Dudley Henriques wrote in
:

Bertie the Bunyip wrote:
"Bob F." wrote in
:

That's what I heard before. Makes you wonder. Who would have
thought of that? "Oh, buffeting, let' s swap the engines and see
if that works." More likely story is they accidentally installed the
engines wrong and someone said, "Hey, this thing performs better
this way". You can see I have a lot of confidence in American
ingenuity.


Should have looked here first

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-38_Lightning


This seems to be a pretty accurate account of the teething problems
the airplane had and the remedies they used. i'm pretty sure the prop
rotation was part of the buffet solution, but this article seems to
indicate otherwise.


bertie

LeVier did a lot of the high mach number dive tests in the 38, and
there definitely was a compressibility problem, mach tuck; the whole
works. I know they added speed brakes but not sure at exactly what
stage. The engine rotation switch was early on in the program
according to Ethell; I believe in the YP38 stage before the first
production run. If I'm not mistaken, the high mach dives came after
the switch but I'm not at all certain of that.

Me neither. I did find one farily hilarious account of the airpanes
early flights in an old period magazine. The story is abou tBen Kelsey
one of the test pilots, and his transcontinental flight. Apparenlty he
cracke the thing up on landing after some sort of harrowing experinece
which left him babbling and he had to be hospitalised, with G-men
gaurding his bed. The aritcle goes on for several pages about how fligt
at high speeds like the lightning achieved, was at the ragged edge of
what even a superhuman could withstand mentally.
Those were the days!


Bertie