How would you rate the various fighters operated from carriers during World War II? Which would you consider the best and which the worst? Rate more than just pure combat capability - Rate Aircraft Reliability, Ease of Landing on / Taking off a Carrier, Operational Range, Protection, and any other factors which you classify as important. A few lines of why is appropriate as well.

Pretty easy really (in chronological order)

Overall Importance

Allied
F4F/Wildcat/Martlet - has to be the most important
Seafire - for just working all let alone working as well as it did for so long (Mk.47 being the sexiest looking fighter of the era IMHO)
F6F - as the late war US backbone

Honorable mentions to:
Sea Gladiator - Defense of Malta (Faith Hope and Charity)
F8F - for its performance

Axis
A6/Type 0 'Zero'
A7M Reppu

On a technical level, ease of landing/maintenance
Sea Gladiator
A6M
F4F
F6F
A7M
Seafire

As Combat Aircraft
??? which period, which pilots, which Mk and model ???



shane

Only planes that actually saw significant combat as a carrier fighter, so no F8F-1, Sea Gladiator, Seafire Mk.47, etc...

Combat capability
F4U-1/4
F6F-3/5
A6M-2/3/5
SeaFire II/III
F4F-3
F4F-4

Reliability
F6F-3/5
F4U-1/4
F4F-3/4
Seafire II/III
(don't know enough about the A6M, but would probably rate it ahead of the Seafire)

Ease of Landing on / Taking off
F6F-3/5
F4F-3/4
F4U-1/4
Seafire II/III
(don't know enough about the A6M, but would probably rate it ahead of the F4F-3/4)

Operational Range
A6M-2/3/5
F4U-1/4
F6F-3/5
F4F-3/4
Seafire II/III

Protection
F6F-3/5
F4F-3/4
F4U-1/4
Seafire II/III
A6M-2/3/5

Worse - Brewster Buffalo
Best- Vought F4U Corsair

You mean you would rate it lower than the Skua?



Problems with oil pan being shot out from previous discussions as well as being hard to land.
Thats why I tend to rate the Hellcat slightly higher

You would rate that as higher than the Roc?

If there are high losses taking off and landing on the carrier, the aircraft and pilots are just as gone as if they were shot down. A good carrier-based fighter had to be relatively easy to handle around the boat by an inexperienced and below-average pilot. Given that consideration, the F6F Hellcat is clearly the best WWII carrier fighter.

Well, the Roc was never really operated from carriers if I understand while the Skua was?

I would have to say that this conclusion warrants more than just "that consideration" as it's preface.

I believe the F6F had a better kill-to-loss ratio, with a higher total count of enemy planes shot down, a very respectable tonnage of ordnance carried and dropped, all supported by a better operational accidents rate than any other leading contender.

All in all it was a tremendous weapon of war. I still think the F4U is sexier, and clearly a better plane in terms of pure performance, but for the most useful carrier fighter of the war my vote goes to the 'cat.

-Mark 1

By that same token, the Seafire had good stats on paper but their loss rates to landing accidents etc. were outright crippling.

Agreed. Yet, it remains a matter of record which one the USN/USMC continued to operate after the war and the supposed poor-landing F4U even operated off of the escort carriers during the Korean War. What did the RN operate as piston-engine fighters postwar?

I'm not particularly knowledgeable about the F4U but I believe that the F4U-4 and F4U-5 were a considerable improvement in this regard compared to the earlier models, and IIRC the F4U-4 only came into service during the spring of 1945. The USN and USMC certainly did not operate the F4U-1 off of CVEs.

Did not read about many Hellcats in the korean War. Corsairs were still being used in the early stages. Must be a reason for that. It was a probably a better plane in the MArine's eyes.

If that isn't a rhetorical question:

Sea Fury

Firefly

Sea Hornet

How much were they operated off of carriers and how much off of ground bases. Also, the Corsair could take a larger engine.
The Grumman Iron Works also had some new toys including the Bearcat

Best to worst

F4U-4 Corsair
F6F-5 Hellcat
Seafire III
Seafire I
A6M2 Reisen
F4F-4 Wildcat
Firefly F1
Sea Hurricane
Fulmar
Buffalo (Did it see combat from a CV?)
Skua
Sea Gladiator

IMHO, While the Hellcat had the better combat record, the Corsair was a far superior Fighter. It equals or surpasses the Hellcat in every criteria.

