These admonishments were probably written into Handbook because of the 56th Fighter Group’s high accident rate. It was the first Army Air Corps group to fly the Thunderbolts, and it lost 13 pilots and 41 aircraft during training at Mitchel Field, New York, before leaving for Europe!
The P-47 has often been written of as being “tremendous” in size. True, it was considerably bigger then Bell P-39 and Curtiss P-40, but to me, it wasn’t much bigger that the Hellcat because it had the same wingspan and was only 3 feet longer. It was soon to find out that its much greater weight- and consequent 130-percent higher wing loading – would soon make me a respectful P-47B pilot.
The first obvious difference I noted during take off was the deep, muffled faraway exhaust noise sounded more like that of a Cadillac than of a fighter. Compared with that, the Hellcat’s take-off exhaust racket – with the exhaust stacks very near cockpit sounded like an unturned hot-rod’s
The P-47B’s additional gross weight exceeded the Hellcat’s by 3000 pounds and seemed to give it an all too disinterested acceleration rate when it tried to reach its 125mph take off speed. I immediately thought that Republic’s 5000 foot runway was much too short, especially with main assembly plant right at the end of it. A few seconds later I was pleased that I had remembered to unlock the ground landing gear downlock. Had I not done this, I would have had to look back into the cockpit during takeoff to unlock it just when I wanted to be sure I would clear that onrushing factory roof. I found that P-47’s lingering takeoff impressive.
I never did used to the long wait for the P-47 to leave the ground. One my first of several takeoff’s, I instinctively looked back at the engine instruments several times, hoping that the throttle could be pushed much farther forward. I failed to ask why they don’t use partial flap deflection to shorten its ground run.
The P-47’s best climb speed was 45 mph higher than the Hellcat’s 125mph, and that added to the long wait required to get away from the earth’s crust, which seemed to scrape its fuselage bottom. At 10 000 feet I felt at home, so I moved the controls more then I moved my eyeballs.
Remembering the POH rebuke as I set up to do a stall, I very slowly reduced the P-47B’s airspeed with the flaps and landing gear retracted . At 120mph it started to buffet, and at 110 it stalled. Surprisingly, it had very little wing drop, so I recovered and rechecked it several times with similar results. I then tried an accelerated stall at 125mph and found that even when I pulled the stick fairly hard it’s stall was also preceded by pronounced buffeting, and very little wing drop. It seemed too good to be true. With the wheel and flaps down, it again stalled very gently, and the stall was preceded by an even stronger buffet warning and with absolutely no wing drop.
I was amazed because it’s stall characteristics were better then the Hellcat’s, but stall speed was 21mph higher. I was even more impressed when I returned from the flight and inspected the wing’s leading edge expecting to find stall “fixes” such as a cambered leading edge or leading-edge spoilers that would give it required a more raid and larger throttle motion during the recovery to minimize altitude loss. It’s heavier wing loading was quite noticeable during recovery.