Why was the F4U Corsair so feared?

Video from the channel El Lado Secreto de la Guerra about Vought F4U Corsair, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 20:28. Language: Spanish. Video type: Documentary.

A Spanish-language documentary about the Vought F4U Corsair: its design, the serious problems of its early years, how they were solved, and its long career in the Second World War, in Korea and with other air forces.

At the start of the war, the US Navy called for a high-performance fighter to operate from carriers. The XF4U-1 prototype was built around the 2,000-hp Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp engine, with a propeller over 4 m in diameter. To keep the propeller from touching the ground, the inverted gull wing was adopted, which also shortened the landing gear. In October 1940 the aircraft exceeded 400 miles per hour.

Housing six .50-calibre machine guns in the wings pushed the fuel to a large forward tank and moved the cockpit back, leaving very little visibility when landing on carriers. This was compounded by oil leaks onto the windscreen, gear bounces and abrupt stalls in which one wing dropped before the other. Among sailors it was nicknamed the "ensign eliminator." The fixes were a metal strip on the right wing's leading edge, a redesigned landing gear, a bubble canopy instead of the birdcage one, and a raised seat. The Navy remained reluctant to put it aboard ship, and it was the Marines who first used it from land bases in the Pacific. The Japanese nicknamed it "whistling death."

The video puts the figures at 692 Corsairs destroyed in incidents unrelated to combat, 230 lost to technical failures on missions and 189 shot down in air combat. Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, leading the Black Sheep, totalled 26 kills. Against the Zero, pilots avoided prolonged turns and attacked from higher altitude before diving away. It also excelled at close support with rockets, bombs and napalm. By 1945 it was operating at large scale from carriers and struck Okinawa and Japan itself. It returned to combat in Korea from 1950 as an attack aircraft. Honduras used it in 1969 against Salvadoran P-51 Mustangs in the Football War. More than 12,500 units were built, from the F4U-1 to the F4U-7, and Goodyear and Brewster manufactured it under licence.