I say the P-51. It’s just got the firepower
The P-47’s got two more machineguns that the Mustang…Bob Johnson said that the first time he fired the eight .50’s on his Thunderbolt he thought that the plane would shake apart and stop in midair…thats firepower.
You gotta love the P-51 and the Corsair. There is always an argument about the performance comparisons of these two great aircraft. The ease of handeling the P-51 seemed to make it a favorite to its pilots and it had no major performance weaknesses. The Corsair was just awsome but tough to handle in the naval capacity. The edge P-51
Yes the Corsair was a beast if you did not have top notch training in it’s quirks, it used to be called the “Ensign Eliminator” before they found out how to control the problem of one wing losing lift before the other at slow landing speeds. (Pencil sized piece of triangle stock attached to the underside of the wing root intake). The big assed P&W engine and the set back cockpit made it hard to impossible to see where you are going on take offs ane especally landings. Pilots learned to make wide turning sweeps on approach so they could see the deck, then trusted the LSO to get them on deck. The early F4U had landing gear that was just too bouncy and they had a hard time staying on deck once they got back on it. Once all these problems were ironed out the Navy and Marines found that they had one of the best fighter, ground attack, dive bombers in the world.
Oh Wow… found these while looking up Corsair pics… Enjoy!!
http://www.richard-seaman.com/Aircraft/AirShows/Chino2006/Highlights/index.html
Lets not forget the F6F Hellcat.
Kill ratio is one stat that can reveal more about a fighter than any other single stat. 19/1 kill ratio for Hellcat vs. Corsair 11/1. Hmmmmm…
There was something intangible about the Hellcat that does not show up on the specification sheet. It was big, slower than most of its allied contemporaries, but it could turn, take battle damage, was a dream to fly.
It say’s more about the quality (or lack of ) of its opponents than anything else
Sir,
i met you in other forum, you seems have many doubts in US account on their claims,… i remember in one forum on guy really looked up on P47, no doubt a great plane, however he seems made a God out the steel bird.
however I seems to agree with your assesment, if infact all claims of all US airplanes are correct, than, The force of Germans or Japan are gone down to zero before end of war,…
Cheers
G
All claims made by ANY airforce in WW2 are prone to be overclaims.
In his book “The Most Dangerous Enemy, a History of the Battle of Britain”, Stephen Bungay makes the following observations
“Claims are usually used to show who got what. This may be of interest to the participants, but it is knowing the total losses inflicted on the enemy in the air, whoever caused them that matters, Because of its importance, both sides insisted on rigorous citeria for confirming claims, which had to to be independently witnessed by another pilot or verified through the location of the crash-site. Dispite this , it is an endemic feature of all air-fighting that claims are too high , by a factor of at LEAST two. There are good reasons for this.
The first is simple mistakes usually made by inexperienced pilots. If he was firing at an enemy machine and it dived steeply away, a new pilot might think he had a kill. In fact, engines usually emit smoke when an aircraft bunts, They can also get into spins, fall out of control and then recover low down out of sight.
The second is that verification is very difficult and also dangerous. To be accurate, the observing pilot, who is usually fighting for his life, rather than playind umpire, would have to follow the victim from the first bullet strikes on it, to its crashing into the ground. All he would usually be able to see would be several plane firing at each other, catch a glimpse of one spinning down a few seconds later, and then perhaps an explosion on the ground some time after that. All three impressions might be connected. On the other hand the spinning plane may have recovered in cloud and gone home and the crash be of an entirely different machine actually shot down in a different dog-fight. When moving at 200-300mph in three dimentions large distances are covered very quickly. Pilots who tried to follow down aircraft they had hit usually turned into victims themselves. Experienced pilots forgot about confirming claims and kept their precious height for better purposes.
Multiple claims were also a major reason for over claims, the same machine would be seen and attacked by different pilots at different altitudes and in different stages of disintergration and be identified as different machines”
However may i interrupt,. it will be easier to identified a genuine claime, should the claim made above the occupied land,… where as the claims can be justified by the land force,…
this case to RAF during BoB,… and Luftwaffe during the Allied bombing over germany,… (the kills claims of two airforce during the particular conflict looked very accurate,. the luftwaffe event put so called,. bailed out score on the top of kills score 
)
However,… the claims by allied force during the later stage of airwar., are harder to justified due to the fact it was the mouth of the pilot is the source of information,…
but i guess, like the USN submarine tonnage claims over IJN, this was cross cehck to IJN shipping records after the war,. and somehow the claims were down significantly…
Cheers
Wasnt the Mustang originally a close support plane, dive bomber? to start out and later was converted to a fighter, espeically when its engine was replaced with the Merlins
I saw a show on the mustangs my impressions were it was not an easy plane to fly pilots stated that when flying a P51 altitude was your friend, the more distance you had from the ground the better
the p51 was the best on great heights. how closer to the ground the lesser it performanced it had another disadvantage the engin block could be destroyed with one shot. but still a good aircraft:). the p38 was the 3d fastest aircraft of the us it was fast enough to intercept zeros and manouvreable enough to excape from them when attacked. it could use many weapons rockets,.50 mgs and other things. i had good range.
P47 is the best! Its huge! Its got long range! Its got 8 .50 cals! It has a radial engine! It can take lots of damage! I love it! In the future I would like to build a 1:2 scale model for me.
8 .50 cal machine guns? Now I can imagine what I read about the devastating effect of the US “jabos” on enemy colomns.
I have edited #post 35 with this: XF4U-3 speed attained (in 1946) was 772km/h; and 3 F4U´s cost as much as 5 F6F´s.
We´ve had some quotes for the price in $ for the P-51 and P-47, does anybody know the price of any of the other US fighters?