The Rejected Engineer Who Created the Most Feared Fighter in the Pacific: Rex Beisel and the F4U ...
Video from the channel Documentari estremi IT about Vought F4U Corsair, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 21:27. Language: Spanish. Video type: Documentary.
What it's about
Documentary about Rex Buren Beisel, chief engineer at Vought, and the birth of the F4U Corsair. It traces his humble origins, his education, his career in US naval aviation and the development of the fighter, from the Navy's specification to its triumph in the Pacific.
Historical context
Beisel was born in 1893, the son of a coal miner in Washington State, and worked from age 16 in the mine and other trades before studying mechanical engineering at the University of Washington. After passing a civil service exam he joined the Navy and moved to the Bureau of Aeronautics: he started in 1917 as a technical draftsman, in 1919 became one of the country's first certified aeronautical engineers and designed the TS-1. At Curtiss he designed racing aircraft that won the Pulitzer Trophy, the N2C-1 Fledgling trainer and the F8C Helldiver. In 1931 he joined Chance Vought, whose last two fighter projects the Navy had rejected; there he turned the cancelled F3U into the SBU, the first aircraft of its category to exceed 320 km/h.
Key facts
In February 1938 the Bureau of Aeronautics asked United Aircraft for a carrier fighter faster than any other, in competition with the Brewster F2A Buffalo and the Grumman F4F Wildcat. Beisel combined the Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp, of about 2,000 hp, with the smallest possible fuselage; the propeller, over 4 m across, required a long landing gear, and the solution was the inverted gull wing, which also housed the oil coolers and supercharger intakes at its root. The XF4U-1 prototype flew on May 29, 1940 with Lyman Bullard at the controls and in October reached 650 km/h in level flight. Carrier problems (visibility, gear bounce, sudden left-wing stall) relegated it to land bases: Major William E. Gise's VMF-124 arrived at Guadalcanal on February 12, 1943 and Kenneth Walsh became the first ace in a Corsair. More than 11,000 were built, with over 2,100 claimed kills against fewer than 200 losses; after several fixes it returned to carriers in late 1944 and went on to serve in the Korean War.