Pony talk

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by IceFire

Oh... about the Mustang in Korea. I'm over simplifying what happened but after the war the P-51's were put into mothballs for the most part while the P-47N's continued on in National Guard units. I think they were phased out sometime in the late 40s just before the US got involved in Korea. The Mustangs were cheap and still plentiful while the P-47s were phased out or scrapped.

The P-47 would have been a much better CAS aircraft but the Mustangs were available in quantity and they needed to procure large numbers of aircraft in a very short period of time.

That is as best I understand that particular situation.

That's pretty much it. My father was a subscriber to a quartertly aviation magazine that also runs some history columns and i've read pieces about both the Mustang and the Corsair in Korea.

What happened was that the types of prop-driven close support aircraft were chosen based on what was available or easiest to restore to flying condition in order to quickly close the gaps and start flying CAS sorties as soon as possible. It was a case of "i need an extra 1000 airframes and i need them yesterday", instead of "i need the best aiframes for the job".
This meant that Mustangs with their sensitive liquid cooled merlins had to run the gauntlet of low level AA and small arms fire.

It's also interesting that Corsairs suffered higher losses than what was expected of an aircraft with a radial engine. The reason was that Corsairs were stripped of certain equipment post-WWII to improve handling and performance. When the first ones were shipped to Korea there was no time to re-install everything, so a lot if not the majority of them entered combat while missing some pieces of equipment.

Among those missing pieces was an armoured ring running around the engine cowling. Radials are powerful, reliable, durable and all that jazz, but still need oil to work. Well, the main oil lines in the Corsairs were running around the cowling and the lack of the armoured cowling ring made them one of the most vulnerable parts of the airframe. A big WWII-era radial could still function with entire cylinders blown off as long as it had lubrication, but if there's no oil everything grinds to a halt through friction sooner or later.

In practical terms what his means is that as the Corsair is diving towards the target and going head-on through the flak, all it would take was a few bits of lucky shrapnel that might not even scratch the engine block, but they could certainly puncture the oil line and force a mission abort.