AP 118 · No. 10 Section II · Aircraft Plate 75 / 160

Plate 75 of 160 · Second World War · Carrier-borne fighter

Vought Corsair IV

Corsair IV, painted as KD431, the Fleet Air Arm Museum’s Vought Corsair IV, a Goodyear-built FG-1A delivered to the Royal Navy in 1944, flown by No. 1835 Squadron at Eglinton in Northern Ireland in 1945, then an instructional airframe at Cranfield until it reached Yeovilton in 1963, where conservators removed the later repaint by hand between 2000 and 2005 to reveal its original wartime finish, making it the most authentically painted Corsair in the world: a single-seat carrier fighter with a Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp radial, an inverted gull wing clipped by 8 in at each tip to fit British carrier hangars, oil-cooler and supercharger intakes in the wing roots, six 0.50 in machine guns, the raised cockpit and framed sliding hood of the F4U-1A and a 13 ft 4 in Hamilton Standard propeller, shown standing tail-down with its wings spread, the hood slid back and the port engine-accessory panel off as it has been displayed: worn Glossy Sea Blue overall, a Type C1 roundel under the cockpit, Type C roundels on the outer wings, a Type C fin flash, ‘ROYAL NAVY’ and ‘KD 431’ in white on the rear fuselage, red patches over the gun ports and on the wingtips, a white ‘S’ on the port main-leg door, the faint traces of its removed codes on the port side and a black three-blade propeller with yellow tips.

3D model

Turn it over

A procedural model built in Blender from published dimensions, drawings and photographs, painted as KD431, the Fleet Air Arm Museum’s Vought Corsair IV, a Goodyear-built FG-1A delivered to the Royal Navy in 1944, flown by No. 1835 Squadron at Eglinton in Northern Ireland in 1945, then an instructional airframe at Cranfield until it reached Yeovilton in 1963, where conservators removed the later repaint by hand between 2000 and 2005 to reveal its original wartime finish, making it the most authentically painted Corsair in the world: a single-seat carrier fighter with a Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp radial, an inverted gull wing clipped by 8 in at each tip to fit British carrier hangars, oil-cooler and supercharger intakes in the wing roots, six 0.50 in machine guns, the raised cockpit and framed sliding hood of the F4U-1A and a 13 ft 4 in Hamilton Standard propeller, shown standing tail-down with its wings spread, the hood slid back and the port engine-accessory panel off as it has been displayed: worn Glossy Sea Blue overall, a Type C1 roundel under the cockpit, Type C roundels on the outer wings, a Type C fin flash, ‘ROYAL NAVY’ and ‘KD 431’ in white on the rear fuselage, red patches over the gun ports and on the wingtips, a white ‘S’ on the port main-leg door, the faint traces of its removed codes on the port side and a black three-blade propeller with yellow tips. Drag to orbit, scroll or pinch to zoom · download .glb (1.1 MB)

Data plate

Specification

First flight, number built and top speed are for the whole family (); engine, crew and dimensions are for the Corsair IV modelled here.

History

The Corsair

In 1938 the US Navy asked for a single-seat carrier fighter with the highest possible speed, and Rex Beisel’s team at Vought-Sikorsky in Stratford, Connecticut, answered by putting the most powerful engine available, Pratt & Whitney’s new eighteen-cylinder R-2800 Double Wasp, behind the largest propeller ever fitted to a fighter. To give the 13 ft 4 in propeller room without a long, weak undercarriage, they bent the wing down from the roots and up again outboard, an inverted gull that let the main legs stay short and met the fuselage at right angles for low drag. The XF4U-1 first flew on 29 May 1940, and that October it became the first American single-engined fighter to exceed 400 mph in level flight.

Production F4U-1s had the cockpit moved some three feet aft to make room for fuel tanks over the wing, which left the pilot peering past a very long nose, and with a stiff undercarriage that bounced on landing the US Navy judged the Corsair unfit for carriers. It went first to the US Marine Corps, which flew it from island airfields in the Solomons from February 1943, and Goodyear and Brewster built it alongside Vought. The Royal Navy took more than 2,000 under Lend-Lease from 1943, the Corsair I to IV, with eight inches clipped from each wingtip to fit the low hangars of British carriers. Fleet Air Arm pilots worked out a curving approach that kept the deck in sight until the last moment, and on 3 April 1944 Corsairs from HMS Victorious covered the Barracuda strike on the battleship Tirpitz in Norway, months before American Corsairs went to sea in numbers.

In 1945 Corsairs of the British Pacific Fleet flew from Illustrious, Victorious and Formidable against the oil refineries of Sumatra, the airfields of the Sakishima islands during the Okinawa campaign and the Japanese home islands. Under the Lend-Lease terms most of the Fleet Air Arm’s Corsairs were returned or dumped at sea when the war ended, and the last squadrons gave them up in 1946. In American service the type flew on through the Korean War as a fighter-bomber and night fighter, and when production ended in December 1952, with the F4U-7 for the French Navy, 12,571 had been built, the last piston-engined fighters made in the United States.

This airframe

Corsair IV “KD431”

KD431The airframe modelled

KD431 was built by Goodyear at Akron, Ohio, as an FG-1A, with the raised cockpit and framed sliding hood of the F4U-1A, and delivered to the Royal Navy in 1944 as a Corsair IV. In 1945 it served with No. 1835 Squadron at Eglinton in Northern Ireland (one record gives No. 768 Squadron, a deck-landing training unit), and after the war it became an instructional airframe at Cranfield rather than being returned to the United States. It came to the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton in 1963 and was repainted. Between 2000 and 2005 the museum’s conservators removed that later paint by hand and found the original wartime finish beneath it, which it still wears, making it the most authentically finished Corsair anywhere. The model shows it in that finish as it has been displayed: worn Glossy Sea Blue overall, a yellow-ringed fuselage roundel under the cockpit, pale blue and red roundels on the outer wings, a red, white and blue fin flash, “ROYAL NAVY” and “KD 431” in white on the rear fuselage, red patches over the gun ports and on the wingtips, a white “S” on the port main-leg door, the faint traces of its removed codes on the port side, the hood slid back, the port engine-accessory panel off and a black propeller with yellow tips. It is shown with its wings spread, as in earlier photographs; the museum now displays it with one or both wings folded. The roundels beneath the wings are assumed to match those above, and the contents of the open accessory bay are generic.

See it at Fleet Air Arm Museum

Where to see one

In the gazetteer

The gazetteer records the Corsair in one UK collection. The airframe modelled here is marked.

Every airframe and serial All 160 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.