Just thought I'd share this (P-40)

[StarOfAfrica2]

Text from an advertisement in May 1944 issue of Flying magazine.

THAT OUR PILOTS MIGHT OUTFIGHT THE ENEMY

CURTISS P-40... Cradle of Heroes Born in the Sky

Enemy hordes stalked the global skies! Into the blue against them flew pilots of the United Nations, airborne on Curtiss P-40 wings. This is history!

From the earliest days of World War II, these teams of plucky pilots and their Curtiss P-40's have swept the air in every theater of conflict. On occasion, "lone wolfing." Other times in squadrons.! Their total formed a mighty armada whose blazing guns have written an unparalleled saga of successful aerial combat.

In battle-raked heavens throughout the world, these pilots have won undying glory, symbolized by distinguished military decorations. Honor the pilots!

Salute the scrappy Curtiss P-40 fighters which carried them to success. Together, against overwhelming odds, they fought to finally wrest air supremacy for America and its Allies.

Another contribution of
CURTISS-WRIGHT CORPORATION
Airplane Division.

TOWARD WINNING THIS WAR

Buffalo - Columbus - St. Louis - Louisville

[Oldman731]

Originally posted by StarOfAfrica2
From the earliest days of World War II, these teams of plucky pilots and their Curtiss P-40's have swept the air in every theater of conflict.

Heh heh.  I like it.  "Plucky pilots."

Should be a new squad name.

- oldman

[Widewing]

It's too bad that by 1944, Curtiss had one foot in the Aircraft Manufacturer's grave. Their XP-60 program was a debacle. They lost their contract to manufacture P-47Gs due to incredibly bad quality control. Things were tough for Curtiss then. Congress was calling for the end of P-40 production and using the resources and materials for modern aircraft.

What killed Curtiss was old thinking and a lack of vision. This was exacerbated by a drain-off of talented personnel who flocked to the other manufacturers. It was a shame, because just 10 years earlier Curtiss was at the top of the heap.

My regards,

Widewing

[Karnak]

Marketing people never change.

[Urchin]

One american airplane manufacturor went out of business during WW2... but I can't remember who it was.  Wasn't it the folks who made the Buffalo?

[Widewing]

Originally posted by Urchin
One american airplane manufacturor went out of business during WW2... but I can't remember who it was.  Wasn't it the folks who made the Buffalo?

Yeah, it was Brewster. Same problems as Curtiss, but they had a lot less money from the outset. Like Curtiss, they lost a contract due to poor delivery and awful quality (building F4Us).

My regards,

Widewing

[GRUNHERZ]

Originally posted by Karnak
Marketing people never change.

My thoughts xactly as I read the first post...  

[hogenbor]

Originally posted by Widewing
They lost their contract to manufacture P-47Gs due to incredibly bad quality control.

What killed Curtiss was old thinking and a lack of vision.

Do you have more info on this, especially on the bad quality control? I'd like to know how this manifested itself.

And please describe 'old thinking' if you can. Was it management, production methods, design?

Regards,

Ronald

[Widewing]

Originally posted by hogenbor
Do you have more info on this, especially on the bad quality control? I'd like to know how this manifested itself.

And please describe 'old thinking' if you can. Was it management, production methods, design?

Regards,

Ronald

As to the P-47Gs, the War Production Board cancelled 4,220 P-47s based upon several factors.

1) Late delivery (Curtiss produced just 354 planes over 9 months, while Republic built a new plant in Indiana, trained a work force and rolled out 1,141 P-47s in half that time).
2) Failure to meet acceptance criteria on a large percentage of aircraft presented to the USAAF for acceptance.
3) The Truman Commission's excoriating report on the inefficiency of Curtiss Wright.

As to Curtiss, one needs only examine the XP-60 program to understand that Curtiss was not able to design and build a modern fighter that met USAAF specifications. No CW designed fighter after the P-40 was accepted by the USAAF. They were unable to resolve design problems, or their solution was so late that the design was already obsolete or surpassed by rival company's designs.

