P-51 Mustang (thread drift from the ACRO P-1 thread)

[Redhat]

You can't talk about the P-51 and just dismiss the Packard Merlin engine and the range and it's firepower... and say, "see it wasn't so great without that stuff". It did have all those things and that plus the men that flew and maintained them, made it what it was.

I never read or heard of a P-51 pilot saying they wouldn't take on a 190 at any altitude cause they were going to get waxed.

[Guerrero]

Trivia question:

What was the platform of choice used to develop a single engine long range fighter to escort B29s into Japan?


Hint: It wasn't the P51

The P-47N (the "clipped wing" version)?

[Stephanie B]

The thread needs more pictures. Here's one of a P51 I took at the Rome Airshow in North Georgia last year.

Attachment 30576

Looks like one that was based in Craig Field, Jacksonville, Fl in the early 90s.

[Joe in PNG]

You can't talk about the P-51 and just dismiss the Packard Merlin engine and the range and it's firepower... and say, "see it wasn't so great without that stuff". It did have all those things and that plus the men that flew and maintained them, made it what it was.

I never read or heard of a P-51 pilot saying they wouldn't take on a 190 at any altitude cause they were going to get waxed.

Also, Packard pretty much had to totally redesign the Merlin engine to make something that was actually properly mass producible. The English were still doing a lot of "get it close enough, then file it to fit" by hand on their production lines.

Note that Chuck Yeager had the opportunity to test out most of the major German fighters after the war, and the only one close to being as good as the P-51 in his opinion was the FW-190.

[Wheeler]

Looks like one that was based in Craig Field, Jacksonville, Fl in the early 90s.

Somewhere in my outdated collection of 8mm cassettes I have video of a P51C doing 400+ MPH "strafing runs" at the PDK Airshow. I should drag that stuff out some day and move those old airshow videos to digital.

[Guerrero]

Note that Chuck Yeager had the opportunity to test out most of the major German fighters after the war, and the only one close to being as good as the P-51 in his opinion was the FW-190.

By the late mid-war era, the Bf-109 was getting really long in the tooth; the FW-190 was really the better plane (especially the Ta-152), but Luftwaffe command was all about the 109.

[willie]

A recently deceased local pilot told me that he bought a surplus P-51 in the 1950s for $6000.

[ralph]

A recently deceased local pilot told me that he bought a surplus P-51 in the 1950s for $6000.

Probably worth over a million today...If one could have a time machine, and about $100,000 in cash to take back with you, the things you could come back with....

[RevolverRob]

Probably worth over a million today...If one could have a time machine, and about $100,000 in cash to take back with you, the things you could come back with....

Honestly, just buy 100k of Exxon stock and call it a day. Or buy 100k worth of ocean-front in Los Angeles County.

But realistically, Exxon has an annualized return of 11.9% since 1926. Assuming you went back in time to 1926, set it up to buy 100k worth of Exxon stock and you reinvested your annual return back to Exxon stock, you'd have roughly 3.1 billion dollars worth of stock in 2018.

You could probably still buy every flyable P51 out there for that money and have plenty of cash left over.

[DC_P]

Looks like one that was based in Craig Field, Jacksonville, Fl in the early 90s.

If so, it had the name ‘Sizzlin Liz’ at the time. I was a flight instructor at CRG back then and was going to post about how the entire airport would come to a stop as it would taxi out, do a run up, then take off. After you could no longer hear it things would go back to normal until he reentered the pattern for landing. I can still hear that crackling and popping Merlin....