From Wikipedia"
The Lockheed P-38 Lightning was a World War II American fighter aircraft built by Lockheed. Developed to a United States Army Air Corps requirement, the P-38 had distinctive twin booms and a single, central nacelle containing the cockpit and armament. Named "fork-tailed devil" by the Luftwaffe and "two planes, one pilot" by the Japanese, the P-38 was used in a number of roles, including dive bombing, level bombing, ground-attack, photo reconnaissance missions, and extensively as a long-range escort fighter when equipped with drop tanks under its wings.
The P-38 was used most successfully in the Pacific Theater of Operations and the China-Burma-India Theater of Operations as the mount of America's top aces, Richard Bong (40 victories) and Thomas McGuire (38 victories). In the South West Pacific theater, the P-38 was the primary long-range fighter of United States Army Air Forces until the appearance of large numbers of P-51D Mustangs toward the end of the war. The P-38 was unusually quiet for a fighter, the exhaust muffled by the turbo-superchargers.
It was extremely forgiving, and could be mishandled in many ways, but
the rate of roll was too slow for it to excel as a dogfighter. The P-38 was the only American fighter aircraft in production throughout American involvement in the war, from Pearl Harbor to Victory over Japan Day.
The P-38J was introduced in August 1943. The turbo-supercharger intercooler
system on previous variants had been housed in the leading edges of
the wings and had proven vulnerable to combat damage and could burst if
the wrong series of controls were mistakenly activated. In the P-38J
model, the streamlined engine nacelles of previous Lightnings were
changed to fit the intercooler radiator between the oil coolers,
forming a "chin" that visually distinguished the J model from its
predecessors. While the P-38J used the same V-1710-89/91 engines as the
H model, the new core-type intercooler more efficiently lowered intake
manifold temperatures and permitted a substantial increase in rated
power. The leading edge of the outer wing was fitted with 55 gal (208
l) fuel tanks, filling the space formerly occupied by intercooler
tunnels, but these were omitted on early P-38J blocks due to limited
availability.
The
final 210 J models, designated P-38J-25-LO, alleviated the
compressibility problem through the addition of a set of
electrically-actuated dive recovery flaps just outboard of the engines
on the bottom centerline of the wings. With these improvements, a USAAF
pilot reported a dive speed of almost 600 mph (970 km/h), although the
indicated air speed was later corrected for compressibility error, and
the actual dive speed was lower.
Lockheed manufactured over 200 retrofit modification kits to be
installed on P-38J-10-LO and J-20-LO already in Europe, but the USAAF
C-54 carrying them was shot down by an RAF pilot who mistook the Douglas
transport for a German Focke-Wulf Condor. Unfortunately the loss of the kits came during Lockheed test pilot Tony LeVier's
four-month morale-boosting tour of P-38 bases. Flying a new Lightning
named "Snafuperman" modified to full P-38J-25-LO specs at Lockheed's
modification center near Belfast, LeVier captured the pilots' full
attention by routinely performing maneuvers during March 1944 that
common Eighth Air Force wisdom held to be suicidal. It proved too little
too late because the decision had already been made to re-equip with
Mustangs.
The
P-38J-25-LO production block also introduced hydraulically-boosted
ailerons, one of the first times such a system was fitted to a fighter.
This significantly improved the Lightning's rate of roll and reduced
control forces for the pilot. This production block and the following
P-38L model are considered the definitive Lightnings, and Lockheed
ramped up production, working with subcontractors across the country to
produce hundreds of Lightnings each month.
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