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Tuesday, 14 July 2009

What are they?


H/T
Scotty

12 comments:

Greybeard said...

P-40 Warhawk...
The airplane used by the "Flying Tigers".

Anonymous said...

p-40 warhawks

Bill said...

They are American Curtiss-Wright p-40 Warhawks. The model had other hawkish names assigned by allied purchasers. It was a rather mediocre fighter of the WWII era compared with its competition, the Nips' Zero and all German fighters.

steveH said...

It soldiered on well for several years in ground attack, as did the Hurricane post-BoB. A lot of them were built and used by several allied air forces.

It was, after all, an obsolescent design by Pearl Harbor, being basically a P-36 with an inline engine, and hardly a match for later European and Japanese (not to mention American) fighters.

Speaking of which, five of the P-36s based near Pearl Harbor managed to get in the air during the attack, accounting for two Japanese losses for the loss of one P-36.

Sigivald said...

Airplanes. Duh.

Theo Spark said...

They look pre-war. Very early variants.

Murray said...

Sigivald is right, thems is "aeroplanes" Theo.

You can't fool us grunts.

Anonymous said...

Yep. P40's. An inferior airframe that the AVG used in China to prove that it aint always about the airframe being flown.

I imagine you can still find a few surviving Japanese Army Airforce pilots who flew in China. Show em one of those planes with the shark's maw painted on it and there's a good change they'd have an adult diaper moment.

Warthog said...

P40 Warhawks, later models actually. You can tell because they have 6 wing mounted .50's.

The AVG, also called the Flying Tigers actually used Tomahawks which was an earlier model which had 4 .30's in the wings and 2 .50's on top of the engine fairing.

Ed Miller said...

Wikipedia says (and my memory agrees):

Warhawk was the name the United States Army Air Corps adopted for all models, making it the official name in the United States for all P-40s.

The British Commonwealth and Soviet air forces used the name Tomahawk for models equivalent to the P-40B and P-40C, and the name Kittyhawk for models equivalent to the P-40D and all later variants.

- pupista! (barking mad on the right)

eric said...

P-40F's. Note the lack of a carburetor intake above the engine. These airplanes had a Merlin engine. The shorter fuselage distinguishes these from P-40L's which had a stretched fuselage to give the vertical stabilizer more leverage for stability.

richard mcenroe said...

They may have been obsolescent, but those are the planes that choked the airlift to North Africa and starved Rommel out of the war... like the Wildcat and the Aircobra, they paid the price but they held the line.