How was the Corsair far superior? Which one was easier to land on an aircraft carrier?

The only Hellcats used on Korea were rigged up as primitive cruise missiles. Corsairs were used throughout the war.

From what I've been able to gather, the F4U was the (somewhat) superior fighter, but required a higher degree of technical proficiency on the part of the pilot to extract it (to say nothing of landing on carriers) unlike the F6F, which demanded less in terms of skill on the part of mass-produced aviators in wartime. F6F apparently had much more predictable handling characteristics at speeds under 200KIA (big wing area). That's not where you want to fight, but is pretty critical to getting in the air and back down safely again.

Corsair could also carry more stuff to the fight. (and it's prettier)

I have been doing some research in my library and on the web. My current thinking is that the F6F-3 and F6F-5 probably get the nod over the F4U-1D (first version to be assigned to carriers, in December 1944) due to better handling qualities but the F4U-1D did cure most of the vices of the earlier models of F4U. The F4U-4 (introduced into combat in April 1945) was clearly superior to the F6F-5 in most ways except that the Hellcat was probably still easier to get aboard. There was an improved version of the Hellcat designated the F6F-6 which was essentially the direct counterpart of the F4U-4 but it did not go into production because the Navy and Grumman decided to concentrate on the F8F Bearcat. The F8F was a tiny little airplane with a massive engine. The F4U was a better fighter-bomber than the F8F which is why the F4U and not the F8F went to Korea but as a pure dogfighter the F8F may have been the best piston-engine fighter ever. Of course the F8F just missed combat in WWII by a few months so it doesn't count. Ditto for the F4U-5 which also missed WWII by about a year. So for the United States Navy carrier-based fighters of WWII and immediately thereafter, best to worse looks like:

F8F-1* (air to air), F4U-5* (fighter-bomber)
F6F-6* tied with F4U-5
F6F-5 tied with F4U-1D
F6F-3

* aircraft that did not see operational service in WWII

But of course even the airplane at the bottom of the list was an excellent airplane, and when the F6F-3 was introduced it was exactly what was needed and the F4U-1/1A/1C were unsatisfactory for use on carriers.

If I recall correctly " Fire in the Sky" by Bergerund(sp) stated the F4F was the best plane to fly and very forgiving but not as good of a weapon as the F6F or the F4U. The F4F was best at a traditional dogfight with the Zero but U.S. tactics were swope and gun , climb then swope again. The U.S. change of tactics were suited to the heavy robust gunships.

I was under the impression that with the F4U it was only the early bird-cage variants that experiences CV landing difficulties due to poor visibility and suspension?

Different purposes, but interesting for points of comparison between the specified models...



FW-190A5-U8 Vrs F4U-1D and F6F-3 Navy Fly-off comparison

Your one component does not rule out the fact that the Corsair was better at everything else. It wasnt impossible to land an F4U onboard, just took a lot of work.

If the USN didnt have the F6F by mid 43 I am sure they would have had F4U's on board.

It's true it depends which dash numbers are being compared, and the introduction of different Hellcat and Corsair models was staggered. In 1945, the only year in WWII when the F4U was a significant *carrier* fighter in the USN, the comparison was generally later F4U-1's with F6F-5 and those two didn't differ even in performance all that much (the particular F4U-1D and F6F-5 tested v. A6M5 clocked best speeds of 413mph and 409mph, demonstrating how official speed stats always have to be taken with caution). Moreover in actual fighter-fighter combat in 1945, the claimed ratio's of F4U's (including some -4's) and F6F's against fighter types (albeit claims not real Japanese losses, and further inflated by fighter-type kamikaze targets, but nonetheless presumably comparable between the two) were almost exactly the same. So most evidence indicates the F6F-5 and F4U-1D had similar capabilities in fighter combat. The F4U-1D was a better interceptor (at least a bit faster), the F6F-5 a better fighter bomber (carried a bit less but not much less on average in carrier sorties per USN stats, with only 60% of the loss rate of the F4U to AA in side by side carrier ops in 1945), and the F6F also the better carrier plane (carrier operational loss rate about 2/3's that of the F4U).

