Could the F4U Corsair and or the F6F Hellcat have fought and won again the Luftwaffe's Bf 109 and Fw 190? We will compare speeds, climb rates, dive speed, maneuverability and more.

If they could have competed, why didn't the USAAF use them? While we are looking at this we will take a look at Equivalent Airspeed or EAS, and learn some surprising facts about the Brewster Buffalo, facts I'm quite sure have never been on youtube before.

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A lot of people have commented that the Hellcat's design had nothing to do with encounters with the Zero, or study of the Akutan Zero. I disagree. Here are my supporting facts:

1. The Akutan Zero was recovered and shipped to Seattle where it arrived on August 1st 1942.
2. Data about the plane was transmitted to Grumman and others as soon as possible. From the book The Grumman Story " After careful study, Roy Grumman decided that he could match or surpass the Zero in most respects, except in range, without sacrificing pilot armor, self-sealing tanks and fuselage structure. The new F6F Hellcat would compensate for the extra weight with additional power."

3. The Akutan Zero was repaired and first flew in US hands on Sept. 20th 1942, but they had been studying it since they got it.

4. The first production Hellcat first flew on Oct. 2nd 1942.

5. The following statement is on Wikipedia, with multiple sources to back it up "This first Double Wasp-equipped Hellcat airframe, bearing Bauer serial number 02982, first flew on 30 July 1942. The F6F-3 subtype had been designed with specific "Wildcat vs Zero" input from Battle of the Coral Sea and Battle of Midway veteran F4F pilots such as Jim Flatley and Jimmy Thach, respectively, among several others, obtained during a meeting with Grumman Vice President Jake Swirbul at Pearl Harbor on 23 June 1942, with the first production F6F-3 making its first flight just over three months later, on October 3, 1942"

The bottom line is that Grumman had been designing the Hellcat before the Wildcat's met Zero's but made huge changes to it based on reports from the War. The biggest change was the switch from the R-2600 to the R-2800, which was huge, and they were very clear that this was based on "specific Wildcat vs. Zero" input from the war. Furthermore, we know that Grumman had studied the Zero and while I doubt any major changes came from the study of the Akutan Zero specifically, having the ability to study it was a huge advantage. Even if they made no changes to the Hellcat at that point, which is unlikely, it still helped by letting them know they were on the right track.


Roger B. Taney. When I say almost nobody knows who he is, I'm referring to the man, not the actions of the supreme court while he was there. Yes, he delivered a famous pro slavery verdict. This terrible decision was a 7-2 vote essentially in favor of slavery. My point is that the man, not the history of slavery is an obscure foot note, and if anything, changing the name of the ship is causing him to be more well known.

Here is my evidence for this. At the time my video came out there were only about a half dozen youtube videos about Roger B. Taney. Of those, many have been up for years and have only a few dozen views, some have a few hundred. The video that has the most has been up for 8 years and has about 3500 views, that's it. Type in Robert E. Lee and there are countless videos, many with hundreds of thousands of views. So by youtube standards, Taney the man is a historical footnote.

That doesn't' mean that the civil war or slavery are footnotes. There is an obvious difference. Just because someone has heard of the civil war doesn't mean they know the key players, let along the key players before the war. If you ask 1000 people in the US if they have heard of the US Civil war, nearly all will say yes. If you ask 1000 people who Jefferson Davis was, you might get 100 who get that correct. If you ask 1000 people at random who Roger B. Taney was, I would be shocked if you got five who know who he is.

Yet all the sudden we have all these virtue signaling keyboard crusaders typing from their products made by forced labor claiming that they knew all about Taney, and have been on some anti-Taney crusade all along. I'm calling BS. How many have comments on youtube with the name Taney in them prior to this video? Probably none.