Was the P-51 really that good?

[Buck Bradley]

Going back to the original question, the answer is clearly "no." An excellent fighter beyond dought, but easily the most overrated warplane of all time. To read the American accounts (I am an Ami) it won the war single-handedly which is ridiculous--it wasn't even the best piston-engine fighter of the war.

[Carl Schwamberger]

... To read the American accounts (I am an Ami) it won the war single-handedly which is ridiculous--it wasn't even the best piston-engine fighter of the war.

Depends if you are using the History Channel & the glossy magazines off the racks as your reading, or something more substantial.

[Adrian B]

Going back to the original question, the answer is clearly "no." An excellent fighter beyond dought, but easily the most overrated warplane of all time. To read the American accounts (I am an Ami) it won the war single-handedly which is ridiculous--it wasn't even the best piston-engine fighter of the war.

The P-51 is definitely the victim of a huge amount of national pride-fueled over-hyping, and any comparison of it against things like the Me-109 or FW-190 will always be skewed by the differences in pilot quality/experience during the later part of the war. It may have been a good plane, but like any plane, it had its faults and vulnerabilities.

And many comparisons of the different aircraft usually focus on the wrong factors. Speed and range are nice to have and great for getting you where you want to go. But there's a number of other factors that are much more important when it comes to what you do once you get there. As someone who had the chance to fly in a number of RAF aircraft in the mid-1980s and chat to lots of operational pilots, I got a pretty good feel for what they considered to be important when it came to what makes a good fighter. So maybe we need to look at the various factors involved, including those that often get ignored.

Speed - Good for getting you there and back quickly, but if you have a speed advantage over your opponent, it's best use is giving you the ability to get out of trouble. Once you get into a dogfight, who has the higher speed is pretty much irrelevant, as you can't really use it except to try and get away from a more aggressive/better opponent. And if you do that, you run the risk of giving them the chance to get on your tail for an easy shot as you depart the area. High speed may be a good advertising headline, but it's not as important as many of the other factors once combat has been joined.

Range - Can get you to places that others may not be able to get to, but the weight of fuel needed can hurt your maneuverability. I have heard it mentioned by some that the P-51 was a bit of a sitting duck until the centre fuel tank was used up, as it tended to upset the balance of the aircraft and made it a bit sluggish. And that's why the pilots always used it up first, even before the external tanks.

Cockpit visibility - To fight (and hopefully kill) your opponent, you first need to see them. And the fewer blind spots you have, the easier it is for you to see them, and the harder it is for them to sneak up on you.

Wing loading - The lower your wing loading, the tighter you can turn, and he who can turn tightest has the better chance of getting a shot in. And that, rather than speed, was always the Spitfire's main advantage over the Me-109 in the Battle of Britain.

Power-to-weight ratio - The greater your power-to-weight (or thrust-to-weight) ratio, the better your acceleration and rate of climb. And rate of climb is important, as he who has the altitude has the advantage. If you read about the tactics of the top aces, most of them never got into dogfights. Instead, they just cruised about above the dogfight looking for the easy victims to pick off in a single-pass diving attack, then quickly back upstairs to repeat the tactic on another unsuspecting victim. OK, it may not be as glamourous or heroic as Hollywood likes to depict, but it's what they did, and how they survived to run up the big kill scores.

Wingspan - The shorter your wingspan, the faster you can roll. And the faster you can roll, the quicker you can change direction in a dogfight. However, the shorter your wingspan, the higher your wing loading tends to be (unless you have a long-chord wing such as on a Spitfire), so although you may be able to roll quicker, you may not then be able to out-turn your opponent as they may be able to pull harder.

Stable gun platform - To kill your opponent, you first need to hit them. And, if you are talking about using guns, then you need an aircraft that is fairly stable and compliant when you want it to be. That way, it's much easier to keep your guns on target while you are firing.

Firepower - Once you've got into a firing position, you need to throw as much metal at your opponent as possible, and that metal needs to do maximum damage if it hits them. While machine guns may be great for rate-of-fire, you have to rely on the bullets hitting a vital system in order to cause fatal damage, and that's not guaranteed with WW2 aircraft. While you could get lucky and do fatal damage with just a single bullet, there's recorded instances of planes getting home with dozens (or even hundreds) of bullet holes in them. For that reason, cannons will always be better than machine guns, especially if they have a high rate-of-fire - which is why the 20mm was the most popular choice as the war went on.

