THE BEST WWII FIGHTERS

Which was number one?

- CORKY MEYER

When the editors of Flight Journal asked me to write about all the great WW II fighters and to choose one as “the best,” I thought, “What an ego trip!” The selections would be easy to dig out of my dusty flight-report files (which document my evaluations of WW II fighter types) and out of books in my aviation collection.

I test-flew several versions of these fighters during the Joint Army/Navy Fighter Conference at NAS Patuxent in October 1944 and also fighters that had been passed between Navy and Air Corps contractors for test-pilot evaluations: the F4U-1, F4U-1D, F4U-4 Corsair; P-51B, P-51D, H Mustang; P-38D, M Lightning; P-47B, P-47D, N Thunderbolt; P-40N Warhawk and P-39 Airacobra; P-63 King Cobra; F4F Wildcat; F6F Hellcat; Supermarine Seafire (a carrier version of the famous Spitfire); the Mosquito and the Japanese A6M5 Zero.

These flight evaluations weren’t merely joyrides to add hours to my logbook; they had been set up to investigate the fighters’ known good and bad flight characteristics and performance capabilities during simulated gunnery runs against other fighters and during dive-bombing runs against targets. I wrote a comprehensive report on every fighter so that Grumman engineers would be able to incorporate—or steer clear of—these features in future designs.

Picking the “best” fighter, however, went way past my experiences as a test pilot. It involved the consideration of a very complex series of operational factors. On top of that, the land-based war in Europe and the island-hopping war in Japan, in which carrier-based aviation played such a vital part, would have to be considered separately.

“BEST FIGHTER” SELECTION CRITERIA