The F4U-4 as mentioned changed this equation v F6F-5 to considerable speed advantage and thus interceptor capability, perhaps notably better fighter-fighter capability as of 1945 (though no stats to prove it), but still had the AA vulnerability and accident rate disadvantage. In Korea IMO the F6F-5 would have been the better a/c especially for the USN carrier prop fighter role. In that attritional combat avoiding losses (especially of pilots as opposed to banged up old props destined for the boneyard soon anyway) was key. It's doubtful the practical advantage in load capability of the F4U cancelled out its higher vulnerability. And again pilots were often lost in the frequent accidents in the difficult operating conditions aboard carriers, often more difficult weather conditions and more continuous operations than WWII. Whereas, fighter-fighter capability of props was pretty much academic by then: all were in the same boat in their relatively few encounters with enemy jets, and there were only two daylight encounters in the whole war between F4U's and enemy prop fighters. The AU-1 with reduced vulnerability and increased bomb load was superior to the F6F-5 for the Korean mission, but the F6F-5 would probably have been better than the F4U-4/4B used in the vast majority of sorties, including virtually all daylight f-b missions from carriers.

The 'straight' F4U-5 was little used in Korean combat, only briefly by VMF-212 in 1950, and not by the USN. Besides not being very numerous, some of the complexity added resulted in annoying to dangerous bugs. And even the specialist -5 versions like -5N and P that were widely used in Korea carried on the high pilot workload reputation of the F4U. Flying F4U-5N's over North Korea at night, especially from carriers, especially in the winter season, is often mentioned among candidates for most challenging missions for a single pilot in US naval aviation history. That's another role where the F6F's natural advantage in ease to fly would have come in handy.

Korean War CVE operations by USMC F4U-4's were from the relatively large Commencement Bay class ships, which also operated Marine F4U's in the Okinawa campaign. Their similar predecessors the Sangammon's operated F6F's for most of WWII. The small Kaiser-type CVE's operated F6F's in the invasion of Southern France, never operated F4U's in combat, but operated FM's in the great majority of cases.

Joe

When the F4U was having trouble with carrier qualifications in WWII, the Marines got it to use as a land-based fighter, the Navy took the F6Fs for carrier use. By Korea the USN was operating jets as carrier fighters but the Naval Reserves were flying Hellcats.

If you crash into the ramp while attempting to land on the aircraft carrier you are as dead as if you died in a dogfight. Just flying WWII aircraft was dangerous and doing so from a carrier was more so. Operational losses were a significant fraction of combat losses. Pilots were shockingly poorly trained and unexperienced by today's standards. That the F6F was significantly safer for a 20 year old ensign with 200 flight hours to land on a carrier than an F4U-1 was a major advantage of the Hellcat, more so than the small advantages that the F4U otherwise had.

Let me emphasize, to a typical USN fighter pilot, it wasn't "a lot work", it was a matter of life and death not much less threatening the guns of a A6M. I seriously doubt the USN would have used the F4U on carriers in 1943, more likely late model F4F/FM Wildcats if that had been the alternative. The F4U-1 was a highly unsatisfactory carrier airplane.

A good point. Flight test engineering during World War II was in an early stage of development and airspeed/altitude calibration was generally not well done. I have read (but don't remember where) that much of the alleged speed advantage of the F4U over the F6F was due to differences in airspeed calibration and when flown side-by-side they had about the same max level speed.

Another good point is that the plain F4U-5 as opposed to some of the specialized -5 variants saw very little use in Korea. The most common F4U model in Korea was the cannon-armed F4U-4B which was not used in WWII.

There was an interesting article about 20 years ago in the Society of Experimental Test Pilots journal. One of the members got to fly an F6F, F4U, P-47D and P-51D and perform an comparative evaluation. These were all highly successful in combat, and the author of the article found the F6F to be the superior aircraft from the perspective of flying qualities and cockpit design.

The Navy flew Corsairs in Korea.

