When the USAF was formed in 1948. P- was for pursuit and F- was for fighter.
Early jet fighters were massively underpowered. Years back, Aviation History had a short article about a fellow whose Panther or Cougar lost its nosecone over North Korea and his struggle to get the plane home because with the additional drag it could barely stay above a stall. A friend of mine was ground crew in Korea and a fun thing to do was have one guy chock the front wheel of an F-86 with his foot, then another guy would run up the engine to redline to get the plane to move. No aircraft moved and no feet were damaged, but you couldn’t do that if the plane was already in motion.
McNamara forced a common naming format on the services, but AFAIK the only difference for USN/USMC was the addition of hyphens. The only aircraft designation that was forced on a service that I know of was that the USN F4B “Phantom II” / USAF F110A “Spectre” became the F-4B “Phantom II”.
Not a UL - Bell test pilot Bob Stanley was concerned that other aircraft might wander close enough to the test area at Muroc Dry Lake to notice the odd configuration. He wore a gorilla mask and a bowler hat, with a cigar in his mouth, so that anyone seeing the plane *and *him would think they were crazy and not say anything about the lack of a propeller.
Bell also mounted a fake wooden prop on the nose for ground handling purposes.
Well, yeah, but sometimes Hitler’s interference wasn’t so much directly contradicting someone as just “setting up competing programs and keeping everyone in the dark,” which was interference enough. This appears to have been a deliberate policy of his, to prevent any subordinate or organization from acquiring too much power and influence. Often, theses competing organizations hoarded resources and concealed their data from each other. As a management style, it failed to compete effectively with the Allies’ “throw men and money at the problem and get out of the way” style best exemplified by the Manhattan Project. On the other hand, he was not overthrown, so maybe it did accomplish one of his objectives.
Meh. I don’t think “technological superiority” characterizes the Nazi start position; each side was ahead in some fields and behind in others. And your question hinges on the definition of “significant,” in that we only recognize as “significant” the ones that got backing and were produced in sufficient quantity in time to affect the war.
A tangentially related question that fascinates me is how many of the war’s most effective weapon systems were the product of different countries cooperating. In case after case, we see that neither country had complete success until they blended their efforts. And certainly the Allies had more opportunity to merge their scientific and technical efforts than the Axis (Italy not contributing much technologically and Japan being so physically isolated and having such a fundamentally different approach to weapons research).
Just to cite a few examples off the top of my head:
[ul]
[li]P-51 Mustang: UK engine powers US airframe[/li][li]Radar: Extensive UK/US cooperation[/li][li]Convoy: UK tactic and sonar employed by UK, US, and Commonwealth forces[/li][li]T-34: US tank designer Walter Christie’s ideas adapted and expanded by USSR tank designers[/li][li]Enigma decryption: a melange of efforts by Poland and UK with a dash of French aid[/li][/ul]
A few of the German successes even benefited from taking ideas or tech from other countries without cooperation:
[ul]
[li]Panther tank copied (and expanded) from USSR T-34[/li][li]ME-262 jet development boosted by studying UK’s Whittle jet research[/li][/ul]
And so on. Different research cultures working together often produce fruitful hybrids.
One of my favorites: the program summary saying “Roman Emperor Julius Caesar attacks Pompeii”
(In case anyone is wondering, Julius was never Emperor, and they are probably trying to refer to his rival Pompey the Great, not the city buried under volcanic ash).
It’s more accurate to say that the P-51 was the grandpappy of the F-86:
P-51 -> FJ-1 -> F-86
Of course, a lot changed in the transition from P-51 to FJ-1, and even more between FJ-1 and F-86, so it’s disingenuous (to the point of being wrong) to call the F-86 a swept-wing jet-powered “tweaked” P-51.
Well, as i say, the P-59 was rushed into development-the design was approved by General “Hap” Arnold (who headed aircraft development for the USAAF). My guess is that he hoped to leapfrog the Germans and Japanese-when the new plane turned out so poorly, it was a major embarrassment. It can be argued that the German jet fighters were also not worth their immense development costs-the Reich would have done better buy building more conventional fighters.
Major embarrassment? It was experimental and a way to get pilots, groundcrew, and engineers used to jets. Jet fighter evolution was moving very quickly and most early designs had short service lives before they were obsolete.
Well, yes and no. The AD Skyraider was an Attack aircraft built by Douglas. Then there were subtypes and modifications of subtypes. For example, IIRC, my dad flew in an AD-4W. So it was the AEW version of the fourth subtype of the Douglas (first – the ‘1’ was omitted) Attack design that was the Skyraider. When the designations were changed, it became the A-1. The A3D Skywarrior was the 3rd design of a Douglass Attack aircraft, which became the A-3. The A3J Vigilante was the 3rd design of an Attack aircraft by North American (‘J’). It became the A-5.
The previous USN scheme was a little complicated, but more descriptive than the new scheme. FWIW, the ‘H’ in F4H stood for McDonnell.
And because the B-26 Marauder was out of service by 1948 the A-26 Invader could be renamed the B-26. Our late David Simmons flew Marauders in WWII and I once asked if he was annoyed that a boxy thing from Douglas would try to horn in on the glorious name of the beautiful Martin Marauder, but he said he wasn’t.
Quote:
T-34: US tank designer Walter Christie’s ideas adapted and expanded by USSR tank designers
Walter Christie was a rather eccentric guy-but his drivetrain and suspension designs for tanks were ahead of his time. His tanks could hit speeds of 60 MPH. Both the USSR and Germany infringed his patents.
Was swinging by to mention that the F-4 Phantom II’s original Navy designation was F4H, not F4B.
Also, I think someone mentioned the F-102 upthread, and I have a nitpick: Strictly speaking, the wasp-waisting didn’t do anything for the F-102. By the time this and other design improvements were implemented, they ended up with a sufficiently different aircraft to call it the F-106.
A group photo which includes both the F-102 and F-106, facing each other. To match up the planes with the caption, the F-89 Scorpion is at the 2 o’clock position. Basically, you can see a bit of the wasp-waisting on the F-106 (4 o’clock), but the easiest difference for me to spot is the positioning of the jet intakes. On the F-102, they’re forward of the cockpit, on the F-106, they’re aft of the cockpit, over the wings.