Hi Guppy,
>you can see in the 38 Group Histories a disctinct difference in opinion where the 38 trained guys liked the 38s and didn't want to transition to 51 "Spam cans" and the single engined trained guys welcomed the change. It was interesting to see that the 370th FG pilots who'd transitioned from Jugs to 38s, weren't thrilled when they transitioned from the 38s to 51s in March of 45.
The reluctance to part with whatever fighter one has been learned to fly and fight in is purely psychological and (up to a point) has nothing to do with its objective qualities. It's absolutely necessary for survival to concentrate on the strong points of one own's mount and devise tactics that avoid the weak points, so every fighter pilot will naturally tend to tell you that his mount has superior strengths and only minor weaknesses that, if the right tactics are used, don't matter much.
When combat pilots consider their fighter superior to any other, that's the same way of guarding one's mental health that leads test pilots to attribute any fatal crash to a "pilot error" every time. Of course, the personally would not have made the fatal error. Tom Wolfe has described this very impressively in "The Right Stuff".
Additionally, that so many squadrons preferred their current ride over any other was very much a case "better the devil you know". Having to acquire a new set of skills and tactics for a new fighter requires time, and during the necessary period of trial and error, every pilot is objectively endangered, so transitions are not taken easy.
(Of course, there is a point when the inferiority of a fighter becomes so obvious that the illusion of superiority breaks down. This had happened to the squadrons in the Pacific that flew P-39 and P-40 fighters - they couldn't get the P-38 soon enough.)
>For the obvious reasons, the 38 with the twin engines and range was the preferred ride of the Pacific fighter drivers with all that overwater flying. Something about that 2nd engine made a difference and they certainly had confidence in the 38s ability to compete with the Japanese planes they encountered.
Well, I'd say this was 100% a matter of confidence since no pilot in the theatre knew anything about the actual survival rates. Reputation and reality don't necessarily coincede. The Grumman Navy aircraft had a reputation for survivability, but the one Navy plane that really can be recoginzed in the post-war analysis as way tougher than the rest was the innocent-looking Douglas SBD. Likewise, the B-24 had a reputation for fragility compared to the supposedly more robust B-17, but the numbers show it was just as good or even better. The reputation the planes gained in the theatres were based on squadron-level experience, reinforced by hearsay, and comparison to other aircraft was mostly done in individual mock-fights which turned into rumours for all that were not directly involved.
OK, that's my take on the psychology of aircraft comparisons and the resulting difficulty of extracting valid information from historical opionion :-)
Regards,
Henning (HoHun)
