Talk:Emergency fighter

Bristol Blenheim?
Why are the Bristol Blenheim IF and IVF listed here? The Blenheim was a purpose built fighter-bomber designed and built under non-emergency conditions years before the war even started. The Blenheim IF, the first long range fighter variant, entered service in September 1938, a full year before the outbreak of hostilities in Europe. The conversion wasn't an "emergency" action but was intended to exploit what was seen (at the time the conversions were first mooted) as good speed, good high altitude performance and very long range. -- 202.63.39.58 (talk) 07:33, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

North American P-51 Mustang?
Although it had time to later mature the North American P-51 Mustang had its genesis in the desire of the British to bolster its fighter strength at a time of crisis.--KTo288 (talk) 19:39, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

SBD Dauntless
Apparently a pre-war tactic of the US Navy was to launch SBD Dauntlesses to augment the combat air patrol over an aircraft carrier group. The Dauntless had two forward-firing machine guns as well as a rear-facing gunner, because the "Scout" part of the SBD acronym required the Dauntless to be able to defend itself while alone or in small groups. The use of SBDs as combat air patrol was actually tried in the Battle of Coral Sea, with a patrol of 8 SBDs claiming three kills--but four SBDs were downed in turn by escorting Zero fighters. There may have been other instances.

USN Pilot Stanley "Swede" Vejtasa scored at least ten kills in his wartime career, including seven in one day as a fighter pilot. But at Coral Sea, Vajesta was piloting an SBD and claimed three Zeroes shot down. These may be the same three kills claimed by the SBD patrol mentioned above. Vejtasa earned two Navy Crosses for this incident and a previous one in which Vejtasa claimed an enemy fighter downed with his SBD.

If the simplest definition of an "emergency fighter" is to press other types of planes into a fighter combat role, without modification, then the use of the SBD certainly qualifies and it even has a combat record in that role. Sofa King (talk) 19:14, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

Definition and scope
There has been some confusion over this. The solution is simple; we defer to reliable sources (see WP:RS). If RS state a clear definition, we may adopt it. If RS refer to a type as an "emergency fighter" then so may we. Only rarely might we be able to identify a type as such if no source on it uses the term explicitly. &mdash; Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 07:38, 2 July 2023 (UTC)