Thursday, March 26, 2009

Because I can...


Have a piccie of a Grumman F3F...
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21 comments:

hpcc19 said...

I'll see your plane and raise you a P26, the coolest thing ever to leave the ground

http://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m217/samva999/Peashooterarp750pix.jpg

7:22 PM, March 26, 2009
José Giganté said...

Everytime I see an F3F, I remember how my dad and I always argued about it. He insisted it was a Buffalo, I stood fast that the Buffalo was the monowing F2F. Thanks for bringing some memories back.

Oh, here's a Buff.
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/h97000/h97540.jpg

Myself, my favorite piston driven fighter has always been the Jug, I love me some Jugs. Razorbacks give them +10 against Gerrys.

http://home.comcast.net/%7Ebzee1b/Chino/DSC_6924.jpg

No airplane has ever looked more like kicking someone's ass than the Jug, period.

8:53 PM, March 26, 2009
Anonymous said...

Errr... small correction: the Buffalo was the F2A, built by a company called Brewster. Which is probably why it looked like a keg with wings. :-) I don't know if the F2F (which was a biplane) ever received a name.

My favorite piston-engined fighter is the P-38 Lightning. Double the engines gave double the ass-kicking capability. Best all-purpose aircraft of the entire war. There wasn't anything it couldn't do.

9:49 PM, March 26, 2009
closed said...

My fav?

The Curtis F9C.

9:52 PM, March 26, 2009
Anonymous said...

Radial engines and fabric: A girl after my own heart.

Jim

10:31 PM, March 26, 2009
Anonymous said...

Grumman always had way with landing gear. The F3F was exemplary.

10:32 PM, March 26, 2009
Joanna said...

Oh GOD, that's gorgeous. They just don't design 'em like they used to.

10:53 PM, March 26, 2009
Anonymous said...

The Jug and the Fork-Tail devil were indeed bad boys, but it was the first export version of Brewster's little Buffalo, the B-239 (equivalent to the F2A-1, but using rebuilt civilian Wright Cyclone engines out of DC-3s), which had the highest kill ratio of any aircraft in WW II, bar none. We sold 44 of them to the Finns, and they made 34 aces on those 44 aircraft, racking up a kill ratio of 26 to 1. Nothing else even came close. One of their B-239s had 41 kills to it's credit, the same as the highest-scoring allied ace, Sqn. Ldr. M.T. St. J. Pattle, a South African flying in the desert theatre. The Finns called the Brewster B-239 the "Sky Pearl", and only traded it in late in the war for late-model Me-109s.

BoxStockRacer

7:12 AM, March 27, 2009
Tam said...

Yup, the legend of the "Finnish Mustang".

Strip all the extra weight out of a Buffalo... you know, the nancy stuff like armor and self-sealing tanks, and that third pair of emmagees, and fill the cockpit with some motivated Finn, and you've got a hella little fighter.

7:17 AM, March 27, 2009
Anonymous said...

I know they pulled all the navy equipment out of it, like the life-raft, the clunky old navy radio, the heavy arrestor hook and associated equipment, and some other stuff, but I've never been able to find out just how much total weight they took out. I have looked for years for that information and can find no record of it. I do know they added some back. The B-239 had three 0.50s and a .30 (one .50 in each wing, one .50 in the nose, and a .30 in the nose). They dumped the .30, replaced it with a .50 (an outstanding mod), for a total of four .50s, added real seat armor, and replaced the funky old tube sight with a real reflector sight. They also made some mods to the old Wright Cyclones they got which solved the leaking oil and smoking problems.

I know how much the performance of the F4F Wildcat improved when they lightened it by about 230 pounds and upped the horsepower by 150 in the penultimate FM-2 version of the Wildcat, and I suspect the performance improvement in the B-239 was at least that good, as I've seen climb rates listed which equal a Zero's! And that with the crappy old used 1050 hp civvy Cyclone engines! I suspect they off-loaded about 400 pounds of stuff to get that performance, but I just don't know. Now if they would just weigh that B-239 they pulled out of the lake in Korelia which now resides in the navy museum maybe all would come clear . . .

BoxStockRacer

8:18 AM, March 27, 2009
Tam said...

Huh.

As you can see, all I knew about it was just stuff I'd read in passing on teh intertubes ten years ago.

Now I really need to go read.

8:26 AM, March 27, 2009
Tango Juliet said...

The things I don't learn here.

11:04 AM, March 27, 2009
Assrot said...

Y'all can keep your dinky little planes. Give me a CH-47 any day. I arrived in Vietnam on one back in early 1966.

I've always had a special place in my heart for them ever since.

Joe

12:38 PM, March 27, 2009
J.R.Shirley said...

Beautiful.

12:57 PM, March 27, 2009
Gewehr98 said...

It's missing 7 engines...

:-)

2:25 PM, March 27, 2009
Anonymous said...

My old man was in SBD's and could tweak a Cyclone 9 like nobody's business. You could pick up 15 or 20 horses just by setting the magnetos up tight. When the trailing rotor just barely clears the lead rotor, with nothing but the drag of a dollar bill as a feeler gage...

Thanks guys, for bringing back some great old memories. In the 50's, my dad was Line Chief at Green Cove Springs Florida NAS, getting all the WWII stuff coming in from reservists around the country and making it ready for the French to use in North Africa. I would go to work with him on Saturdays and sit in the cockpits wiggling the stick and trying (unsuccessfully)to reach the pedals.

My vote for the finest recip fighter of WWII, based solely on it's ability to shoot down any other prop fighter in one on one combat, would have to be the F4U Corsair. It could dive with a Thunderbolt, outroll a zero, and outclimb anything without a jet engine.

The old man hated them with a passion because of the very leaky hydraulic system in the powered, self folding wing. Memories.

4:25 PM, March 27, 2009
Anonymous said...

Oops! I screwed up. Bad memory. The second hand engines the Finns got stuck with for their B-239s were the civvy G5 version of the Wright Cyclone, which made only 950 hp, not the 1050 hp of our military version of the same engine. Makes their achievements even more amazing!

BoxStockRacer

2:14 AM, March 28, 2009
Buddy said...

This particular F3F was one of a group made here in Fort Worth, Texas at the Texas Airplane Factory based at Meachem Field. They used the data plates (which according to FARS ARE the A/C itself) and various bits and pieces of some crashed airframes and basically built new A/C around them!
I was in A&P school at the time, and watched them being test flown around the area. TAF is now building replicas of Nakajima KI-43s!

9:06 AM, March 28, 2009
B Smith said...

Wow, and I always thought of myself as a "wing-nut". Title ceded.

(That IS one purty li'l plane, tho.)

12:15 PM, March 28, 2009
Anonymous said...

"You're the top: you're a Brewster body..."

That Brewster. By most accounts the best Rolls-Royces ever (4-wheeled--the other distinction belongs to Packard), but the aeronautical division fell prey to the sort of managerial tragedy of errors that could never happen today. Oh no.

Their senior business team may have been the model for [the naughty side of] Francisco d'Anconia.

12:49 PM, March 28, 2009
Buddy said...

I also remember seeing a flight of 3 in vee formation... probably something that hasn't been seen since early WW2, and probably never will be seen again as they were sold to various groups and museums around the country. I think they built 4 total. Somewhere I have a photo of F3Fs in blue-grey over light grey camo at a training field somewhere in the states at the beginning of WW2.

3:03 PM, March 29, 2009

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