Not too Hard for the Marines to Fly
The Marines loved the Corsair for its speed, range, and toughness. It was well-armored and could take a lot of damage. They stripped the carrier landing specific gear off the plane like the tail hook and removed the power mechanisms to fold the wings. Trimming 50 pounds of weight off the aircraft may not seem like a lot, but those weight savings meant increased range.
In a 2004 interview, a retired Marine aviator recalled the intricacy of the Corsair and how its pilots need to be at their best game when flying the aircraft, saying: “It demanded your constant attention, even when cruising in smooth air at altitude. You needed to master the Corsair, but when you did, it performed superbly.”
Another retired Marine pilot also described the challenges faced when landing the Corsair on a carrier, explaining that “[i]t didn’t fight well at altitude. But at medium heights and down low, the F4U Corsair was a world-beater.”
Despite its complexity, however, hundreds of highly skilled aviators had taken on the challenge of taming the Killer Corsair, including US Marines’ self-proclaimed “Black Sheep” of VMF-214 Major Gregory Boyington, who managed to strike down 28 kills.
“The Corsairs flown by VMF-214 were seldom flown by the same pilot every day. In fact, [Boyington] would always fly the plane in the poorest condition on every mission, just so a pilot under his command wouldn’t have to do so,” via The National WWII Museum.
Corsair pilots eventually had a kill ratio of 11:1 against their Japanese counterparts, which meant that for every FAU lost, it took down at least eleven enemy aircraft with it. By the end’s war in 1945, the venerable yet difficult-to-fly American warplane shot down around 2,140 enemy fighters. It also flourished after the Second World War and into the Korean War, serving as a close-air support and surveillance mission. It eventually rose to prominence as a dreadful aircraft, accounting for roughly 80 percent of all US Marine and Navy ground strike missions during 1950 alone.
The Royal Navy Debugged the Corsair
As expected the Royal Navy experienced its share of crashes landing the Corsair on its own carriers, but their long experience with carrier aviation allowed them to come up with the fixes the aircraft needed to operate safely from carriers. First, they solved the visibility problem by having the Corsair approach the carrier from the 8 O’clock position and make a sweeping left turn in for the final approach. This allowed the pilot to see the flight deck for most of the approach. The also fitted the Corsair with a higher bubble canopy which allowed the pilot to raise his seat almost 8 inches higher to see over the nose and wings a bit better.
They also added a stall strip to the right wing of the Corsair to even out its stalling characteristics, now both wings would stall together rather than just one. Because of the tight deck space on smaller British carriers, they clipped 8 inches off each wing on the Corsair. This accidentally improved Corsair’s sink rate when the power was cut to improve her chances of catching an arresting wire on landing.
Finally, they changed out a valve in the landing gear strut to make it less stiff on landing. That may seem like a lot, but it really isn’t.
The Navy Needed the Corsair late in the War.
Continuous improvements to the Corsair’s engine resulted in the Corsair having the best climb rate of any naval fighter and ended up becoming very valuable as the Kamikazes began to attack the US navy. The Hellcat simply couldn’t make it to altitude as fast as the Corsair. With its landing problems on carriers fixed, the navy assigned Marine squadrons flying the Corsairs off land to the fast carriers as Kamikaze killers, able to climb to their altitude and use their superior speed and firepower to intercept them before they could reach the fleet.
The Heart of Corsair
The earliest version of the F4U featured a 2,000 hp (1,500 kW) 18-cylinder Pratt & Whitney (P&W) R-2800 Double Wasp radial as the aircraft’s heart, the largest engine available at the time, as well as the huge Hamilton Standard Hydromatic three-blade propeller of 13 feet 4 inches (4.06 m) to ensure that it generated as much power as possible per USN requirements. The bent wings of the Corsair were not some aerodynamic trick to improve performance. The landing gear was in the wings, and they could either make the landing gear struts longer by several feet so the prop would clear the ground or get the wings lower to the ground. So they bent the wings as the easiest solution to the problem,
Rising to prominence for its speed, ruggedness, and firepower, the production and improvement of the F4U line continued throughout the years, beginning with the release of F4U-1 (known by the Fleet Air Arm as “Corsair Mk I”), which has a distinctive “birdcage” canopy; followed by F4U-1A (“Corsair Mk II”) and 700 Brewster-built F3A-1 (“Corsair Mk III”).
Variants F4U-1C and F4U-1D featured 4x20mm cannon armament and 2×1,000 lb bombs or 8×5 in rockets, respectively, effectively becoming fighter bombers. The latter is also equipped with a more powerful P&W R-2800-8W water-injected engine. A few more variants followed (including a Night Fighter version), with the F4U-4 fitted with a more powerful P&W R-2800-18W (up to 2,450 hp) appearing in late 1944, becoming the last Corsair variant to serve during WWII.
The F4U-4 measured about 33.6 ft in length, 41 ft in width, and 14.8 in height, with a maximum load of 4,000 lbs of bombs or eight 5-in rockets. It had a top speed of around 453 mph within a 900 mi range.
Apart from the United States, Corsair also notably served France, the Royal Navy, and the Royal New Zealand Air Force, as well as the navies of Argentina and El Salvador and the Honduran Air Force.
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