P47 and Black widow lovers

[Duckwing6]

first a Pic  

 

Guys get yourselfe the Flight journal .. outstanding magazine  

The last issue had an article about the Black widow:

Quote from John W. Mayers Northrop Testpilot:
"So i had a little 'show off' flight that i had practiced; it took about three minutes: very short takeof, back across the deck at red-line 420mph, loop down to deck again and do an Immelman, come out of Immelmann, feather one engine on the way down to deck, two slow rolls off teh deck intto the dead engine, approach and land short. This made true believers of all pilots who witnessed it"

And at one instance on a demo flight they spotted a flight of Navy Grumman F4F Fighters, dived to their level, feathered an engine and passed them while doing slow rolls!  

Guess that opened those fighter joks eyes  

DW6

[Ripsnort]

Hmm, we must get our mags a month before the Euro's, I've had mine for 3 weeks now!  (Only makes sense, publisher is in US?)
Great magazine!

[Jimdandy]

I think that was the mag I read three great stories in. One was on the restoration of a bunch of P-47's that they found in S. America not to long ago. One of those countries used the P-47 onto the 60's. Another (different article) used 51's into the 70's. Another good article was on the F4U. It was a newer model and the pilots hated it. They had put all kinds of new automatic controls on it that actually made it harder to fly. Two I remember where the automatic boots control for the engine and the other was the auto trim. The boost control made it hard to formation fly because they would kick in at slightly deferent times. The trim control was killing pilots during dive bombing practice. The contact points would weld together and over trim the plane. They finally figured out what it was because some really strong pilot was able to correct for it and pull out of the dive. So when he got home they looked at it and found the problem. The other one was on the need to pressurize the ignition system on the planes that flew above about 35k. At that altitude the resistance of the insulation on the wire is insufficient to contain the spark. The spark just grounds and kills the engine (I think it was the F4U that they were talking about.) When the plane dropped below this alt they could restart the engine. One of the engineers got to talking to a friend over at Republic about the strange problem. The guys at Republic had figured it out while testing the P-47.