This is a big topic to discuss in such a limited forum. I suggest you locate a copy of "Whatever Happened to Curtiss-Wright?: The Story of How a Very Successful Aircraft Company Took Itself Out of the Business" by Robert W. Fausel, for details on the demise of CW.

My regards,

Widewing

[StarOfAfrica2]

Originally posted by Widewing
As to the P-47Gs, the War Production Board cancelled 4,220 P-47s based upon several factors.

1) Late delivery (Curtiss produced just 354 planes over 9 months, while Republic built a new plant in Indiana, trained a work force and rolled out 1,141 P-47s in half that time).
2) Failure to meet acceptance criteria on a large percentage of aircraft presented to the USAAF for acceptance.
3) The Truman Commission's excoriating report on the inefficiency of Curtiss Wright.

As to Curtiss, one needs only examine the XP-60 program to understand that Curtiss was not able to design and build a modern fighter that met USAAF specifications. No CW designed fighter after the P-40 was accepted by the USAAF. They were unable to resolve design problems, or their solution was so late that the design was already obsolete or surpassed by rival company's designs.

This is a big topic to discuss in such a limited forum. I suggest you locate a copy of "Whatever Happened to Curtiss-Wright?: The Story of How a Very Successful Aircraft Company Took Itself Out of the Business" by Robert W. Fausel, for details on the demise of CW.

My regards,

Widewing

You can find evidence of problems with Curtiss Wright management decisions long before that.  During the design of the P-40, it was originally designed with the belly-scoop radiator like the P-51.  The prototypes kept this design all the way up until just before production, when CW management decided to change it to a forward mount radiator over the objections of the designer.  It led to many later problems with the aircraft.  Guess where the designer of the P-40 went?  lol

[Karnak]

Originally posted by StarOfAfrica2
You can find evidence of problems with Curtiss Wright management decisions long before that.  During the design of the P-40, it was originally designed with the belly-scoop radiator like the P-51.  The prototypes kept this design all the way up until just before production, when CW management decided to change it to a forward mount radiator over the objections of the designer.  It led to many later problems with the aircraft.  Guess where the designer of the P-40 went?  lol

Well, that would certainly explain why North American was so confident that they could build a better fighter than the P-40 in six months for the British.

[StarOfAfrica2]

From the book WARBIRDS American Legends of WWII, section on the "Hawks".

In October 1934, when Curtiss-Wright's Donovan R. Berlin began design work on the Hawk 75 - later designated the P-36 - he had no idea the airframe, basically unchanged, would live on in onver 13,000 Tomahawks, Kittyhawks, and Warhawks (all versions of the P-40).  

............................. ...................

Berlin tried a different tack (from design of the disastrous XP-37).  In standard trim the 1710 (Allison) made 1090 HP at 10,000 feet.  To up the power, Berlin asked Allison to step up the rpm of the 1710's single-stage mechanical supercharger.  (This) was installed in the tenth production P-36 airframe - modified with a belly scoop radiator - and flown for the first time on 14 October 1938.  Dubbed the XP-40, it won the Army Air Corps' May 1939 fighter competition at Wright Field with a top speed of 365 mph at 15,000 feet.  The Army immediately ordered 524 examples.

In one of a number of top-level decisions indicative of what would later spell doom for the company, Curtiss-Wright mangement ordered Berlin to redesign the aircraft to mount the readiator under the nose.  They thought it looked better this way, although it cost the aircraft speed. On 4 April 1940 test pilot Lloyd Childs flew the first production P-40, and by 1 June the Army began to take delivery of an aircraft that, from the firewall back, was essentially unchanged from its introduction in 1934.................

