Some Spitfires could carry a centrally-mounted ‘slipper tank’ to extend their range. I don’t know if it could be jettisoned. I’d have to check my books (which I can’t right now, since I’m working – just coming here while my program runs), but I think later models could carry drop tanks on the wings. I’m pretty sure some variants could carry 250-lb bombs.
However: Spitfires were not strong enough to carry wing stores in combat, so they had to be flown carefully until external stores were jettisoned.
I remember seeing something that claimed the Me-262 considerably outperformed both the P-80 and the Meteor. I think primarily because of of it’s swept wing technology.
OTOH, supposedly the 262’s engine life was about 10-20 hours, while there is still a Meteor flying today with its original engines.
As an aside, the Ford Mustang would probably be named something else.
“Executive stylist Pres Harris, who was a fan of the World War II P-51 Mustang fighter plane, is believed by many to have suggested the name and designed the body.”
On the big picture, I don’t think it would have had any major significance. The United States had a huge industrial lead over the Reich and had numerous developement programs going on - if the Mustang hadn’t been developed we would have developed some other plane that would have filled the same role. And even if we hadn’t, no big deal - it’s not like the Germans lost WWII by just a field goal.
I have read claims that the P-51 made D-Day possible. Not only by reducing bomber losses by 75%, but by having the range, performance and numbers to chase after the Luftwaffe and decimate their numbers. That is, supposedly, why the landings were virtually unopposed by German aircraft.
If you look at jet engine development between England and Germany they tracked closely in design during the early stages. They both worked on centrifugal and multi-stage compressor designs. The British went with the centrifugal because it was more reliable.
A heavy night fighter would be eaten alive in daylight, as they indeed were in the real war (Germans often committed them against the American bomber streams). At night, I’d still prefer a Mosquito.
I just don’t understand why the Army Air Force didn’t put a supercharger or turbocharger on the Allison. For some reason I THINK it was left out as cost cutting.
The Allison performed GREAT at low altitude (where it could get enough air). Superchargers would have made all the difference in high altitude performance. The -38 had 'em and all other planes with good high altitude performance had them. The Merllin had a blower too, and that’s why it did so well.
For the reasons that Sailboat and Magiver give above, I doubt it would have made a difference.
Another aspect is that it would have been feasible to just concentrate on night bombing. There were limited targets to attack, and a lot had been damaged before the Mustang came along. I don’t have any statistics but I’m not sure that carpet bombing at night would have been less efficient than “precision” bombing during daylight.
And of course there was the Soviet air offensive from the East. It is difficult to believe that Germany could have withstood the pressure of the Soviet Union and the Allied advance eventually no matter how the bombing campaign went.
I didn’t word that very clearly. They should have put one on the Mustang’s Allison. It was necessary for the P-38, and all other planes that had good high altitude performance
The P-47 was apparently a much more formidable dogfighter, but lacked the range for deep penetration raids into Germany until later models appeared. And, by the end of the war, almost every one of the P-47 units had switched to the P-51. Of course, the fact that it wasn’t as good as the p-51 as a dogfighter doesn’t mean that it wasn’t good enough to be a dogfighter.
So I will ask again about D-day. No other plane had the performance to escort the bombers, and then go on what amounted to fighter sweeps, loitering and searching the countryside to destroy German aircraft all over the place. And I seriously wonder if D-Day might have had to wait another year had the Luftwaffe not been so devastated. And if it was delayed by a year, and perhaps the Allied bomber focus on fuel production facilities had not happened (because they in particular, were very deep penetration missions), and there were a lot more Me-262s that became operational, et cetera et cetera et cetera…
If there had been a wait of a year, Germany would still have been overrun by the Russians, by that stage of the war it was not even slightly close.
You could speculate that the Italian campaign might have gained more ground, in addition, the Meteor would have been in full service, and the equal of the ME262, along with the Comet tank, perhaps even early variants of the Centurian.The Firefly tank was already able to take on any tank the Germans had with a reasonable chance of success, and that was nothing like as formidable as the Comet.
The number of weapon platforms that both the Americans and British had that were just a little bit too late for a decisive role mean that the Allies would have been in an even stronger position, and no doubt there would have been quite a few more thousand bomber raids of the Dresden and Hamburg type - so the production of Germany was being significantly eroded all the time.
From what I’m reading the early Meteors were not the equal of the Me-262, being 50 mph slower. Here’s one site with a brief comparison near the bottom. There are a bunch of others, but most of them seem to be military discussion boards that don’t seem suitable as evidence of anything other than (perhaps) informed opinions.
I found this other page claiming there was past-war comparison flights of the P-80 and the Me-262, and the 262 came out ahead in most areas.
This same site says about the Meteor:
To be fair, the US tests had to be discontinued because the Me-262s engines failed so frequently, The engines had to be replaced 4 times, and two test flights ended with emergency single-engine landings.
Also, I would note that if D-Day had been delayed a year or more, and the Russians had indeed continued at the same pace into Germany, there is a decent chance they would have kept going west. We might have ended up with a united Germany entirely Soviet dominated, and perhaps all or a good part of France as well.
I don’t understand how that paragraph squares with everything I’ve read. The Lightning was the first combat aircraft to reach Mach 1.0, which is why it had compressibility problems. American ace Robin Olds once took on 40 BF-10s with only two Lightnings because of his confidence in the aircraft.
D-Day was planned around the most numerous Allied fighter by far at the time, the Spitfire. Only beaches within range of the Spit were considered. I’m not sure how much of the devastation of the Luftwaffe by deep-penetration had occurred by the spring of '44, when D-Day planning was peaking, but on the day itself 12,000 Allied aircraft covered the beaches. A fully intact Luftwaffe would have had a hard time stopping that (and as mentioned above, apparently the Luftwaffe feared the Spitfire most of all, and thousands upon thousands of them filled the air that day.)
The Mustang was hot, and a key weapon of air superiority, but I doubt it gets credit for permitting D-Day.
I interpret it as a “speed limit” while retaining combat maneuverability. So while the P-38 could achieve higher speeds, certainly useful for escape or for a hit and run attack, it had to drop to lower speeds than its opponents to mix it up in a dogfight. Escort fighters can’t leave their bombers, so hit and run attacks aren’t a good option for them.