Frank
Posts: 1668
Joined: 9/1/2000
From: Bayern
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quote:
ORIGINAL: wdolson
The F6F Hellcat had the best kill to loss ratio of any fighter and in the Battle of the Philippine Sea the Hellcats shot down bucket loads of Japanese aircraft for minimal losses. David McCampbell shot down 9 in one sortie on Oct 24, 1944.
It's really difficult to come up with "the best of anything with such broad categories. The mission requirements the bombers and fighters mission are so different, comparing the two is very difficult. For bombers, the fateful few minutes at Midway the SBD certainly shined bright. The SBD didn't so such a bad job defending Guadalcanal either.
Bill Dunn who was an Eagle Squadron pilot before getting transferred to the USAAF and the 9th AF, had the opportunity to fly most of the Allied land based fighters. He said he has frequently been asked which one was "the best". His response is that it depends heavily on the mission. For ground attack, the P-47 was excellent. For long range escort, the P-51 is hard to beat. For short range defense and pleasure of flying, the Spitfire is an excellent choice. He found the Hurricane to be a nice mix of ease of handling, good fire power, and ruggedness too. The P-38 is very good for long distances over water with it's twin engines. The P-40 is best for rugged conditions because it's so easy to maintain.
When asking "the best", it really should be qualified with the exact mission you have in mind.
The SBD was the best dive bomber in a dive. The trailing edge split flap made the dive much smoother than the fence type dive flaps on most other dive bombers. It was also a better diver than the SB2C because the turtle back and short fuselage made the Helldiver inherently more unstable than the SBD and in a pushing the envelope situation like a dive, it bucked more, even with the trailing edge split flaps. So for steadiness of dive, the SBD is the winner. The SBD also had rock solid reliability the SB2C lacked until very late versions. But the SBD had shorter range and lacked folding wings that the SB2C had. The SB2C also had a larger bomb load and was faster. So which was "better"?
This discussion will probably devolve into another one of those x vs y arguments...
Bill
The Ju87 wasn´t too inferior to both of them and carried 3600lbs of bombs. Wasn´t a carrierplane though.
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RE: OT The best airplane of WWII? - 
sneaky, does your wife know the uh "secret" behind these names ? 
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