Size - Often overlooked, but the smaller you are, the harder you are to hit. Conversely, the bigger you are, the easier you are to hit. So ideally you want the smallest possible airframe that will do the job required.

Survivability - Basically the ability to take battle damage and still keep flying. This can be determined by a number of factors, including the type of engine (air-cooled radials being less susceptible to damage than liquid-cooled engines), the level of protection (e.g. armour) given to vital systems, and how tightly packed things are within the airframe.

And then you need to factor in things like numbers and pilot quality. Personally, based on the above factors, if I had to choose a WW2 fighter to go into combat in, I'd pick one that often gets overlooked - the Hawker Tempest V. Sure , it had a few reliability issues to start with, but it was fast, had a good wing, good visibility, and great firepower.

And, sometimes, real life can throw up some results that are counter to what you'd expect from a logical comparison. A couple of examples that come to mind involve Cold War exercises pitting older RAF aircraft against newer USAF ones. The first time that F-16s took part in a British air defence exercise, playing the role of the aggressors, the participating aircraft scored a total of 84 kills. Out of those 84 kills, 80 were scored by the F-16s, while just 4 were scored by all of the RAF aircraft taking part, because most of them (mainly Phantoms) couldn't cope with the F-16's superior maneuverability. However, there was one RAF fighter that could, as all 4 of the F-16s killed by the RAF were bagged by that wonderful triumph of brute force over aerodynamics, the EE Lightning. And, just to rub things in, not one of the 80 F-16 kills was a Lightning! Based on a logical comparison, it should have been no contest but, for some reason, the Lightning pilots found they had the edge and could turn the tables on their more modern opponents.

And the other example also involves some 1950s tech. On several occasions in exercises, F-15 Eagles tried making high-altitude interceptions on Vulcans. Now, two much-heralded features of the F-15 are its big wing, designed to give it plenty of maneuverability in a dogfight, and its high thrust-to-weight ratio. In theory, it should have been no contest. Unfortunately for the F-15 pilots, nobody told the Vulcan crews that, and they proved to be much tougher targets than expected. While the F-15 may have a big wing, the Vulcan has an even bigger one, and four Olympus engines give it plenty of power - as anyone who has ever seen a Vulcan take off can tell you, as they can pull up into a surprisingly steep climb straight off the runway. This meant that, on occasion, the Vulcans were able to turn the tables on the F-15s in these high-altitude interceptions. Several times, rather embarrassed F-15 pilots had to report to their boss that their nice fat juicy bomber target had completely outflown them and managed to get onto THEIR tail!!

So these comparisons are never as clear-cut as you think they should be.

[DL650]

Forget the number-crunching.The P-51's (B & D) were superb.

It was pretty good...

It was THE fighter of WW2 - because without it the Luftwaffe would not have been beaten over the homeland.

That is what they be sayin', but it isn't true. In fact... the P-47 was already doing that job. There was little the P-51 could do better than the P-47. It wasn't much fast (esp up high) and it couldn't go much further, and had nowhere near the resistance to battle damage that P-47 had... but it did cost a lot less. That was the P-51's biggest attribute - cost less to purchase, and less expensive to operate (fuel)

[Pips]

Was the P-51 the best fighter? Arguable. As someone had mentioned earlier, it had it's strength's and weaknesses. Both in it's own design and in comparisons to other fighters.

That said, it was it's incredible range that gave the P-51 the edge over it's other Allied stablemates. It could fly anywhere the US bombers went, stay with them as escort, fight off the Luftwaffe, and on the way home drop down to strafe anything that moved.

It became available at a crucial time when strategic bombing by the 8th AF had had to be curtailed due to high losses suffered in '43. The bomber could not always get through by itself, and both the P-47 and the P-38 lacked the legs to escort the B-17 and B-24 to their distant targets and back.

Most importantly the P-51 was available in sufficient numbers and with highly trained pilots to provide a distinct superiority over the opposing Luftwaffe. It did destroy the Luftwaffe in the six months of '44, and it maintained that advantage throughout the remainder of the war.

It was the war winning fighter in the European Theatre. And that is why it is held in such high regard.

The only other fighter that had such a powerful impact on the war was the F6F Hellcat. Which literally destroyed the air power of Japan in the Pacific.