Vought F4U Corsair
The F4U Corsair is an American carrier fighter and fighter-bomber designed and built by Chance Vought around the Pratt & Whitney R-2800 engine, and recognised by its inverted gull wing. First flown in 1940, it served with the United States Navy and Marine Corps in the Second World War and again in Korea; Vought, Goodyear and Brewster together built 12,582, and production ran longer than that of any other American fighter of its war.
Why It Mattered
The Corsair mattered because it outlasted every contemporary: it remained in production longer than any other American fighter of the Second World War, fought a second war in Korea, and compiled an 11:1 record in air combat over the Pacific. It did so despite a difficult start: designed as a carrier fighter, it proved itself first from island airfields with the Marine Corps and reached American carrier decks only in the war's final year. There it became a mainstay of the air groups facing the kamikaze campaign.
Design Notes
The Corsair was designed around the Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp radial and the largest propeller then fitted to a fighter, its blades spanning 13 feet 1 inch. The design team was led by Rex Beisel, whose solution to propeller clearance was an inverted gull wing: the bent wing let short landing-gear struts do the work of long ones, and kept the wing's joint with the fuselage clean. Production aircraft carried three .50-calibre machine guns in each folding outer wing panel, and the cockpit sat far aft, a combination of an aft-mounted cockpit and long nose that left pilots little view ahead on approach. With a sharp low-speed stall as well, early Corsairs were hazardous to land aboard ship, and Navy pilots gave the type the reported nickname 'ensign eliminator' before the faults were engineered out.
Operational History
The XF4U-1 prototype first flew on 29 May 1940, but the Navy did not accept the type for shipboard operations until April 1944. Marine Corps squadrons took it into combat first: twelve F4U-1s arrived at Henderson Field, Guadalcanal, on 12 February 1943, and the Marines engaged the enemy two days later. The Royal Navy, an early operator, finally figured out the Corsair's landing issues with carriers, and in late 1944 the plane started operating from American aircraft carriers, where it proved critical against the kamikaze threat. By the end of the war, the Corsair had flown over 64,000 sorties and shot down over 2,000 enemy aircraft. In Korea the Corsair's primary mission was to support Allied ground units along the battlefront; air-to-air encounters were rare, though a Marine pilot destroyed a MiG-15 in September 1952. Foreign air forces kept it in front-line service far longer, and it was not until the late 1970s that the type finally left front-line service abroad.
Afterlife
Production continued until January 1953, by which time Vought, Goodyear and Brewster had built 12,582 Corsairs in all. After the war, surplus Corsairs went air racing, and the type won the prestigious Thompson Trophy twice. Others passed to museums: the Smithsonian's F4U-1D took 9,315 hours to restore and now hangs at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. A few still fly, among them Planes of Fame's F4U-1A, restored in 1975 and described by its museum as one of the oldest Corsairs still flying; it remains a regular at air shows.