corky Meyer, who was Grumman test pilot in WWII and participated in the test, they showed identical performances. The slower F6F wasn’t slower at all, but have a badly placed static port, that caused lower airspeed readings.

The whole story can be read in the book “Corky Meyer’s Flight Journal”, written by Meyer himself and published by Specialty Press.

A F6F-5 vs. an earlier model F4U would be very close according to
http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/f6f/f6f.html
http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/f4u/f4u.html

If Corky Meyer’s memory is to be trusted, Grumman tested an F4U and Vought an F6F in the autumn of 1943, apparently later than the Boscombe Down’s report. The Hellcat’s ASI indicated 18 mph less than Corsair’s one, a difference that disappeared after relocation of static ports.

Flying side-by-side, the two fighters showed identical performances at all altitudes, with just a slight advantage for the Corsair on main blower, because of some ram air effect from the forward facing air duct in Corsair’s wing roots.

And the difference, or lack of, didn’t stop there. NACA developed spring tab assisted ailerons for the Hellcat, much improving rolling performance while reducing stick forces. With these ailerons, “Hellcat finally approached Corsair’s rolling performances”, as Meyer wrote. They were standard for the F6F-5, and were retrofitted to over 3,000 early models F6F-3. Indirectly this confirms the excellence of Corsair’s roll.

Conclusion: a side-by-side test of Il2’s Corsair and Hellcat should be very interesting, and for both types.

I was going to ask the people complaining about the F4U's speed if they're flying with the airbrakes on, but this looks like the more likely (and less sarcastic) reason for their low readings.

I remember thinking "oooo, nice!" the first time I did a high speed turn while tracking a target in the F4U; so smooth. It's the best high-speed turner in the game in my opinion, all the other fast planes are more jumpy and nervous above 350mph.

The low-speed handling is not that bad either; I can definitely out-turn the 190 and even the less experienced 109 pilots, as long as they're in a G6 or later 109. You need to drop down to very low, landing-flap speed quickly and be very careful about detecting the stall; an FFB joystick probably helps here.

Japanese planes are another story, the N1K1 is a monster down low, and the Ki84 and J2M are tough anywhere. The Ki61 is slower and very delicate, and the tactics against the Zero are obvious.

Don't climb at speeds slower than 175mph, it makes a big difference in the climb rate. It does take long to get to its max level speed, but it you climb a bit and then dive to your desired altitude it will retain its speed for a long time.

If there is one similar plane to look at before looking at the F4U, it's definitely the F6F; now there's a slug. For every plane in the game I can think of at least a couple pilots who do well in it (including quite a few in the F4U), except for the Hellcat.

I retested the corsair ok..in level flight I got to about 270mph. Might have gotten higher but didn't keep flying. Seems like the acceleration to get to that 270mph is really ..really slow


In F4U Corsair..as well as P-51, and P-47, I always grab energy by flying fast and high alts and just fight in the vertical.

A quick impression that one gets from 'flying' late war US fighters in this game/sim is that they are all overweight buses; they may 'hit their numbers' eventually (well, except for the P-38 and the F6F), but they are uniformly sluggish and very hard to trim to level flight. And for Heaven's sake, don't ever change directions or it will take you several minutes to regain even a fraction of the speed you had. Compared to the late-war IJN and IJAAF fighters (the flight data for which is almost invariably 70 years old, and always reflect the factory fresh ideal that the historical record indicates was rarer than an honest military recruiter), they are at HUGE disadvantages.

We cannot know what the stick forces were on the Ki-84, we cannot find an appraisal of how much or how often you needed to trim the rudder of the N1K2 as speed varied, whether you needed to constantly fiddle with your radiator or mixture in the Ki 100 to keep from overheating or if the optimum prop pitch for all of these aircraft was always 3000rpm--all of which we do know and have in grossly exaggerated form with the late war US fighters.

Every time I hear that the Corsair was called the 'Ensign Eliminator' and uses that for justification for making it hard to fly and control, I want to puke. Isn't anyone else mystified that the Messerschmitt 109 is so much easier to take off and land in the game when it had a well-deserved reputation for being difficult to land or takeoff in any but the most ideal conditions? What about the P-40, another aircraft notorious for ground-looping if the pilot's attention wandered for a moment? Again, pretty easy to land and control compared to the US late-war fighters. These aircraft were never intended to land on a carrier in even a calm sea; that's a task a couple of orders of magnitude more difficult to accomplish, but US and British Naval aviators did it routinely in the Corsair in all kinds of sea states short of a typhoon.

The US Navy rejected the Mustang as a carrier aircraft because it was not sufficiently controllable at carrier landing speeds, and as for the Seafire...well, the RN lost many, many times more Seafires to landing accidents than to enemy action. Some of us would take that data as a clue that the Corsair was quite a bit more tractable than those aircraft, particularly at slower speeds (what? compared to the legendary Spitfire--which is what the wartime Seafire models were, with some modifications for hooks and so on). One should expect that the Corsair was overall, a more forgiving and less demanding aircraft than the Spitfire in most if not all regimes.

The issue is context; compared to their contemporaries, late war US fighters are depicted with painfully accuracy while their less documented contemporaries appear to be given the benefit of the doubt, even when the historical record shows the exact opposite.

cheers

horseback