European Air War - The Gen

Chris Cartledge, who has died aged 100, was a Fleet Air Arm pilot who flew the F4U Corsair – the “Bent-Wing Bastard” – on operations against the Germans and the Japanese in the Second World War; he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross aged 20 and qualified twice as a member of the Goldfish Club, whose members had ditched at sea.

In 1944 Cartledge returned to North America, to Brunswick, Maine, to learn to fly the long-nosed, high-performance Chance Vought Corsair. It was so difficult to handle in the approach to carrier landings that it became known as the “Bent-Wing Bastard” or “the ensign killer” and it was given to the US Marine Corps and to the Royal Navy to master. Adopting a curved approach to ensure that the flightdeck was kept in sight as long as possible, young Fleet Air Arm pilots like Cartledge tamed the Corsair and it was brought into service on small British carriers before it was cleared for use in the US Navy.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/ ... -kamikaze/

My brother was on the Indefatigable when they bombed the Tirpitz. We all thought that he flew on the mission but he told me that he was ill at the time and was unable to fly.
He also told me that he always felt much safer when the Corsairs were with them, and that he did not have a lot of faith in the Seafires.

Recently watched a Youtube video on British carrier fighter ops.

A huge number of Seafires broke into pieces landing on the carriers. I mean, they literally came apart.

The F4u didn't have that problem but the landings really did look like controlled crashes.

OTOH, pilots made landing other planes, F6F, F4F, Fulmars and Avengers look like a walk in the park.

The later F4u's fared much better with their readjusted landing gear oleo struts, suggested by the Brits.

As I understood it, the landing gear configuration of the Spitfire/Seafire, with the wheels very close together, made it highly unstable in the context of carrier landings. The basic Spitfire configuration was unsuitable for carrier ops generally. Only optimism kept it in the inventory.

The Corsair was a beast, and once the carrier landing technique had been sorted out was a very valuable addition to the navy airfleet.

The commentator of the video mentioned that the wheel base of the F4F was about the same as the Seafire but because of low speed handling characteristics the pilots had no problem landing the Wildcat.

If you watch the video it is plainly obvious. The F4F toodles onto the deck and catches the 1st or second wire without a "fare thee well" while the Seafire comes in a lot faster, tends to catch the 3rd or 4th wire and gets wacked down on the deck with a royal thump.

Oh, that's interesting. I wonder if some sort of flaps augmentation might have sorted the Seafire problem, lower speed landings.