I saw this airplane painting on the wall behind someone being interviewed about something else entirely (Grumman Wildcats and Hellcats).
The TV show was Empires of Industry: War Planes of World War II. The interviewee was WWII carrier pilot “Whitey” Feightner.
The plane in the painting looks like some weird mix of an A-7 Corsair II and an A-10 Warthog. Does anybody here know if there was ever such a plane, real or on the drawing board? Or is it just an artist’s fantasy?
I read your description and thought “oh for crying out loud, what a description, I’m sure it doesn’t actually look like that,” and then clicked your link and that’s exactly what it looks like.
Kudos on the accurate description, but I can’t help with your question. I’ll be interested to see if there is an answer.
It’s some weird conglomeration of an A-10, A-7, and a couple other things. Not real.
I can’t say for sure that no one has gotten really drunk and put the two planes together, but it doesn’t make much sense to have the air intake under the nose with those engines, or to have three vertical stabilizers that aren’t all the same size. I mean, at least cut the A-7 stabilizer down to match.
The A-10 prototypes and later variants all look like A-10s, and this doesn’t look anything like the YA-9A, which lost the AF contract to the A-10. Plus the A-10 is built by Fairchild-Republic and the A-7 was built by Northrop Grumman, so it’s not like someone could easily borrow designs to make a hybrid.
As a naval aviation geek I must point out, in a friendly lemme-buy-you-a-beer way, that the A-7 was not from the Ironworks, but from Ling-Temco-Vought.
As a former employee of an LTV subsidiary, I concur.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here (since no one else has said it) and definitively say NO, that is not a real aircraft depicted in the painting.
Back in the crazy, no-holds-barred days of early aviation I could see someone trying a mashup of existing models, but by the time the A-7 and A-10 rolled around the costs were too great to throw something like that together.
And has been already pointed out - a big WTF on the design itself. So it’s supposed to be…ummm… a 3-engined, single-seat attack aircraft?
Edit: I see flyboy has already said Not Real. My apologies.
Well when a mommy corsair and a daddy warthog …
Declan
“Baby, let me show you the largest cannon ever mounted on an attack aircraft…”
Yeah, my mistake. I was (mistakingly) looking at it from the angle of who would actually own the design now. Northrop Grumman bought Vought later and I mistakebly thought they still owned them, thus I assumed the Vought design actually belonged to Grumman now turns out Carlyle Group bought out NG’s stake and renamed it Vought again, so all that was for nothing.
It’s still not as cool or historic as the Boeing P-51 or even the Boeing DC-3, though.
Since we’re on the topic of planes mashed together, I hope everyone knows about the F-82 Twin Mustang.
I’m personally fond of the Westland P12 invasion-beach strafer - essentially a Lysander with a Lancaster tail.
I’ve seen that before.
I think it was a rival for the A-10 contract.
No references, sorry.
The article on the Lysander mock up is a little confused, it looks like they have conflated an attempt to make a Defiant style turret night-fighter out of a Lysander with the beach strafer modification.
How someone can think an aircraft with a tail turret, could be a night-fighter I have no idea.
Update
The aircraft resembles a Corsair II, not a Crusader, as the radar dome is too rounded.
I contacted Voight Heritage Museum about odd plane.
I await the email, if any.
Am I the first to notice the image is titled ‘7-10_split.jpg’? 
garygnu: What was the odd design of the F-82 intended to accomplish? Was there a reason for making it look that unusual?
Yes :smack:
It was for even more range than a standard Mustang; a range so long that a relief pilot was needed. At least that was the idea. One F-82 set a record flying 14½ hours from Hawaii to New York.
It’s on the OP’s site, he’s probably the one who named the image.
