At lot of sailplanes require some gymnastics to get in, including standing on the seat. This may be true of a lot of planes that have a canopy over the cockpit but no door on the side of the cockpit. The Grumman (later Schweizer) Ag-Cat crop-duster looks difficult too. It has a little step (or maybe two) built into the port side.
Us older guys call that TV show Baa Baa Black Sheep. One of my favorites as a kid. 12 O’Clock High was good too.
I’ve never seen an F4U fly. Would love to.
Not to derail the thread, but when B-29 “Doc” got fixed up I just had to go see it. My first B-29 that I saw fly. Back in Nov 2019, at Mather Field, Sacramento CA. This is a pic of the wife and me.
That’s pretty much it. Big picture every cockpit-style airplane is about the same for boarding.
- Use either an auxiliary ladder, a built-in ladder, or various hand- and foot-holds to climb up until your body is alongside the cockpit w your crotch at more or less cockpit rail level.
- First leg over the rail.
- Support your weight with that leg, your taint, and/or handholds depending.
- Second leg over the rail.
- Lower yourself into the seat w your legs slithering down the tunnels towards the rudder pedals.
- Wiggle your rump to get parts, pants, etc., settled, then start the strap-in process.
Starting your climb with the correct foot is key or else you end up like this.
Then all your friends laugh.
In some cases the plane was pretty much designed for the engine; the P-47 Thunderbolt was to some extent designed specifically to have an Air Force fighter to put the Double Wasp engine in.
We’ve really drifted from the OP, but the design of the P-47 is fascinating. Kartveli decided the smaller radials he was using for his P-43 and P-44 models were inadequate and started with the R-2800. You can see the family resemblance to the P-43, with the Seversky wing and belly mounted turbosupercharger.
I was at the Palm Springs Air Museum the week before last. When I got to the F4U I remembered this thread and studied its ingress and egress. Docents were around and I could have asked one, but looking at it up close it became self evident and pretty obvious.
I spent 15-20mins looking at that F4U. In my pics the green circle is likely (to my untrained eye) for L foot, yellow circle for R foot, and red for L & R feet. To me, visually and without any training that’s how I would do it. And it looks straightforward enough. Easy, even.
The three stepping points are large enough for both feet together. I included a fiducial for scale, my SAK knife in two pics — black circle. That’s a Swiss Army Knife, Nomad model (black handles).
Then last night, a TV station is playing reruns of Baa Baa Black Sheep and I watched my first episode in decades. I quickly realized they weren’t going to show many scenes of ingress, but there was one of egress and I took a short video of it, 20secs — Egress - YouTube
Here are those F4U pics from PSAM together with the video (20 secs) — https://photos.app.goo.gl/wgEiitTxNgig7Cvb8
Five quick steps: L on green, R on yellow, L&R on red, swing L up and in, get in. No contortions required.
This is about the PSAM and is not necessarily F4U-specific.
This was our first time there. It is great. At the PSAM the planes aren’t cordoned off (or, weren’t during covid) and you could walk right up to them, take pics from tight angles, feel the dive brakes on the SBD Dauntless, gently tap on the tight skin of a P-51’s wing with your finger and feel how light and fragile it is, see and feel the guylines that secure the folded wing of the F4F Wildcat. And also closely study the ingress and egress of the F4U.
As for the F4U, in my younger and bolder youth I likely may have tried stepping up onto those points. Carefully of course — step on the wrong spot and you can become popular quickly, and not in a good way.
As admiral Grace Hopper said, it’s better to beg forgiveness than ask for permission. But you better not F it up.
I’m almost 60 now and not as spry of foot as when I was in my glory days. I may even be wiser and not as foolhardy too, but that is often questionable, especially by my wife. Alas, I did not try it.
Here are my picks of the PSAM — https://photos.app.goo.gl/aKEQJn2ggTzbVmAQ7
It was great and we spent 4h there. There is more to see. We want to go back.
My love of warbirds stem from my parents, who both grew up in the Philippines and were young kids when they saw US warbirds overhead during WW-II — my dad, RIP, was born in 1932, and my mom in 1939. When we were kids my dad had many books on the shelves. My favorite ones were a book series by Ballantine Books on WWII. I flipped through those paperbacks endlessly looking at the pics. I also built many plastic models of warbirds.
https://is.gd/uNFfga << images, Ballantine Books Illustrated History of WWII
They were great books and we had dozens of them.
