We Raised the Pilots’ EyesWe Raised the Pilots’ EyesWe Raised
the Pilots’ EyesWe Raised the Pilots’ EyesWe Raised the Pilots’
Eyes(and solved a Corsair program crisis)(and solved a Corsair
program crisis)(and solved a Corsair program crisis)(and solved a
Corsair program crisis)(and solved a Corsair program crisis)
In September 1942 F4U-1 Navy shipboard tri-als confirmed what
most of us had known, that itwas almost impossible to see to land
the bird on acarrier. Positioning a 237 gallon self sealing fuel
tankbetween the engine and thepilot had moved him 32inches further
aft than inthe XF4U-1, and the nose-high landing attitudeblocked
out the deck. Navybrass threatened to cancel the whole Corsair
program.
As the junior member of Vought’s fuselage de-sign group – I was
19 years old – I was assigned tostay all night to sketch up a quick
solution, to raisethe pilot’s eyeball five inches and to retrofit
thechange. Project Engineer Russ Clark(later president of Vought)
arrivedearly in the morning to scoop up thesketches and catch the
train to Wash-ington, where he dashed to the old Wbuilding on
Constitution Avenue andsold the scheme to Navair officials.
Im-mediately, Ted Lillemoe (now retiredbut still flying, the only
Lillemoe in Ver-mont) led a team to redesign the canopy. The
objectwas to install it on the earliest aircraft possible on
anever-accelerating assembly line, and to retrofit theaircraft we
couldn’t catch. We ended up putting iton the 125th and subsequent
and sending kits toretrofit the 6th and subsequent. The first five
air-craft were never changed; they stayed at the plantfor follow-on
testing.
The first Corsairs had a “birdcage” canopy,with a three-light
glass windshield and a six pan-eled plastic sliding section. The
mechanism, doneby some clever design draftsman, had forwardrollers
on an extruded track and aft roller trol-leys that rode up, then
aft, along a rear trackembedded in a “turtledeck” behind the pilot,
so that,when closed, the canopy was flush with the afterstructure.
The aircraft had good visibility where wedidn’t need it; two
notches in the turtledeck providedrearward views for owl-necked
pilots and the bot-tom of the fuselage (there was no cockpit floor,
justa pair of foot troughs) contained a window usuallycovered with
oil. Our new design replaced the canopyby a five-inch higher
compound-curved three-panelsliding section mounted on the same
track fixtures.The transparencies were Lucite or Plexiglas,
formedby a new process over a felt-covered wooden mold.Our new
windshield used existing fasteners: its con-tour butted the forward
edge of the new slidingcanopy.
Incorporating this mandatory fix gave Engineeringan opportunity
to make a couple of other desiredchanges. The canopy, designed to
ride upward onthe rear tracks, was hard to open so we improved
itsoperating mechanism. We replaced hard-to-get ex-truded track
with a more durable track of stainlesssheet. The rear windows and
the bottom one came
out; more armor plate went in. Bulkhead 186,the aft cabin
bulkhead, acquired an upper panelof armor plate, and the aft end of
the new slid-ing section had a plate of half-inch thick alumi-num.
We toyed with a curved armored wind-shield, but ended with thick
laminated glasshung inside the center panel. The changes raised
the pilot’s eye five inches and saved the programfrom
cancellation.
Even so, Navy Squadron VF12 did not deploythe first delivered
F4Us aboard carriers. Instead they
went to land based MarineSquadron VMF 214 onGuadalcanal, where
they weredesperately needed. The storiesof their exploits are
legend. TheMarines considered landing vis-ibility an idiosyncracy,
not aproblem. Verne Pepper, one ofPappy Boyington’s Black Sheep
boys, affectionately referred to the long nosed birdas “old hose
nose.”
Actually, the first carrier operated Corsairswere British,
flying from HMS Victorious against the
Germans inNorway. USNavy flyersquickly fol-lowed up
onBritish-devel-oped landingtechniques,and by theend of the
war were regularly attacking Tokyo from the decksof Yorktown and
Bunker Hill. Late in the war, thecanopy underwent a second update.
A new free form-ing process — blowing heated plastic almost
likebubblegum — gave clearer vision in a one-piecetransparency. The
flat laminated armor resistantglass became the windshield center
panel itself. Thischange made the 689th Corsair, and became the
fi-nal cockpit canopy on the F4U-4, F4U-5, and AU-1series.
Ultimately, 12,571 Corsairs were built. Theywere all made
possible by our crash project in 1942and 1943 to raise the pilot’s
eye and rescue the pro-gram.
- Lew Knapp- Lew Knapp- Lew Knapp- Lew Knapp- Lew Knapp
Page 5Reminiscences
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