AP 118 · No. 10 Section II · Aircraft Plate 142 / 264

Plate 142 of 264 · Second World War · Fighter

Bell P-63A Kingcobra

P-63A-7-BE Kingcobra, 42-69080 ‘Fatal Fang’, painted as 42-69080 ‘Fatal Fang’, a Bell P-63A-7-BE Kingcobra built in 1943 and kept in the United States, owned from 1950 by the Cal-Aero Technical Institute at Glendale and from 1953 by Ed Maloney’s Air Museum (later Planes of Fame), registered N94501, and since 1977 by the Yankee Air Corps, now the Yanks Air Museum, Chino, California, which flew it again on 30 November 2023 after more than forty years on the ground: Bell’s enlarged successor to the Airacobra, a single-seat fighter with its 1,325 hp Allison V-1710 engine behind the pilot driving a four-bladed Aeroproducts propeller through an extension shaft, a 37 mm cannon firing through the propeller hub, a car-style cockpit door, a laminar-flow wing and a tricycle undercarriage, shown standing nose-up on its wheels with a 75 US gallon drop tank under the fuselage: bare aluminium overall with a dark anti-glare panel ahead of the windscreen, an orange-yellow spinner, black propeller blades with yellow tips, the star-and-bar with a blue outline on both fuselage sides, black ‘269080’ across the fin and rudder, a small ‘N94501’ behind the insignia, and red ‘FATAL FANG’ lettering with a crowned cobra on both sides of the nose (shape from the Bell P-63A three-view on Wikimedia Commons, checked against a side-on wartime photograph of 42-68871; paint and markings following photographs of 42-69080 at Chino; no wing insignia is shown, since the photographs show none on the upper surfaces and none of the undersides); no complete Kingcobra survives in Britain: the Wings Aviation Museum at Balcombe holds the wreck remains of several recovered from Russia, where most P-63s served.

3D model

Turn it over

A procedural model built in Blender from published dimensions, drawings and photographs, painted as 42-69080 ‘Fatal Fang’, a Bell P-63A-7-BE Kingcobra built in 1943 and kept in the United States, owned from 1950 by the Cal-Aero Technical Institute at Glendale and from 1953 by Ed Maloney’s Air Museum (later Planes of Fame), registered N94501, and since 1977 by the Yankee Air Corps, now the Yanks Air Museum, Chino, California, which flew it again on 30 November 2023 after more than forty years on the ground: Bell’s enlarged successor to the Airacobra, a single-seat fighter with its 1,325 hp Allison V-1710 engine behind the pilot driving a four-bladed Aeroproducts propeller through an extension shaft, a 37 mm cannon firing through the propeller hub, a car-style cockpit door, a laminar-flow wing and a tricycle undercarriage, shown standing nose-up on its wheels with a 75 US gallon drop tank under the fuselage: bare aluminium overall with a dark anti-glare panel ahead of the windscreen, an orange-yellow spinner, black propeller blades with yellow tips, the star-and-bar with a blue outline on both fuselage sides, black ‘269080’ across the fin and rudder, a small ‘N94501’ behind the insignia, and red ‘FATAL FANG’ lettering with a crowned cobra on both sides of the nose (shape from the Bell P-63A three-view on Wikimedia Commons, checked against a side-on wartime photograph of 42-68871; paint and markings following photographs of 42-69080 at Chino; no wing insignia is shown, since the photographs show none on the upper surfaces and none of the undersides); no complete Kingcobra survives in Britain: the Wings Aviation Museum at Balcombe holds the wreck remains of several recovered from Russia, where most P-63s served. Drag to orbit, scroll or pinch to zoom · download .glb (1.2 MB)

Data plate

Specification

First flight, number built and top speed are for the whole family (P-63A/C); engine, crew and dimensions are for the P-63A-7-BE Kingcobra, 42-69080 ‘Fatal Fang’ modelled here.

History

The Kingcobra

Bell’s P-39 Airacobra had an unusual layout: the Allison engine sat behind the pilot, turning the propeller through a long shaft that ran under the cockpit, which left the nose free for a cannon firing through the propeller hub. It was a poor performer at height, and in 1941 Bell began a larger, more powerful successor. The P-63 kept the Airacobra’s layout, its car-style cockpit doors and its tricycle undercarriage, but had a new laminar-flow wing, a bigger tail and an Allison with a second, auxiliary supercharger. The first XP-63 flew on 7 December 1942, a year to the day after Pearl Harbor, and production P-63As followed in October 1943.

By then the US Army Air Forces had the P-47 and P-51 and did not want the Kingcobra for combat. The Soviet Union did. It was already the largest user of the Airacobra, whose cannon and low-level handling suited the fighting on the Eastern Front, and about 2,400 of the 3,303 Kingcobras built went there under Lend-Lease. Most were flown by American and Soviet pilots from Great Falls, Montana, through Alaska and across Siberia. The P-63A carried a 37 mm cannon in the nose and four .50 in machine guns, two in the nose and two under the wings, and the P-63C that followed had a more powerful engine and a ventral fin.

Soviet Kingcobras fought against Japan in Manchuria in August 1945, and stayed in service into the early 1950s. Free French forces received about 300, which they flew in Indochina until the early 1950s. In the United States the type found one more use: the RP-63 ‘Pinball’, an armoured manned target with its guns removed, at which air gunners under training fired frangible lead-and-plastic bullets that broke up on impact. Sensors in the skin counted the hits and lit a red lamp in the propeller hub.

This airframe

P-63A-7-BE 42-69080 ‘Fatal Fang’

42-69080The airframe modelled

No complete Kingcobra survives in Britain. The Wings Aviation Museum near Balcombe in West Sussex displays the wreck remains of several Soviet P-63s recovered from Russia, but none is complete or has a finish that can be documented, so the model shows a complete American P-63A instead. 42-69080 stayed in the United States after the war. From 1950 it belonged to the Cal-Aero Technical Institute at Glendale, California, and from 1953 to Ed Maloney’s Air Museum, later Planes of Fame, which registered it N94501. In 1977 it passed to Charles Nichols’s Yankee Air Corps at Chino, now the Yanks Air Museum, which began restoring it in 1979 and flew it again on 30 November 2023, after more than forty years on the ground. The model shows it as photographed at the museum, standing nose-up on its wheels with a 75 US gallon drop tank under the fuselage: bare aluminium overall with a dark anti-glare panel ahead of the windscreen, an orange-yellow spinner, black propeller blades with yellow tips, the star-and-bar with a blue outline on both fuselage sides, black ‘269080’ across the fin and rudder, a small ‘N94501’ behind the insignia, and red ‘FATAL FANG’ lettering with a crowned cobra on both sides of the nose. The photographs show no insignia on the upper wing surfaces and none of the undersides, so none is painted there. The shape follows the Bell P-63A three-view on Wikimedia Commons, checked against a side-on wartime photograph of another P-63A, 42-68871.

Where to see one

In the gazetteer

The gazetteer records the Kingcobra in one UK collection.

Every airframe and serial All 264 plates

Profiles and models are procedural interpretations built in Blender from published dimensions, three-view drawings and photographs of each airframe. Treat the museum aircraft as the reference.