How I ended up choosing the Marine Corps, and field artillery and not the air wing no less, is another story. On my ASVAB I did qualify for the avionics MOS, but I went 0848.
One more, about the DC-3 and the PSAM. My mom was once a stewardess for PAL (Philippines) on the DC-3. This was in the late 1950s when she was 20. She is 82 now and lives in LA. I want to arrange a family gathering at the PSAM where we all go up together in the one they have there for rides.
She’s the Russian/ Polish side of my Russi-Poli-Filipino heritage. She was awarded as Philippine Airlines’ “Miss Aviation” of 1959. Most of these pics are from a photo shoot from when she won that award. The bathing suit shot was on the Manila Times magazine cover. These were some of her glory days; pics here — https://photos.app.goo.gl/t7KBESTtGyMJoRMz8
I think I’ve shared some of those here on the Dope before.
She met my dad who was a business traveler on a flight. They got married later that year (yes, my dad hit on a flight attendant, and succeeded). She was barely 20. In those days that was a career-ending move for flight attendants. I was born soon after (1961), the first of five kids in 6 years. Her life took a different trajectory.
My mom was a beautiful lady. Still is.
Great pix. Thanks. Who’s the cute young woman you keep grabbing in so many of those pix? 
PSAM is one of the best museums for getting up close and touching stuff.
It definitely pays to visit twice; even most enthusiasts will be glazed before they see and touch everything on one visit.
I was last there about 2 years ago IIRC. For anyone interested, here’s the museum website.
Go Mom!
It doesn’t show the pilot getting in, but this video came across my Facebook feed a few minutes ago.
She is Da Boss!
I like the Zeno videos–there’s one on uncrating and assembling a P-47 in the field–and I also waste time watching Greg’s videos. Here’s one on the Corsair:
Egress, you say?
(The bit starting at 1:30 is interesting, too…)
There must be some economic or doctrinal reason why American fighters were generally bigger than the fighters of their adversaries. Even the P-51, hardly a huge fighter, was a bit heavier than the Fw-190 and a lot heavier than a Bf-109.
This wasn’t generally true of British planes early in the war but the later fighter models grew, too. The Tempest was an absolute monster.
I think it largely had to do with engine size. Generally the larger engines were more powerful and allowed for larger aircraft. The design of the F4 (and the P-47) started with the engine: they were explicitly made to house the P&W monster.
Up to a point a larger plane is more adaptable to later developments; e.g. a design with more wing area could be updated to larger engines, guns, and external gas tanks. The BF-109 was a marvel when it came out but it was too small to upgrade effectively and was greatly outclassed by the end of WW II. The Spitfire–designed at roughly the same time but larger–was still effective right to the end of the war with upgrades.
American aircraft generally had more armor as well. The Zero is generally considered an example of a very light fighter, but it didn’t have armor and was very lightly built. They were really manoeverable, but Americans learned to avoid them by diving away. The Zero was completely outclassed by the end of the war.
Also, because American fighters had to take the fight to the enemy, they needed long ranges. The combat range of a European fighter like the P-47 Thunderbolt was about 1600 km. The combat range of the FW-190 was only a little more than 1/4 of that, around 450km. It carried 639L of gas. The Thunderbolt carried 1402.
But many of the aircraft were similarly sized and weighted. The Mustang weighed about 3500kg. The Focke-Wolf FW-190 was 3200. For the extra 300kg the Mustang could carry 500l more fuel and had hardpoints on the wings for bombs.
Sam hit it. American design was built around armor and range. This means a bigger engine and undercarriage, which makes the whole thing super-sized. Pilot armor is virtually non-existent on most Axis fighters, especially Japanese fighters, whereas not only was the P-47 the toughest thing flying, it was big enough pilots said you could slip out of your seat and run around the fuselage to dodge enemy bullets. 
I don’t think the Bf 109 even had drop tanks. And I certainly do not recall seeing pictures of one carrying them. Maybe they didn’t have them at all, and so maybe they lacked even the supporting framework (and thus, weight) to carry them.
A guess.
There were versions of the 109 with drop tanks, but later in the war they were largely used to fight bombers so I guess they didn’t use them much.