F4U_Corsair
The Vought F4U Corsair — the inverted-gull-winged Marine fighter that Japanese pilots called "Whistling Death" — captured as an RC scale warbird.
About
The Vought F4U Corsair began as a 1938 Navy Bureau of Aeronautics request for proposals for a new carrier-based fighter, and Vought's winning design was built around the largest aircraft engine then available — the 2,000 hp Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp eighteen-cylinder radial. To swing the engine's enormous 13-foot-4-inch Hamilton Standard propeller while keeping the landing gear short enough to fit on a carrier deck, designers gave the Corsair its distinctive inverted-gull wing — the visual signature that has made the type one of the most recognizable WWII aircraft ever produced.
Vought test pilot Lyman A. Bullard, Jr., first flew the XF4U-1 prototype on May 29, 1940. In October of that year the airframe became the first American fighter to exceed 400 mph in level flight. The Navy contracted Vought for 584 F4U-1 fighters in March 1941, with the name "Corsair" formalized that June. The first production F4U-1 flew on June 24, 1942, and the Marines were the priority recipient — Marine Corps aviators flew their first combat mission in the Corsair on February 13, 1943, from Guadalcanal.
The Corsair's combat record in the Pacific became legendary. Some Japanese pilots regarded it as the most formidable American fighter of the war, and U.S. naval aviators' kill claims suggested an 11-to-1 ratio over Japanese opposition. American infantrymen on the islands nicknamed the Corsair "The Sweetheart of the Marianas" and "The Angel of Okinawa" for its close-support work. Japanese pilots reportedly called it "Whistling Death" — supposedly because the wing-root oil-cooler air intakes produced a distinctive sound at speed.
The unmistakable inverted-gull silhouette of the F4U is one of the most-modeled warbird subjects in modern RC scale flying. Foam, balsa, and giant-scale Corsair kits appear at scale fly-ins worldwide, where the type's distinctive shape and Pacific-theater livery remain warbird-show favorites decades after the last F4U left service.
In the simulator
A serious warbird scale subject with the kind of presence at altitude that suits a Pacific-theater fighter. The F4U Corsair in our sim has the heavy nose and big radial torque of the real airframe — taildragger ground handling demands rudder discipline, and the inverted-gull wing gives the airframe its distinctive visual signature in flight. Use it for warbird-style scale flying: low passes down a grass strip, gentle wing-overs, and the unhurried pattern circuit of a Pacific carrier deck. Pairs well with carrier-deck and Pacific-island landscapes. A natural sibling of the A6-Zero in CV Planes Pack 1 — opposite sides of the same Pacific air war.
