bomccarthy
Posts: 414
Joined: 9/6/2013
From: L.A.
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Given the highly interactive nature of aircraft research, design, and manufacture, I don’t think the introduction of any particular aircraft in any country could have been accelerated. Research and design progresses in fits and starts; someone in research comes up with a nifty idea, designers examine it and find that a certain aspect doesn’t quite mesh with existing systems, so they work with the researchers to refine the idea. Then, during testing in the lab, another problem pops up and they have to go back to redesign a certain part, maybe multiple times. And finally, flight-testing reveals even more problems (some very serious) that need to be resolved before manufacturing can begin.
I think the notion that development could have been accelerated is rooted in the belief that throwing more money and resources at a project will inevitably move it towards it goal more quickly. If you asked the FoMoCo executives in charge winning Le Mans with the GT-40 program in the mid-1960s, they would have admitted that, sometimes, it just ain’t so.
Example 1 – P-51
The P-51 may have first flown in 1940, but the two-stage Merlin 60 series that made it a star, wasn’t ready for production until late 1941 (if I recall). Designed for a high-altitude version of the Wellington, the Merlin 60 went through a development period which required solving a number of problems, particularly cooling the intake charge with high manifold pressures. As it so happened, the high-altitude Wellington was eventually sidelined but the Merlin 60 series was shoehorned into the Spitfire V airframe in response to the FW 190 threat in 1941 – the result was the Spitfire IX in 1942. And even this was considered an interim solution, since the Spitfire V airframe was not considered adequate for handling the extra power of the Merlin 60 – the “real” solution was the Spitfire VIII (longer fuselage and larger vertical fin area). Design of the VIII began earlier, with the Merlin 60 in mind, but the RAF decided it needed something very quickly to combat the FW-190. Adapting the Merlin 60 to a brand new American prototype in 1941 would have been the last thing on RR’s to-do list.
Then you have production – in 1942, there weren’t enough Merlin 60s to equip both Spitfire IXs and P-51s. They could have stuck a single-stage Merlin in the P-51, but then you would just have something that performed a little better than the P-51A, but whose performance fell off drastically by 25,000 ft. They had to wait for RR to convey their information on the Merlin 60 to Packard, which then redesigned some components and processes to facilitate mass production (RR was still essentially hand-assembling Merlins).
Example 2 – F4U Corsair
The principle complaint concerning the Corsair was poor forward visibility over the nose during landing. Although a complaint with most single-engine fighters in the War (because of the size of 1,500-2,500 hp engines and their ever-growing superchargers), the Corsair was worse than most due to the location of its cockpit, behind the wing. Yet, the XF4U-1 prototype had its cockpit 3 feet forward of the production versions. What happened?
The prototype had integral wing fuel tanks – these were deemed too vulnerable to combat damage, so most of the fuel was moved to a single 237-gallon fuselage tank. In order to maintain the center of gravity within ¼ of the mean aerodynamic chord, the fuselage tank was placed in line with the wings, where the pilot currently sat. The fuselage was designed to be slim, so the cockpit had to be moved backwards, behind the fuel tank. From that point in the design, it took almost two years of fiddling with the height of the pilot’s seat and the canopy design, modifications (beginning in the field) to the main landing gear oleo strut rebound rates, adding a spoiler to the leading edge of the starboard wing to equalize the stall speed on both wings, and increasing the height of the tail wheel to get the Corsair to the point where most pilots were comfortable landing it on a carrier.
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