Military Aircraft The Whistling Death Of The F4U Corsair Fighter Aircraft ✪ Aircraft Documentary HD

Video from the channel Aircraft Documentary HD about Vought F4U Corsair, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 43:50. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

An episode of the Heavy Metal series devoted to the Vought F4U Corsair, the carrier-based fighter with inverted gull wings and a long nose that the Japanese called "whistling death." It combines archive footage, colour re-enactments and testimonies from veteran pilots to follow the aircraft from its design to the Allied victory in the Pacific in 1945.

The documentary starts from the shift from the battleship to the carrier as the centre of naval warfare and from Japan's invasion of China in 1937, which led the United States to review its defences. In 1938 the Navy called for a fast, high-altitude fighter to operate from carriers, and the winner was the Corsair, which first flew on 29 May 1940. The carrier trials of September 1942 went badly: oil stained the windscreen, the nose blocked the view of the deck on landing, the stall was abrupt, and the aircraft bounced and its hook skipped the wires. The Navy restricted it to land bases, and the Marines adopted it in the Solomons, with its first combat in February 1943. The British Fleet Air Arm operated it from carriers using a long curving approach, eight months before the US Navy, which returned it to sea in January 1945 with Marine squadrons aboard. In the final phase it faced the kamikazes at Okinawa, whose invasion began on 1 April 1945.

It exceeded 400 miles per hour in level flight and 500 in a dive; it had folding wings and a 2,000-horsepower engine driving a 13-foot propeller, the largest fitted to a fighter up to then. Greg Boyington's squadron VMF-214, the Black Sheep, debuted on 16 September 1943, and Boyington shot down five aircraft that day. Archie Donahue also shot down five in a single engagement. In 1944 load trials showed it could carry more than a ton and a half of bombs and rockets, turning it into a fighter-bomber. In their first nine days aboard ship, the first two Marine squadrons lost seven pilots and thirteen aircraft. The kamikaze attack on Bunker Hill killed almost 400 men; Donahue and almost all of his patrol survived because he had cancelled a briefing. Okinawa cost around 12,000 Allied lives and at least 125,000 Japanese ones.