Another Deck Thread

Found this discussion online.

Don't know about proposed naval varients but the FW-190 helped design another carrier fighter:

"In early 1943, Grumman officials were invited to England to see the captured fighters of the Axis powers and to fly some of them. The test team included: Leroy Grumman, president of Grumman and test pilot during and after WW I; Bud Gillies, vice president flight operations and a test pilot current in all American airplanes at that time; and Bob Hall, chief engineer experimental, a famous test pilot of Grumman and other airplanes of the Gee Bee era.
Of all the airplanes they saw, they were most fascinated with the Focke-Wulf 190. It not only offered sprightly performance, but it also had excellent flight characteristics with a gross weight of 8,750 pounds and only 1,730hp. The Hellcat was 3,200 pounds heavier with just 270hp more. Both Gillies and Hall evaluated the Fw 190 and found it to be the aircraft they would have liked to have designed themselves. It was exactly what the Hellcat follow-on aircraft should be. The only things the Fw 190 lacked were a good gunnery-lead computing angle of vision over the nose and a structure that would withstand carrier operations.

The Focke-Wulf impressed them so much they felt compelled to hurry home and put together an airplane of this gross weight in time for the water-injected Pratt & Whitney R-2800 C model engine of 2,400hp (War Emergency Power) to be installed. This would give our naval aviators a big performance increase over the newer Japanese fighters and would still retain the proven performance of the P&W R-2800 series production engines installed in the Hellcat. "

www.findarticles.com/p/articl...08/ai_n8826530

Eric Brown's description of lack of vision over the nose while landing a FW-190 reminded me of the early problems encountered while landing the Corsair on carriers. So who knows...adopt a curved approach, beef up the landing gear and add a hook. Can't say how much weight folding wings might add. Probably workable.

Slightly off topic but i took my kids to see a corsair a volunteer group is rebuilding on the weekend. They were blown away

After looking through Deck D I was blindsided that the USS Silversides was here in Michigan. I knew they had a sub in Muskegon but not which one. Now I have to visit!

We've got our own tin can here. The USS Edson. Nice tour but not WWII vintage.