 |
THE CLOCK
After the disaster suffered at Pearl Harbor, on the seventh of December of 1942, Hamilton, like many other companies, changed their whole production to follow the requirements of the US Army. The “Bureau of Aeronautics” wanted two sources supplying a clock with elapsed time. The result made Elgin and Hamilton cooperate in the process of designing and building this elapsed time clock.
It is the most complicated clock ever built for an airplane. It contains 417 pieces, 248 different, double barrel with power for eight days, 16 jewels.
it indicates time, elapsed time, chronometer with 60 minutes counter and date. In this clock improvement was added for the very first time as a new system that allows it to set the time backwards through midnight without affecting the date system.
THE PLANE
What calls attention the most in this plane is his seagull shape wing. This weird shape is due to its need to separate the propeller from the ground. The propeller is the biggest one ever built in a single-seated plane.
It was originally designed to be used in the aircraft carrier, but it had some problems. Taking off it was unstable and in the landing, it would bounce to much.
Due to this problem and the great difficulty for landing in an aircraft carrier for the average Navy pilot, the NAVY declared Corsairs not appropriate for an aircraft carrier.
The US NAVY despite the superiority of the Corsair, equipped the carriers with F6F Hellcats. The Hellcat was more simple, noble, and cheap (3 Corsairs cost the same as 5 Hellcats). The following versions of the Corsair improved the bouncing during the landing, and its visibility.
In 1944 it was cleared for deck operations. Its production ended in 1947 and reached its highest point in 1945 (300 planes were built every month).
With the most powerful engine. Corsairs was the fastest fighter at the time. 2.140 knock downs were attributed to the Corsair while only 190 Corsairs were knocked down. Half of them were not attributed to combat.
Charles Lindberg, the first person to fly across the Atlantic by himself. flew the NAvy Corsairs. He tested the power of the bombs and its use. During practice he bombed the Japanese in the battle over the Marshall Island.
This plane was responsible for the strikes against the German battleship “Tirpiz”.
The F4U Corsair was used in the war against Korea as a nocturnal fighter and continued to be used until 1957.
THE COCKPIT
The cockpit was situated behind the central gas tank, making the pilot be seated behind the wings. This made the front vision complicated. In the later versions, the seat was raised to be able to have a better view, but this made change the canopy and therefore the aiming system, which was reflected on the glass of the cockpit instead of in the gun sight.
Another curiosity about being seated behind the wings was that when the pilot pulled the lever to make the plane go up, he went down, making a strange situation that pilots took a while to get adapted to.
Every pilot that flew this plane had to be very careful not to drop the map or the pen because these planes had no floor. Anything that was dropped was never seen again. The later versions they put in a floor.
The front instrument panel was the typical one of the NAVY, but the sides were a mess of cables, control, switches, etc that bothered themselves. Some switches weren't visible and many were hidden under the guide rail of the cockpit's dome.
At mid 1944 a new cockpit distribution was designed, the F4U-4. More than 400 were in service already. |
