Interesting Article for WWII Aircraft Buffs

[Minimalist]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/04/28...tail=email

The other ones - overlooked aircraft of WWII

[vorlon13]

Poo !!

They left out the Brewster Buffalo !!!

[Anomalocaris]

Poo !!

They left out the Brewster Buffalo !!!

Buffalo was the only fighter in the world that actually looked like a lumbering ground dwelling herbivore.   That its pudgy fuselage could actually rise into the air on those tiny wings is a minor miracle. 

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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/04/28...tail=email

The other ones - overlooked aircraft of WWII

I dispute the assertion any of those aircraft can be considered overlooked.   Hurricane?  Bf-110, wildcat, b-24 liberator, overlooked?  You've gotta be kidding me.  

For some real overlooked aircraft, how about indigenous Romanian IAR 80?

[Minimalist]

The Buffalo......piss poor plane.

[Cato]

I have been fascinated with the B-36 Peacemaker since I first saw it at the Air Force Museum as a boy. It was a year too late to see action in WWII and was rendered obsolete almost immediately because of jet fighters. I would love to have seen this thing fly, mostly because I love the heavy drone of large turboprops.

Next to a B-29:

[Alex K]

was rendered obsolete almost immediately because of jet fighters.

Do you mean because of jet fighters or jet engines? Or both? The B-52 had jet engines, but it's not obvious to me why it should be better-suited against jet fighters. Higher speeds?

[vorlon13]

http://www.air-and-space.com/afftcho%202...0b%20m.jpg

[dyresand]

BTD never saw combat only 30 produced

Gloster E.28 first allied jet produced by the British 

Bell P5-59 when on to make the P80A then The F80C 

Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka Kamikaze Plane

Arado mini fighter

A-9Rocket 

My favorite on created by the Germans the Horten HO 229 a flying wing

And something i truly love Sushi 

Mitsubishi J8M (sushi) bomber interceptor

[The Grand Nudger]

P-47 ftw!.  There are stories, from both sides, of german pilots (even in  later model 190s) going bingo ammo lightin em up - without bringing them down......p-40 doesn't get much love either, but the engine block on the p-40 saved many a pilots life, and was probably one of the only planes ever built in which a HO wasn't the worst idea a pilot could have.

[Anomalocaris]

was rendered obsolete almost immediately because of jet fighters.

Do you mean because of jet fighters or jet engines? Or both? The B-52 had jet engines, but it's not obvious to me why it should be better-suited against jet fighters. Higher speeds?

Not just higher speed, but the ability to maintain higher speed while at higher altitude.   

When fighters have a large margin of superiority in speed and altitude over the bomber, the fighter can begin within a large area around the point where the bomber is first detected, and still successfully intercept the bomber.   But if the fighter has only a small margin of superiority in speed and altitude over the bomber, then the area in which the fighter must be to intercept the bomber shrinks drastically.  This means it take far more fighters on patrol to assure a successfully interception.

B-52 is not faster or higher flying then contemporary jet fighters.  But it greatly narrows the margin of superiority in speed and altitude of jet fighters compared to B-36.  So it was far more difficult to intercept than the b-36.  This means a jet fighter force adequate to provide assurance of interception of a given number b-36 must be enlarged many times to assure interception of same number of B-52s.

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I have been fascinated with the B-36 Peacemaker since I first saw it at the Air Force Museum as a boy. It was a year too late to see action in WWII and was rendered obsolete almost immediately because of jet fighters. I would love to have seen this thing fly, mostly because I love the heavy drone of large turboprops.

Next to a B-29:

B-36 was not a turboprop.   It was designed around piston engines, same as B-29, and aerodynamically optimized to operate within the limits of piston engines.  That's what made it    technically obsolete even before its very first flight.    

To see a bomber optimized for the much higher power to weight ratio and fuel efficiency possible with turbo prop engines, see the Tu-95.   It was about the same weight overall as b-36, and its 4 turbo prop engines weighed less than b-36's 6 piston engines.  But the 4 turbo props put out 3 times as much horse powers in total as b-36's 6 piston engines, and burned less fuel while doing it, which in conjunction with an airframe optimized to take advantage of it, gave Tu-95 150 miles per hour more speed, and 3000 miles more range.