To continue to harp on the importance of good flying qualities, the Bf109G was a wickedly effective fighter in the hands of an skilled and experienced pilot. By late 1944, most of the Luftwaffe's experienced pilots were dead. So the typical Luftwaffe fighter pilot had about 150 hours of flight time, much of that in gliders to save scarce fuel. The Bf109G was a nasty airplane to take off and land, and in the hands of these pilots, it was as dangerous to them as the Mustangs, Thunderbolts, Spitfires, Tempests and Yaks.

With the advent of high performance jets, aeronautical engineers had to relearn how to design good flying qualities into an airplane. So we got unairworthy terrors like the F3H-1 and the F7U. The F-100A was another notorious pilot killer, as was the F-4 before its dangerous side was tamed. The MiG-23 was downright scary. One of the great advances of the F-15 generation of aircraft was not just that they had fantastic performance, avionics, cockpit visibility and weapons but that they were basically safe and easy to fly. When I was at Edwards, I was told by one of my cronies (F-15 test pilot) that if you could fly a Cessna 172, you could handle an F-15 in the pattern. Obviously the F-15 is more complicated and goes much faster, but I suspect that he is basically correct. That would definitely not be the case with a Century Series fighter.

Up until touchdown, the 109 was a easy a/c to fly on landing approach.

Already said.

And Seafires, which saw service in the early days in Korea

http://www.britains-smallwars.com/carriers/Triumph.html

A man jumped from an 100 story high building. As he fell past the 50th floor, somebody yelled at him and asked if he was in trouble. He replied that so far everything was doing fine.

Speaking as a reasonably experienced pilot, it is the ground that makes flying dangerous.

Just shows how clueless you actually are about the 109. There was a study done about the landing and takeoff accidents of JG26 when it operated both the 109 and 190. The 190 had a worse landing accident rate.

I think you're missing the ever so slightly larger picture. Perhaps you feel a bit of an emotional attachment to the Me-109, and feel that you must defend it for some reason? You said this: "Up until touchdown, the 109 was a easy a/c to fly on landing approach." That's great--nobody is saying anything about how easy it is to fly while in the air. The knock on the Me-109 was always that it was difficult in ground handling due to its narrow undercarriage. Your own quote certainly seems to support that.

How much experience do you have with narrow-track undercarriage? Ever flown an aircraft with it, and compared it to an aircraft with better design? I haven't, but I do fly quite a few types of model airplanes. Landing gear configuration has a direct correlation to the ease of ground handling and accident rate. Models with a wide-track are simply easier to handle. The don't ground loop, generally. What surprises many people is how tricky a scale Cub is to handle on the ground--I've seen plenty of mishaps because the pilot tries to treat it like a model with a more forgiving configuration.

Not me who is missing anything. As for some emotional attachment to the 109, hardly.

This is what Katz said: "The Bf109G was a nasty airplane to take off and land".

Course if you don't count 'the circuit' as part of the landing..........

BTW, the Spitfire had a narrower track than the 109.

I've seen it written that the real problem with the Bf-109's landing gear is the way that the tires are angled to the ground. This apparently caused issues during take-off and landing rolls. The Spitfire's mains, while narrower, place the tires perpendicular to the ground, making for more predictable ground handling. I, too, thought that the Spit would have been more unstable on the ground. If narrowness of ground track was a big problem, the F4F should have been a killer.

Bear in mind that half of Bf-109 looses took place on the ground.

I can see that you're not at all emotionally involved in this. Thank you for correcting me.

By most accounts it was.



That's a half-thought, and I have no idea what you mean. Could you complete it?



It's the overall gear configuration that matters. The width, the tail moment, position relative to the CG and center of lift, the amount of torque and P-factor that requires rudder deflection--it all combines. Again, have you ever had any sort of real experience with these matters?

So how much flying have you done if you don't know what the circuit is?

On a couple of other boards I am classed as a 109 hater.

How much P is involved when landing? How much flying have you done?

There was ~1800 simulated carrier landings done by the 109T with no fatal accidents. The same can't be said for the Spitfire which were always crashing. It was so bad at one time in the Med that these losses were greater than losses to the enemy.

shep


Yup, the ones shot up by Allied fighters. There is ~1500 document accidents that resulted in a loss.

Um, simulated landings are not the same thing as real landings on carriers.
The USN ended up converting a couple of paddle wheelers for training because of this

As night fighters, not as the standard VF component of the CAG.

