Yeah, the only piston aircraft that get sea level speeds in the mid-400’s and higher are unlimited air racers. Those things are highly modified, with engine horsepower sometimes doubled, canopies chopped down, wngs clipped, etc.
The stock warbirds like Corsairs and Mustangs typically run in the low to mid-300’s. An unmodified Corsair ran 313 mph average in a race in 2012. In 2017 another one managed 308 mph around the course.
The fastest stock planes tend to include the Mustang, Corsair, Hawker Sea Furies, Bearcats, the odd Yak-11 or Yak-9. Sea Furies and Mustangs are the most common now it seems, probably due more due to the rarity of the other planes.
Are those average lap speeds, or top speeds, straight and level?
Behind the scenes! They only had six mismatched Corsairs and two fake Zeroes to simulate entire squadrons. The combat footage of the show planes got reused more than that in the original Battlestar Galactica. The big revelation: Conrad acted like an asshole. Film at 11!
I like the show - I have the DVDs of the 2/3 of the episodes they released, but even at 16 I knew it wasn’t a great show. As a military show, it was more unrealistic than MASH.
Yeah as a teenager I liked the show too. Little did I know then that I would end up enlisting in the Marine Corps and serving 13 years.
Gunny Bullitt
Bumped, after 7 months. On the Smithsonian channel’s series, “Air Warriors”, it shows a pilot boarding his F4U. It’s not quite the same steps as I saw at PSAM, the Palm Springs Air Museum. I uploaded it to You Tube and it’s about 30-40 seconds.
What about this one? I got this link from YT as a sharing link
The first one worked fine for me.
Both links worked for me. Thanks.
Thinking of Black Sheep, I recently watched the one with Frank Converse as the Maj Bong-esque AAC pilot of a P38. Watching the P38s fly made me notice how easy it must have been to put a Corsair on its nose during takeoff. That’s a lot of power. And they just let kids fly these things! Amazing.
And that doesn’t even take into account the F2G Goodyear Corsairs with the four row radial. That must have been a handful!
Cool, I’d never heard of such a thing, the F2G Super Corsair. Had to look it up.
That’s why it was dubbed the “Ensign Eliminator,” especially the early versions.
In Boyington’s autobiography he talked about the torque of the big radial in the Corsair, and how one new Corsair pilot flipped one over on its back by firewalling the throttle at too low a speed on takeoff. He wound up scalping himself in the accident.
Corsairs are on the short list for best fighter of WWII. They stayed in use until 1979, when Honduras finally stopped flying them in their air force. Corsairs even fought against Migs in Korea.
