Excellent post. I particularly liked the link to the USN tests. As the
Corsair's opponent was almost exclusively Japanese, it must have been a
revelation to find there was an airplane it could outturn (okay, there was
the P-47).

The impact of a weapon system with an effective range of perhaps 1500 feet
skews the weighting of A/C performance characteristics quite a bit when
compared to modern machinery. But then as now, speed was life.

R / John