Talk:McDonnell F2H Banshee/Archive 1

FH/F2H Weights
I was thinking about something, why was the F2H so much heavier both empty than the FH?AVKent882 (talk) 00:58, 28 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Most of the reasons are outlined in the article. The primary reason was that the Navy was unhappy with the Phantom's lackluster performance compared to the P-80 Shooting Star and its lack of range compared to the F4U Corsair. McDonnell engineers quickly determined that they needed more powerful engines and larger fuel tanks to address these concerns, but the FH-1's wing was too small to accomodate the larger engines and not strong enough to support the added weight. As often happens in aviation, the engineers started off redesigning the wing and wound up redesigning most of the airplane! The F2H also had numerous other weight-adding improvements compared to the FH: cockpit air conditioning, an ejection seat, heavier 20mm cannons rather than .50-caliber machine guns, and more and better avionics- the latter item added much more weight in the days of vacuum tubes than it would today. The later F2H-3 and F2H-4 variants were heavier still, due to the added length, the addition of onboard radar (more vacuum tubes), and increased internal fuel capacity. It should be noted that the -3 and -4 variants, particularly the former, had substantially degraded performance compared to the -1 and -2; I intend to address this in a future revision. Carguychris (talk) 16:21, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
 * The weight data listed is largely on the F2H-3. Honestly what I was thinking for all aviation pages was to simply include all variants in some form of a table format, reasonably speaking.AVKent882 (talk) 15:55, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Your idea, while good in theory, is difficult in practice when talking about military aircraft. Specifications for several of the Banshee variants are not well documented in published sources, and a similiar lack of verifiable information is encountered with other military aircraft. The full extent of a military aircaft's capabilities and equipment are often kept secret to confound potential adversaries, and this secrecy can make it difficult to verify an aircraft's true capabilities, even many years after it is struck from the inventory.Carguychris (talk) 19:30, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

Wanted: Combat details + pictures
I would like to find some more information and pictures in order to complete this page. First, I would like to add a summary of Korean War combat kills and losses involving the F2H. Second, I think the page would benefit from the addition of one or more color pictures of USN or USMC F2H-2s in Korean War colors; the B&W image on the page is rather dark, making it hard to see any details of the airplane. Third, I would like to add a picture of the F2H-2P recon variant that clearly shows the unique nose. I am already working on adding a color picture of an RCN F2H-3. If you think you can contribute, feel free. Carguychris 15:48, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Radar in F2H-3 and F2H-4
BilCat, please provide the source for the manufacturer names of the radar units in the F2H-3 and F2H-4. Both the Mills and Mesko books agree that the F2H-3 had Hughes radar, although Mesko incorrectly lists the radar as the APG-41 (tail gun radar for B-36H) rather than the APQ-41, and both books say that the F2H-4 had Westinghouse APG-37 radar. I'm wondering if both books may have used a single erroneous source for this information; I'm no expert on early Cold War radar.Carguychris (talk) 18:15, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

Recent edits
Is there a need for the citation bombing tags on this article? Was there an issue with unsourced or unreferenced material? FWiW Bzuk (talk) 22:46, 7 May 2011 (UTC).

Maiden flight details
In the Design and development section, the maiden flight of the XF2D-1 is shown as occurring on 11 January 1947, and the test pilot is listed as Woodward Burke. The reference for this section is listed as Francillon, René J. McDonnell Douglas Aircraft since 1920. London: Putnam, 1979.

According to this page, test pilot Woodward Burke was killed in the crash of the first prototype of the McDonnell XFD-1 on 1 November 1945. This information appears to be corroborated in a Google Book search of the Francillon book.

Given this discrepancy, I wonder which information is incorrect. Did the XF2D-1 first fly before Burke's death on 1 November 1945, or was the test pilot on its first flight someone other than Burke?

Exceat (talk) 19:01, 9 June 2011 (UTC)