Posted on 06/15/2018 7:14:01 AM PDT by Simon Green
So what are the best and worst fighter aircraft of all time? What plane would you pick for a war in the sky?
On the surface, the questions seem easy to answer. One might look at which planes performed the best in combat as opposed to fighters that did not. Or, one could look at which planes had the best technology, took advantage of historical circumstances, or utilized a combination of the two.
Does America dominate the field of best fighters? What about Russia? Does China get any mentions? Does any one nation have more negative mentions? All good questions.
Robert Farley, one of the world’s best security experts, gives us his breakdown. Over two articles, combined for your reading pleasure written several years ago, provides a strong look at the contenders for best fighters, but also, the worst of the worst.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalinterest.org ...
I knew two fighter pilots from WW2. One really liked the P-38 and the other swore by the P-47. Both felt the P-51 was a tad tender. Pilots put a lot of stock in “get me home”.
Our planes in the Pacific were so dominating because the Japs had lost all their pilots. By late 1944, our air cadets were being converted to bomber crews according to the CBS reports I am listening to from that period
The P47 blew up more tanks than the P51. But the P51 was prettier.
The greatness of the P-47 was that it was without peer in ground support, but if jumped by enemy fighters it could drop its ordinance and duke it out with the best the enemy could offer.
P-51 deserves mention as the best allied fighter in the hands of the average allied pilot.
The BE2 was not a fighter. It was an observation aircraft. In WWI, things changed so fast that there wasn’t really a fighter that deserved to be on the “worst list.” One month a fighter would be ruling the skies, the next it would be obsolescent.
The Buffalo worked great for the Finns and did okay for the Brits in the Far East.
The LaGG-3 deserves to be there.
Dunno why the Century series would make the “worst” list - at worst they were simply mediocre. Now the F-89 Scorpion with its all-rocket armament...
The MiG-23 was only mediocre, too. I think it gets its bad reputation from the undertrained pilots flying the export version.
Dunno ‘bout the ‘best’ list, either.
It doesn’t have the YAK-3, Spitfire, P-51, P-47, P-38, Bf-109 or FW-190, but has the MiG-21? I don’t think that works.
Don’t think Me-262 deserves to be in there either - it simply didn’t see enough service to earn such a position.
“The most shot-after girl in the South Pacific”
Against poorly trained pilots flying equally obsolescent aircraft.
Oh, wait....we did.
“The ME262 was an excellent fighter aircraf”
As I understand it, for the longest time Hitler was adamant on using it strictly as a bomb carrying ground attack aircraft. Adolph Galland put up such a stink that Hitler finally relented and allowed it to be used as an interceptor against bomber formations. Nothing the allies had could deal with it until we figured out to attack them in their landing approach. Too late in war otherwise 262’s could have devastated strategic bombing.
By 1944, the Japs were using different planes that we all seemed to call Zeros. The Zero was actually pretty much kaput by 1943, mostly due to the entry of P-38’s. The Japs still had good planes but the pilots were gone.
The ME 262 made a difference in the war for my family. My cousin was killed when his B26 was shot down by one in 1945
A best of five list without the Japanese Zero is nationalist nonsense. The plane, best of the world in its day, weighed the same as an SUV, but the radial engine produced over 1,000 horsepower. If you can imagine driving a thousand HP SUV, you can imagine what it was like handling a Zero.
They demonstrated a jet for Hitler in 1939 and he dismissed the whole idea.
Imagine the look on the faces of the pilots when they were told, "Here's your new plane. Behold the chode!"
Fighter design involves many tradeoffs. With the zero, the Japanese maximized range in order to have a fighter able to cover large distances between islands of the Japanese mandate of WWI. Maximizing range came at the expense of ruggedness and armaments although they were able to make the zero nimble.
As one surviving zero pilot put it in a post-war interview, fighting in the Zero was like going to war wearing a bathing suit.
I was a big WWII plane buff back in the late 60’s and 70’s. I then spent a fair amount of time in online WWII flight simulators around the turn of the century.
It was fun to read about the planes and then compare the specs to how they flew in combat simulators. Some simulators were pretty accurate. When I came up against a Zero, while flying a P-38, it was all about speed, because they could easily out-turn me. In fact, the Corsair was the same. The fun part was when I came up against a bunch of them I could always just pour on the coal and bug out. They couldn’t catch me.
Supermarine Spitfire should be in the list of the best.
We did.
What's missed in these "top insert number" lists are the differing requirements of the various battlefields.
In Europe, we needed planes with long range. The Mustang fit that bill.
In the Pacific we needed planes that could take the pounding of landing on a carrier. The Hellcat was designed for that.
We didn't adapt the Mustang for that.
I'm not going to turn either one down for sure.
A stronger case could be made for the Corsair to be on the list vs the Hellcat. The Corsair was a more versatile plane once the pilots figured out how to fly it.
You could even make the argument in some ways it was better than the Mustang.
262 does not belong on the list at all.
Better to pick one or two from each era.
Worst? Dont really care about the losers.
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