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Snub nosed planes vs pointed planes in ww2


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This is another article I found that I though was worth copying.  The original question:

why were fighter planes in the Pacific snub nosed while those in Europe were more pointed nosed?

 

Radials have some key advantages for carrier operations.

  1. They are short. The short nose is a big advantage in landing on a carrier. It gives the pilot a much better view as he's coming into land. Carrier planes crashed about 4 times more frequently than land based planes, due to the motion of the ship, the narrow margins for error and failure to catch the arrestor cable. Anything that helped the pilot make a safe, well judged approach and allowed him to see the directions of the ‘batman' on the deck more clearly was a big bonus.
  2. They are simpler in that they don't use a water cooling system. Arguably they are therefore more reliable. On a carrier that meant no need to carry spare radiators, piping, coolant etc. They also had to cover vast distances reliably. A single bullet or fragment of shrapnel could cause a water cooled engine to fail. Over vast ocean distances the chances of survival if you ditched were low. A radial could take more engine damage and keep running. Also the room and weight that a water cooling system took up could be used for more fuel and ammunition.

In Europe the war was fought over land. As a rule of thumb water cooled engines were inline and this allowed them to be more streamlined. Planes like the Spitfire, Messerschmitt 109 and Mustang come to mind. This streamling meant (all things being equal) they could go faster than a radial engine of the same power. But water cooled engines were longer than radials because they were ‘inline'. Hence longer noses were needed to accommodate them.

In land based operations speed was a prime requirement and often outweighed the fact they were more prone to damage. Most could glide to forced landings if necessary. And landing on land with wide open space (most airfields were flat grassed areas) was a less dangerous practice.

So it's a bit like evolution. The fittest designs for their environments prevailed.

Of course as I'm sure others will point out, there are many exceptions to these generalisations I've given. For example the P47 Thunderbolt was widely and successfully used in Europe, (as well as the far East). But it needed a much bigger capacity radial engine with more power than an inline to get its high performance. That engine needed a more fuel (because of both its size and its inherent drag), so the plane had to be bigger and was therefore more expensive to build than say a Mustang, which was pretty much as fast, but had a greater range.

But on the whole these principles hold true.

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Some of that holds up, some doesn't.  None of the Grumman Cats was particularly short nosed.  Nor were the Corsair variants.  The closest to being short nosed was the Thunderbolt, which didn't fly from carriers.  As for taking engine damage, yes, there was not a liquid cooling system to damage, but put a hole in the oil cooler, or damage one cylinder and the plane would go down.  Maybe get 25 miles farther than an inline, but it would still go down from engine damage.  It might have been easier to get armor around the radials and the oil coolers than the liquid cooled inlines.

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44 minutes ago, Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984 said:

The short nose is a big advantage in landing on a carrier. It gives the pilot a much better view as he's coming into land.

When I read that the F4U Corsair came to mind. The Hose Nose is what my Daddy called it.

 

It has a snub nose, instead of pointed, and it has a radial engine. But the cockpit was back about halfway down the fuselage. When that tail wheel came down you couldn't see nothing.

5024523.jpg

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I read in some WWII article that the Navy gave the Corsairs to the Marines to use on pacific island landing strips because they could get the plane to land on carriers. The British figured out how to land them on their carriers by making the big fishhook approach so the pilot could look out side of the cockpit and get lined up to land. Then our Navy started teaching that approach 

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9 minutes ago, Irish-Pat said:

I meant could NOT get them on the carrier at first. I left out “NOT”

Go ahead and blame otto for leaving out NOT.

 

We've started blaming him for everything else. :D

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What I had read was navy specified radial engines.  So all navy planes were radial engines.  Other branches did not thus had various power plants.  I never looked into why the navy wanted radial engines.   There is some interesting reading on ww2 planes.   One of the more interesting theories was that the us had better gas and thus had the upper hand on fighters.   Was easier to get more performance with better fuel.  

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I've read, in various and sundry books over the years, where they would replace a "jug". That would be the piston and cylinder together. If it went bad - if it caught a bullet - if the plane made it back to base they could unbolt the damaged cylinder and replace it.

 

Could they do that in an inline engine? If I'm flying along with my V12 Rolls-Royce engine, and Jerry puts a bullet in one of the cylinders, does that require an engine replacement, or can the cylinder and piston be replaced? I never was much of a mechanic, but I'm pretty sure if you have a busted cylinder / piston in a car engine, you go looking for a new engine.

 

It seems like an airplane engine would work the same.

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16 hours ago, Alpo said:

and Jerry puts a bullet in one of the cylinders, does that require an engine replacement,

 

The bullet has to go through at least one wall of the engine block to get to the cylinder.  Full engine replacement.

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