Hi John;
see inserts;


"Big John" wrote in message
...
Dudley

Some additional comments.

I took a P-40N above 25K and rolled over in a full throttle dive and
ran the air speed up as far as I could. Never came close to Mach One
and bird didn't come unglued either (thank God). Oh to be so young and
inicient again )

Do you happen to remember on that dive if you had to retard throttle on the
way down to prevent overspeed? What happened to Erik Shilling's buddy (Pete
Adkinson) in China most Erik told me Adkinson was diving the P40 over the
field to "wake everyone up" Everyone on the field heard a high pitched
scream from the airplane just before it came apart in the air. This would
have been the tips overspeeding well past mach one. Erik was involved in the
accident investigation team reporting to Chennault on what probably
happened. The governor and prop were still in one piece when they hit the
ground which led Erik to conclude that governor failure with prop overspeed
might not have been the cause. He concluded that some cowling fasteners
(Duez) might have come off allowing high speed air into the engine
compartment causing intense forces. Interesting story. I've never actually
been convinced it wasn't a prop overspeed but of course I wasn't there.





Never ran the P-51D/K over 505 MPH (red line). Had a number of friends
from ETO who said they ran the A/S well over red line in a dive when
being chased by a 109. The 109 was supposed to have a weak tail and
would come unglued in a very high airspeed dive. The P-51 terminal
velocity dive tactic was an escape maneuver.

My high speed dive was the result of an O2 failure at high altitude during a
ferry flight. I woke up with the stick walking all over the cockpit and deep
into compressibility. The governor had reached it's limit and we figured if
I hadn't come around to realizing what was happening, it could easily have
turned out differently than it did :-)

The Jug in a terminal velocity dive tended to tuck. If you cut power
it tucked harder. To recover you had to keep a high power setting and
wait until you got to a lower altitude when you could recover.

Nothing outdives a Republic "Brick" :-))

The P-38 ended up getting some dive boards so it may have gotten a
little closer to Mach One than the rest of the WWII fighters????

The L solved a lot of issues for the 38 if I remember. Hope you finally got
to fly one.

Dudley Henriques