The paddle-wheelers were used because there were no U-boats in the Great Lakes. The USN could have gotten along with CVEs for training if they had had safe places to use them.

IMO Hellcat is by far the best fighter of WW2 in terms of investment-cost-benefits:

- When it appeared its main rival was utterly outclassed.
- It was reliable (95% availability) and easy to fly, which made it ideal for the large number of newly trained pilots.
- Production and supply of spares was extremely effective. At the end of the war production was geared down as USN could no use it all.
- The type scored +5200 axis aircraft. When flying with Hellcat scort, 42 dive or torpedo bombers were lost between 1943 and 45. In the last 8 months the number lost was seven (7).

Corsair might be superior, but it was more expensive to produce (Hellcat costed 3/5) and much more difficult to fly, especially for a novice pilot. F4U had some nasty features which made it suitable for veterans only. The average US pilot in 1943-44 was likely to get much more out of a Hellcat than a Corsair. The latter had a lower availability, so in Hellcats words "they were superior 3 days a week".

In the fighter-bomber role, Hellcat proved more durable too.

I stress that I am talking about investment-cost-benefits, not pure performance.

I understand but am comparing the British making real carrier landings with the Sea Fire while the Me-109T was making "ground" simulated carrier landings.

Also as prop VF component of the air group. The typical early Korean War carrier air group had one or two squadrons of jets and 2 of F4U-4's or -4B's. Later on it was usually 2 of jets and one of F4U but no group that saw combat in Korea lacked an F4U fighter squadron. A few air groups lacked jets and had 3 or 4 sdns of F4U-4's instead. In addition the standard composition included an attack sdn of AD-2/3/4, and detachments of night fighter (F4U-5N/NL), recon (F4U-4P/5P, jets later), night attack (AD-3N/4N/4NL), AEW (AD-3W/4W) and utility/rescue helicopters.

The USN lost 271 Corsairs in Korea, total/enemy action losses by sub type: 194/111 F4U-4, 37/19 F4U-4B, 19/10 F4U-5N, 17/5 F4U-5NL, 1/1 F4U-4P, 3/2 F4U-5P. Two -4's were downed by NK MiG's, but almost all the other enemy action losses were AA. If the relative loss rates of F6F and F4U documented in side by side carrier operations in 1945 had held in Korea, using F6F's from carriers in Korea would have avoided almost 100 losses (~40% reduction in AA loss rate, ~33% reduction in operational loss rate).

The Marines lost another 321 F4U's plus 21 AU-1's. 164 of their F4U losses were due to enemy action (1 -4B in air combat, Jesse Folmar's a/c by a MiG-15 right after he downed another MiG), 58 carrier (CVE/CVL) operational, 99 land based operational. So again, F6F's would have saved quite a lot of losses even assuming land based operational loss rates were equal. The AU-1 OTOH probably matched or exceeded the F6F in resistance to AA, and carried a substantially heavier ordnance load, which wasn't as true in actual practice of previous F4U's over F6F.

Source for losses is "Korean Area Aircraft Losses, Month of July 1953 and Campaign to Date" except the air combat ones counted from the few air encounters between F4U's and enemy a/c in Korea.

Joe

With the A6M Zero, the aircraft is suppose to have made quite an impression in the early part of the American involvement in World War II. Pearl Harbor, due to little in the way of air to air combat, is not a real showcase of this. Which battles would people suggest created her reputation?

Any early-war battle in which dogfighting between the respective combatants took place, I would imagine.

For that matter, there was a dogfight or two during PH.


Shot

As Shot indicated, just about any time an early WWII fighter tried a turning fight with a Zero, it lost. An interesting exception was described by Saburo Sakai in Zero, where he indicated that an experienced USN pilot in an F4F actually hung with him in a dogfight. The Wildcat finally lost, though. Even though Claire Chennault sent accurate information on the A6M to the US, it was ignored, so inexperienced pilots fought (briefly) and died, trying to fight the Zero's strengths. When the Allies finally learned to utilize their aircraft's strengths (and better planes became available), the Zero's days were numbered.

At an operational level, I'm sure the A6M's involvement at PH impressed planners. Having the range to escort the strike from an unknown location has its advantages.