Berlin was well aware of the aircraft's limitations.  As the first P-40B's were rolling off the assembly line in May 1941, Berlin was in England to question RAF pilots about the relative merits of British and German aircraft.  After a glimpse of Rolls-Royce testing its new Merlin 60 engine, he quickly asked for this two-speed, two-stage supercharged, high-altitude engine for the P-40.  Unfortunately, he was only able to swing the low-altitude Merlin 28 (for the P-40F and L), just slightly better than the 1150 HP Allison being installed int he P-40E's at the end of 1941.  As a result, the P-40 was forever destined to be a low-altitude fighter.  Berlin was so frustrated by Curtiss' lack of management and enineering foresight that he resigned at the end of December 1941 and went to work for General Motors.

My statement in the previous post was a bit misleading.  Berlin did not actually go to work for North American, but he did provide them with the designs that eventually led to the development of the P-51.  The XP-46 was well under development at Curtiss-Wright, but due to all their resources being used on production of the P-40, it would take several months to build even prototypes of the XP-46.  The Army basically told Britain and France to look for someone who wasnt already tied up in heavy production to build their planes (they wanted to buy P-40's, as that is what was available in numbers).

This is from the same book, in the section on the P-51.

During the first months of the war the British and French renewed their efforts to purchase US-built aircraft, settling on the P-40.  Lt. Benjamin S. Kelsey, head of the Army Air Corps Pursuit Projects Office at Wright Field, and his boss, Col. Oliver P. Echols regretted this since it would push a new Curtiss Fighter, the XP-46, off the assembly lines.  Air Corps commander Gen. H.H."Hap" Arnold decided he could not spare the four-month lag in production to change from the P-40 to the P-46 - if America were drawn into the war, quantity would be drastically needed.

In January 1940, recalled Kelsey, "Echols made a suggestion to the Anglo-French Purchasing Commission to find a manufacturer who wasn't already bogged down with high-priority stuff.  Curtiss-Wright and the Air Corps would make available all the data we had on the XP-46 in place of the P-40, to find some way of getting around the problem."

Scouting for other companies to build the P-40, the commission was drawn to North American Aviation, which had done a sterling job in providing Harvard trainers.  The company made it clear they had no desire to build another firm's fighter;  they wanted to design one themselves.  

Donovan Berlin had spent the better part of the last two years developing the XP-46.  With hs go-ahead, NAA Vice President Leland Atwood bought the data, along with the results of how the aborted belly radiator scoop worked on the original XP-40 for $56,000.  On 4 May, NAA signed a Foreign Release Agreement with the Air Corps permitting sale of the Model NA-73 overseas, providing that two examples were supplied to the Army.  Kelsey and Echols had maneuvered hard to get their new fighter built at a time when the Air Corps had no procurement money.

................Wing designer Larry Waite incorporated, at the insistence of Edward Horkey (aerodynamicist), the NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) laminar-flow wing section, which had not been in the original design concept.  Kelsey had pushed behind the scenes ........ to get the new wing design into the project.............."All this happened," recalled Kelsey, "without anyone at Wright Field having the foggiest notion of what was going on.  We had to stay out of it because it was a British procurement."  The NAA team's genus resulted in the best design possible around the radical NACA laminar-flow wing section.

Though the Curtiss data was shipped by crate to California, Atwood later said not much of it was used in the final design.  Others in the industry, particularly Berlin and those at Curtiss said otherwise from the time the Mustang became famous.

[Widewing]

Originally posted by StarOfAfrica2
From the book WARBIRDS American Legends of WWII, section on the "Hawks".



My statement in the previous post was a bit misleading.  Berlin did not actually go to work for North American, but he did provide them with the designs that eventually led to the development of the P-51.  The XP-46 was well under development at Curtiss-Wright, but due to all their resources being used on production of the P-40, it would take several months to build even prototypes of the XP-46.

I do not buy into the theory that the XP-46 influenced NAA's design. This is because the two aircraft couldn't have been more different. In terms of performance, the XP-46 was a pig, slower than the P-40E. Even in terms of construction, there is little in common.

My regards,

Widewing