Vought F4U Corsair

Airplane blueprint for the Vought, F4U, Corsair ... Aviation history and aircraft blueprints/plans.

Vought F4U Corsair - Famous for its bent gull-wings and its high kill ratios. The Vought F4U Corsair was the first U.S. single-engine fighter to exceed 400 m.p.h., and had much better performance than the F4F Wildcat, which was the current top-of-the-line Navy fighter when the Corsair was introduced. Unfortunately, due to its very long nose (which limited pilot visibility, especially during take-offs and landings), it was believed by the Navy high command to be unsuitable for carrier operations. Typically, when the Navy had an aircraft that it did not want, it gave them to the Marines (the F2A Buffalo, and later the F7F Tigercat being further examples).

Early in the Pacific War, US Navy and Marine Corps fighter pilots found themselves outclassed by the agile and well-armed Japanese A6M Zero, but even then work was underway to provide them with better aircraft. One of those better aircraft was the Vought "F4U Corsair", a rugged, powerful, and somewhat unforgiving aircraft that featured a distinctive inverted gull wing. The F4U Corsair proved more than a match for the Zero, and it would also prove to be an excellent fighter-bomber, serving in this role in the Korean War and in the French colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria.

At the Vought-Sikorsky (later Chance Vought) Division of the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) group in Connecticut, a design team under Rex B. Beisel decided to build the aircraft around the new XR2800 Double Wasp 18-cylinder two-row air-cooled radial engine 2,000 HP, built by Pratt & Whitney (P&W), another UAC division.

Such a large engine needed a big propeller to soak up the power, and so the design featured a 13 foot 4 inch three-blade variable-pitch constant-speed propeller designed by Hamilton Standard, yet another UAC division. The big propeller posed a problem for the design team. It dictated long landing gear so that it would clear the ground on takeoffs and landings, but long landing gear tended to be too weak to tolerate hard carrier landings. The designers came up with the notion of a low-mounted "inverted gull wing" or "cranked wing", in which the the wings bent down from the root and then back up to the tip, with the main landing gear at the lowest point of the wing. The wing arrangement also improved the pilot's field of view, and the right-angle connection between the wing and the fuselage improved aerodynamics.

Vought F4U Corsair - Known as the most outstanding carrier-based fighter to be used operationally in WWII, the Corsair has become legendary. Known to the Japanese as "Whistling Death"