As I was growing up, I've always liked Naval Aviation. The books I would read about World War II would center around the carrier battles of the war. My favorite movies were "Tora! Tora! Tora!", "Midway" and "In Harm's Way" and a few others. The models I would build were various Navy planes. I think I played the heck out of my dad's Victory at Sea tapes (the music...not the shows). So I thought this was pretty cool.
I'm not going to do these planes in any sort of order as they flew by about 5 or 6 times at least. So enjoy this portion.
First up is the Grumman F4F Wildcat. The Wildcat was one of the first Navy fighters in World War II and with improvements was able to serve all the way through the war.
Development with the Wildcat started in 1935 with a biplane. However the Navy was looking for a monoplane but Grumman kept their design in case the plane the Navy was looking at failed. The plane that beat the biplane out was the Brewster Buffalo.
So Grumman went back to the drawing board and converted the biplane to a monoplane but it still wasn't as good until Grumman added a more powerful engine. That design proved to be a winner.
The Wildcat was succeeded by the Hellcat (my favorite plane). Sadly, they didn't have any Hellcats flying.
No comments:
Post a Comment