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Anonymous09/05/26, 23:24No.65485278Avenger pilot talking about flying fighters
The F6F was a boring plane, efficient enough but without any character. Flying it was like driving the family car on a Sunday afternoon. Even Joe, who loved flying so much that he even liked Links, was unimpressed. We circled the field for an hour, as we were instructed to do. Nothing had happened; it was like being alone with a girl you don’t like. But the F4F Wildcat was marvelous—very small (so small that it seemed you could reach out from the cockpit and touch both wing-tips), simple, maneuverable, and delicately responsive to the controls. After the TBM, which needed hydraulic boosters to be flown at all, and the humdrum F6F, the Wildcat was like a toy designed especially to please pilots. It did acrobatics as though it wanted to, and had been hoping you'd try one; and when you did, it flew you through the most intricate maneuver in a cooperative, friendly way.
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Anon09/06/26, 10:45No.65486194
Thank you for the book recommendation, I hadn't heard of this one before.
I'll trade you one. Nanette by Edwards Park is one of my favorite books. He flew P-39s in the Pacific. Nanette revolves primarily around one specific aircraft that he flew in the war. He also wrote Angels Twenty, which is a wider view on his experiences in the war. I love his writing style.
"The cannon was originally a 37-millimeter antitank gun which fired rather slowly - whump-whump-whump, like that - and since you were sitting on it in the little cockpit, your legs straddling it, the firing of it vibrated your prostate so that the whole essence of war became mildly sexual. I do not know if this was intentional. Later cannon were 20 millimeter and fired much faster - babababababa, like that - and titillated you in a subtly different way. Some men enjoyed it more. I was a 37-millimeter man myself."
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Anon09/06/26, 12:56No.65486353
Is that an actual excerpt (from the book)?
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Anon09/06/26, 20:32No.65487239
Interesting, I haven’t heard any pilot accounts saying that the wildcat was more fun to fly than the hellcat before.
But seeing as Hynes didn’t get posted to a combat outfit until 1944, I’m guessing he would have been flying the FM2 variant which was a whole lot better performance-wise than the vanilla F4Fs of 1941-42
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Anon09/07/26, 03:36No.65488267
That's why the Navy loved Hellcats. A boring plane to fly is a plane that's safe and easy to learn, one that can take off and land on a carrier without much fuss, one that can cruise for a couple hours escorting strike planes without having to fiddle with the controls. It may not be exciting, but it works, and that wins wars.
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Anon09/07/26, 07:39No.65488691
I have heard that heavy bomber pilots were utterly exhausted upon returning from a mission; did the control sticks and pedals also become heavy to operate in large, high-horsepower fighter aircraft?
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Anon09/08/26, 02:56No.65491161
>I remember waiting outside one of the Links while inside, under the hood, Taylor fought the machine, jerking it about as though he would wrestle it into doing what it was supposed to do. The instructor watched his instruments impassively, and finally picked up his microphone: ‘Cadet,’ he said, ‘you are now two thousand feet underground.’
This fuckin sent me
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Anon09/09/26, 02:11No.65493708
the Avenger needs more discussion on this board
