I tested the A-5. To my surprise it flew the exact same distance on WEP as on Cruise!
The test:
Climb to 10,000 ft on DT. Level out, let speed settle. At grid line drop the DT, go to WEP. Distance covered 3.2 sectors.
Repeat, but instead of WEP use the Max Cruise setting from the HTC Help pages for the A-8; 33"man @ 2100 rpm. Distance covered 3.2 sectors, but took 50% longer.
Lesson: In A-5 use WEP for home run. You'll cover the same distance, but when you run out of fuel you'll be going almost 100mph faster, therefore additional glide distance.
This is clearly not right. On cruise all planes should be able to fly greater distances.
This also gives the P-47 another advantage in that it can "cruise" where other planes can't.
Historical Note on Charles Lindbergh regarding cruise settings from
http://www.ww2pacific.com/lindbergh.html:Republic had him test fly the P-47 Thunderbolt. United had him test the F4U Corsair. Working below the visibility of those in the upper Washington circles, he arranged to test the Corsair under combat conditions. Arriving at Guadalcanal, he showed how to take off with double the rated bomb-load and then showed that dive bombing with that load was out of the question, so he wiped out a gun emplacement with horizontal bombing.
MacArthur immediately heard of his unannounced arrival in the theater and ordered him to Australia where he was assigned to extend the range of the P-38 Lightning in New Guinea operations. Lindberg was able to return from combat missions with his tanks half full when others returned empty. He was able to teach how to add 500 miles to the P-38's range. It had been considered to be 400 miles, Lindbergh's techniques let the Lightning appear hundreds of miles from where the Japanese expected to find them. He flew missions to Balikpapan, Mindanao, even led a 4 plane raid on Palau, considered out of range of land based fighters, a base defended by 200 enemy fighters.
And from
http://p-38online.com/lindy.html: He flew along combat missions as an observer, and quickly calculated that the combat radius could be extended by 30%. A standard technique at the time was cruising at 2200 - 2400 rpm's in auto-rich at low manifold pressure. Lindbergh called for only 1600 rpm in an auto-lean mixture with a high manifold pressure. This reduced fuel consumption to 70 gallons per hour, and resulted in a cruising speed of 185 mph. By comparison, in July 1944, P-38s would fly a five-hour mission and come back on fumes, but after taking Lindbergh's advice, Colonel Jack Jenkins landed with over 160 gallons of fuel.