I'm an aviation dork, and this airplane deserves so much more love than it gets. Some quick facts about this plane:
- It had a big fucking cannon in it's nose as well as a few machine guns.
- The engine was behind the cockpit, which scared the shit out of American pilots. They thought if the plane was to crash, the engine would plow through the cockpit.
- First fighter with a tricycle landing gear (others were tail draggers)
- It doesn't have a canopy, it has 'car doors' that can be jettisoned if needed. These doors also have rolls down windows.
- Wasn't really suited for the Americans so they gave them to the USSR.
- Soviet pilots FUCKING LOVED THEM.
- Five of the 10 highest scoring Soviet aces logged the majority of their kills in P-39s.
- The Soviet success makes the P-39 collect the highest number of kills attributed to any U.S. fighter type flown by any air force in any conflict. THAT'S LOTS OF DEAD NAZIS!
The P-39 Airacobra!
AMERICAN LABOR :left-unity-2: SOVIET AIR FORCES
Useless at high altitude due to technical issues they gave up on solving. This didn't matter because high altitude level bombers weren't used much in the east, which means there is nothing to intercept up there.
Similarly awesome aircraft is the A-20. Super fast, agile low altitude bomber. Practically designed for the eastern front, although that wasn't the intention.
The roll-down windows also suggest that they wouldn't be going very high. What're you gonna do, depressurize the cabin above 15,000 feet?
Piston engine planes don't go high enough to need pressurization. They use oxygen up high. If you go high enough 100% oxygen won't be enough because the pressure is so low, but that's only at altitudes so high modern fighter jets can't even go up there.
To clarify, pressurized cabins aren't generally used in military aircraft, or aircraft in general at the time. It's more of a luxury comfort thing at those altitudes, as oxygen masks are annoying and uncomfortable. The B-29 is the only WW II aircraft off the top of my head with a pressurized cockpit.
The P-39 couldn't go above 10,000 feet. This was crippling. It was easily outperformed and shot down by enemy aircraft if it even got close to this altitude. You'd think that would make it a good ground attack aircraft, but in a ground attack aircraft you actually want the engine in front of you, as it functions as additional armor in the exact direction they're going to be shooting at you from. It was so heavily armed because it wasn't supposed to be a fighter, it was supposed to be a bomber interceptor. But bombers fly as high as they can. One can understand why it quickly fell out of favor and was pushed off on someone else.
:gigachad-hd: Rolls down windows to feel the wind whipping through their hair during a firefight.
Unfortunately the Aircobra had a terrible reputation in the US as it was used against pretty well trained pilots flying Zeros in places like Guadalcanal and New Guinea. It's one of these planes that was pretty good but had a "bad run" and got it's bad reputation from it, kinda like the Devastator... it wasn't a terrible torpedo bomber (it performed well about two times before Midway) but during that battle the Devastators were almost all annihilated by the IJN and that is where their reputation comes from.
I flew the Aircobra a lot in IL-2 1946, super easy to use and the nose cannon was excellent. Visibility from the cockpit was bad however.
I flew this thing a lot in war thunder because of the comically large 37mm gun in the nose
low rate of fire, low muzzle velocity and low capacity basically made it objectively inferior to the other cannons - MG151, Hispanos, etc. it's really fun to disintegrate Bf109s with the massive 37mm shell though
