Turboprop F4U Corsair in Vietnam

[tahsin]

This post does not intend to insult or diminish geschwarz in any way. It's just a way of showing what  the options are as they appear this side of the computer screen.

a) Your uncle has the "Wall", completely covered with pictures of him, Phantoms and all sorts of planes, and squadron-mates in addition to awards he got over the years. As such you feel no need to challenge when he says he flew the Corsair in Vietnam. Sadly, everybody decays with time. And he made a mistake. It has already been mentioned that the A-7 had a superb record.

b) Or maybe he just wanted to play with you. Now this thing about Vought aircraft out-of-place and era seems very common. Had the Great Planes Forum been still extant I would have linked a particular thread where a poster talked of his own experience in the 1970s. Hailing from a Navy family he asked his father about the Cutlass two seaters then serving in Vietnam. The response was a stare from his father, no doubt along the lines of "What sort of an idiot I have raised as a son?" It has been quite a while since I read it but to clarify a bit the poster's older brother was an A-6 navigator and the father had flown attack aircraft in the WW2, was possibly involved with the climb-to-altitude tests of F8F, possibly held a world record as a result and was possibly commanding the USS Ranger at the time...

By the way, that possibly arises from the tribulations of Robin Olds, the famous almost-jet-ace of the USAF. Hearing the USN was coming up with Top Gun he arranged to have 4 x F-8s tranferred to his command so that he could later claim he had invented the whole DACT stuff. He stole the first F-4Ds from another outfit; he surely could do anything he liked, he was gunning to be USAF commander one of these days... Unfortunately no USAF Phantom could handle an USN Crusader in 1968. It's almost in every book profiling the F-8 that Olds actually threw his helmet on the ground even before he got out of the cockpit after a particularly fruitless flight. In the end USAF decreed the grey painted USN jets were freaking out USAF pilots whenever they went to Vietnam escorting Old's Phantoms and they had to wear the SEA Camo. It would add 1200 pounds each to the Crusaders and Old's boys could now possibly score...

c) This is merely a prank.

d) You want a "seal of approval" before making it big in places like ATS Forums with a forum name that almost suggests the black arts department of a major corporation.

e) This is even better in that I almost expected to see a sentence that read "The modification of obsolete warbirds is a thriving business that has been going on for ever.(2002)" It is in the Air Forces Monthly that there are some who felt at the time the Friendly Fire incident that dispersed the Afghans to the 4 winds at the beginning of Operation Anaconda was not what it was reported to be. Either the weapons or the craft sounded different than an AC-130. Without any right to know or any need to explain, didn't the "Enemy Aerial Attack Faction" conclude it was an Antonov An-2 in 2005? Which by the way, is a total invention of sorts to blame certain goverments of complicity with the escape of Bin Ladin, so that they could be the target of further interventions.

You have something specific and this is the whole range of reactions in me. Immediately repeating that there is no hostility in this.

[perttime]

The point of this thread - and this forum - is the model.
If somebody hasn't looked at the model pics, please do so: it is good.

As for a real turboprop F4U Corsair, I very much DOUBT that it existed - because:
1) There's no real reason to keep such a thing secret, so we would probably have photo evidence and other documentation of its existence.
2) The subject is so interesting that people would certainly keep the evidence of its existence alive.

[Old Wombat]

AMEN!!!

[Librarian]

YES . Not sure if I posted this before but found it googling...superb :

[PR19_Kit]

Far more practical than a tubro-prop F4U...........

[kitnut617]

That's notched the bar up a few notches Ed, very, verrrry nice 

As I said earlier  ----   

[tahsin]

Well, I do know this is a modelling forum but wouldn't it be nice if it came out to be true? We then would know why the British PM himself intervened in a little search for Spitfires, some 140 of them. Sadly geschwarz seems to be no more, he could have enjoyed all the good stuff here. Won't comment on the Corsair in this thread, apart from the quality of the build and such, it took me something like 5 years to get used to that Green camo on the RN Corsairs...