Originally posted by Zulu7
Nomak the 51 could only do it over Berlin because it had a British motor. And If we hadn't asked for, proposed it the 51 would never have existed. It was designed to meet a British request for fighters from U.S.A So yep a great aerop[lane that owes its existance to us good ole Brits. Thanks for making it.
Hmm.... Let's review history a bit. The Brits went to North American Aviation and asked them to build P-40s under license from Curtiss. NAA refused and offered to build a better fighter of their own design. Thus was the P-51 born, not so much because of the Brits, but somewhat in spite of them.
About the time the RAF began cobbling up Mustangs with Merlins, an American, familiar with the Merlin, made the same suggestion to the Army. North American's version was a lot cleaner and better integrated. Meanwhile, Packhard was contracted to build Merlins and went about converting the engine to Amercian Machine Standards (generally meaning tighter machine tolerances).
While all of this was going on, Lockheed was already flying a version of the P-38 (the K model) that performed as well or better than the P-51B, had equal range and could have been available by the fall of 1943. It was turned down by the War Production Board who didn't want to shut the P-38 line down for the few weeks required to tool up for the revised fighter. Over at At Republic Aviation, a P-47C-5 was modified with the new R2800 C series engine producing 2,800 hp. It demonstrated speeds up to 480 mph in testing. In 1944, 3 P-47D-27s had the same engines installed and thus appeared the P-47M. Drawings were already underway in 1943 for putting fuel into wing tanks (increasing the span by 44 inches) to give the Jug a 1,000 mile combat radius. This eventually appeared 18 months later as the P-47N.
While the P-51 was a fabulous aircraft, several other fighters were nearly ready to step in and fill the long-range escort role had the Merlin Mustang never been built.
My regards,
Widewing
