Posted on 10/21/2014 8:19:55 AM PDT by rktman
Ever since I was a kid I’ve been fascinated with WWII warbirds, my favorite being the P-51 Mustang. The North American P-51 Mustangs were armed with six .50 caliber M2 Browning machine guns, a good amount of firepower for the day. If you’ve been to airshows around the US I’m sure you’ve seen a P-51 at least once, but there’s something different about Ron Fagen’s P-51 Mustang named Twilight Tear. His actually has six functioning M2 Browning machine guns, kind of, read on.
(Excerpt) Read more at thefirearmblog.com ...
P-51 one of my favorite planes. Sweet!
Had the pleasure of assembling one of these aerial M2’s.
What is with that stupid pop up and the page going black. Is this a virus site?
I was a sickly child during WWII and ate many meals off of a tray.
The tray had a Vickers Spitfire on it and I can still see it in my mind.
Not an American plane——but quite memorable to me.
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Hmmm. Didn’t happen to me. Anybody else?
BFL. I’d also like to find someone to keep me in ammo for .50cal
A working P-51 is $1.5 million, plus.
It holds 269 gallons of avgas at about $6 per gallon.
If he can afford the plane and the gas, ammo is relatively cheap!
GO STREGA
I’ll bet you can still see that in your mind...a beautiful machine, too...:)
Those deuces shake that baby.
Yes, the P-51 and the F-86 are my favorite 50 cal. fighters.
If it wasn’t for Packard, the 51 would never have been the successful plane it was. I got a chance to visit with a client who collects packards and he has a still airworthy Merlin on an engine stand in his collection. What an amazing engine! The Packard built merlins had a better time to overhaul than the UK produced motors. I’ve been poking the owner to try and get him to bring the motor up to functioning and put it on a stand for demos. The fact I got to touch that engine was a real treat. I really want to hear it run. The previous owner almost put it in a miss Budweiser boat where it would have eventually blown up. He couldn’t bring himself to grenade a still airworthy Merlin.
Gonna hit my wife up for one for my birthday.
I think even if the Mustang had kept the original Allison V-V-1710 engine, it would have gotten faster anyway because I remember reading Allison had plans for major improvements in forced induction to correct the problem with higher altitude performance. Probably by early 1944, the V-1710 would have a two-stage supercharger, which probably would have made the P-51 only slightly slower than the V-1650 powered P-51B at altitude.
My dad was a USAF tactical fighte pilot for 7 years
He owned a T-28 in later years
He coveted a P-47 most of all
I love those M2s. I should bought some MG40s or ANM2s back when they were under $20k.
Beautiful P-51! After surviving a first tour of duty piloting B-24’s over Europe my FIL flew the P-51 on his second tour. Loved that airframe...
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