Comments by "TheThirdMan" (@thethirdman225) on "Real Engineering"
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@ronfox5519 The evidence I have is that, while it had a great reputation, there are other factors that have not been addressed. The pilots had a lot of faith in it, which is nice, but statistics are pretty inconclusive. The first statistic you’ll come across is that the P-47 had a loss rate of 0.73, compared with the P-51 at 1.18. Superficially, that’s a win for the Thunderbolt. The argument is rather more nuanced than that and the real question comes down to survivor bias.
To begin with, the P-47 was built out of roughly the same gauge of duralumin that other fighters were. While the internal structure is probably where the differences lie, the skin has the same level of bullet or cannon shell resistance as any other fighter: bugger all.
My comment in this thread was in reference to the kind of work the P-47 and P-51 were called up to do. Since the Mustang was a clear winner on range, it follows that it spent a lot more time in enemy airspace than the P-47. The Thunderbolt, on the other hand, did most of its work in northern France as well as Belgium and Holland. Because of that, a wounded P-47 had less distance to travel to get home than a P-51 with a similar problem, hence my illustrative example.
This is survivor bias.
And because the P-51 arrived later in the war, it faced much heavier Flak defences as the Wehrmacht retreated into Germany. Pretty much any pilot memoir from the late war period talks about how heavy the Flak was.
I have other statistics on this but again, they are largely inconclusive. They neither prove nor disprove the claim that the P-47 was more resistant to battle damage than the P-51. In any case, it rather gives the lie to the claim that the P-51 had a ‘glass jaw’ or was severely handicapped by its liquid cooled engine.
I know you didn’t say this but again, I’m trying to illustrate the fact that the differences were not as great as people think.
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@ronfox5519 Well, again, this kind of depends on how you look at it. Are there more photographs because the P-47 was tougher or are there more photographs because it had less distance to travel home? Is it a combination of the two? Probably.
Yes, the P-47’s reputation in this department is pretty stellar and I know that pilots placed a great deal of faith in their mount. But there are some things that get reported which I have yet to see photos of. I know there are anecdotes of P-47s returning with missing cylinders but I have yet to see a picture of one. I know there are similar claims for the FW-190. According to the internet, it was an every day occurrence. There are loads of pics, mostly real, of damaged P-47s but there is also context. Were they returned aircraft or were they damaged in a raid or airfield collision? Then there is the fake. There is a famous picture that purports to be a P-47 with most of the right wing missing. Closer inspection reveals that the undercarriage is in the wrong place.
I want to stress that I’m not saying that the stories aren’t true. My beef is not with the aircraft or the pilots. There are stories of Spitfires that came back with massive holes in them too and that was supposed to be, if anything, a somewhat delicate aircraft. So it kind of depends on context. The internet has made it possible to believe just about anything. Again, I want to stress that I’m not saying the stories aren’t true.
As I have said, whatever else is the case vis a vis survivability, the statistics are simply inconclusive.
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Jock Webb Meh, very different aircraft. There’s a lot of bull talked about the P-47, especially the new prop being worth an extra 1,000hp. On the other hand, it had a very good combat record and even British reports on its performance were quite complimentary, its handling being better than expected for such a heavy aircraft. In my opinion, the P-47 was a very good aircraft but not a great one. Although much is made of its high altitude performance, I would argue that its greatest asset was the group commanders like Gabby Gabreski, Hub Zemke and Don Blakeslee, who was as good as any allied group commander of the entire war and better than pretty much everyone else.
The Tempest V had a shorter career than the P-47 and there were fewer of them. For all the fuss made about the engineering in the P-47 in this video, there wasn’t really anything “insane” about it and the Tempest was rather more sophisticated. Probably overly so. The 24 cylinder, sleeve valve Napier Sabre was a good engine but a temperamental one and overall, the aircraft was not as forgiving as the P-47. On the other hand, at low to medium altitude, the Tempest, in good hands, was a beast of an aircraft and more than a match for anything the Luftwaffe had in service, barring the Me-262.
The Tempest was a late-war aircraft and evolutionary, rather than new and was in a corner of performance rather than being a jack-of-all-trades, which the P-47 was. The P-47 was a mid-war aircraft that made a large step into higher performance via a 2,000+ hp engine. It was a new design that underwent a lot of incremental changes. Ironically, the bubble canopy they put on it was nicked from a Tempest.
As in most cases, the deciding feature was the pilot. If he couldn’t get the best out of it, it didn’t matter what he was flying.
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