F4F-3 Gunsight Question

[Gibbage]

I have a question about the early F4F-3's. They first used telescoptic gunsights but were quickly replaced by optical gunsights. Most of my referances show the round Mk-8 gunsight, but just states F4f. In the book "Walk Around; F4F Wildcat" it shows a square box optical gunsight in F4F-3's, and the Mk-8 un -4's. Is the square gunsight correct for early -3's, and if so what gunsight is that? I cant find anything on it. Thanks for any help.

[simon]

In all honesty, can't help you...

might be worth hanging out for a response from the other true experts on here otherwise, try www.warbirdsresourcegroup.org , if they don't know they can usually point in the right direction...

[R Leonard]

Hang on, I've an F4F-3/-4 pilot handy, but he's asleep right now (2337 R) so I'll ask in the morning and get back to you.

Rich

[R Leonard]

Okay, F4F sights. My source was a pilot in one of the early F4F squadrons, VF-42. His collateral duty was materiel officer, so he’s in a good position to comment on the change from telescopic sight to reflector sights. All the F4F-3s delivered to his squadron and, at least, to VF-4 (which later became VF-41), VF-7 (which later became VF-71), and VF-72 (remember,, these are Atlantic Fleet squadrons . . . VF-4 and VF-42 from Ranger and VF-7 and VF-72 from Wasp) were delivered with the telescopic sight. These were mostly from the 1848-1896 and 2512-2538 b/n series. VF-42's birds came from the 2412-2538 block, though they later picked up #1896 and for a while (before Dec. 7) they had the XF4F-4. Anyway, in VF-42, they had the telescopic sights in their dash 3's up until January, 1942. At that point Yorktown was in San Diego after making the run from Norfolk. At San Diego, he went ashore and pitched a fit at the North Island materiel folks until he got the new reflector sights and windscreens issued to the squadron. It was the squadron’s responsibility to get them installed. The sights came without mounts, so they had to be fabricated on the ship. These were the same reflector sights that came installed in the F4F-4, the appearance difference being in the shipboard crafted mounts of the versus the factory installed version. The rheostat for the sight was located at about the 8 o’clock position on the instrument panel. The F4F-4 also came equipped with an auxiliary, very straight forward, bead and ring arrangement to the right of the reflector sight at about the 2 o’clock position, with the ring within the cone of the windscreen and the bead about 18 inches forward of the windscreen. The auxiliary sight was in case the reflector gave out for some reason. The comment I get on that arrangement is that this came from the folks who still believed in flintlocks. If you had to lean over to use the ring and bead sight you were already in big trouble and you could add to that the fact that you couldn’t see what was going on around you in that position. Later, at least one F4F-4 squadron decided to add another fail safe sighting system by painting a 1 inch wide white stripe down the top of the fuselage from the forward edge of the windscreen down to the cowl ring. Use of either of these auxiliary sighting systems was something to be avoided and my source doesn’t know of anyone who actually did so.

Regards,

Rich

[BuzzLightyear]

Gib,

I think I know the gunsight you are talking about:
http://members.cox.net/rowlandparks/image1.jpg

This is not the Mk-8 reflector sight, but rather the N2-A Optical sight:
http://members.cox.net/rowlandparks/image2.jpg

This was a rather early US optical sight used on planes like early P-35s, P-40s, F4Fs... The information I have on it is rather limited.

[R Leonard]

Interesting, except your photo of the gunsight in the cockpit is an F4F-4, not an F4F-3. Dash 4's used the Mark 8, I believe. Also this is a factory installation.

Regards,

Rich

[BuzzLightyear]

Yes, that's a -4. Nevertheless, as stated, its a N2-A gunsight, not a Mk-8.

Here's an F4F-3 with the same sight:
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/miscnara/pu14842.jpg

[BuzzLightyear]

Again:
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/g60000/g64822.jpg


And while not a Wildcat, here is what the Mk-8 looked like:
http://members.cox.net/rowlandparks/image3.jpg

I hate to use a model for illustration, but this is a an accurate representation of the Mk-8 in the F4F-4
http://hsfeatures.com/images/f4f4rf_cockpit1.jpg

[R Leonard]

Buzz -

You are, of course, correct.

I showed Himself the photos (no mean feat in itself to get him to even look at a computer screen) & he looked me, gave one of his patented "you didn’t pay attention the first time" looks and said "You never asked about the Mark 8’s, you asked about replacing telescopic sights with reflectors." And of course, indeed, that’s what I had asked about. He went on to say "We had Mark 8’s in our dash 4’s at Guadalcanal."
[I knew that … so much for great leaps of intuition]
And then in the next breath said: "But at Midway our dash 4’s had factory installed the same sights we had installed ourselves in our dash 3’s back in January ... N-somethings" The dash 4’s he was flying out of Guadalcanal were late production F4F’s with bureau numbers from the 119XX range (he flew 11985) in one of the last F4F squadrons to see action, VF-11.

That long spiraling plume of smoke you see going down in the distance is yours truly shot down in flames:)

Warm regards,

Rich

[BuzzLightyear]

Except for a picture and a name, I have nothing on this site. Do you have any information?

Looks like a real basic reflector site.

[Gibbage]

In a few of those photo's above, it looks like there is a rear view mirror attached too the front armored glass. Was this just something they did on the ship? Not quite a field mod if you have no field too mod it on.

[R Leonard]

F4F rear view mirrors were kidney shaped and mounted inside the windscreen. These were a standard fitting, not an add-on or modification.

Regards,

Rich

[Gibbage]

Another question. When did they remove the floats? The F4F-3's had inflateabe floats in the wings and engine cowel that would inflate automatically when you ditch. I have info that says they were removed later, but when? Before combat? They had some misshaps were the floats deployed in a dive and caused bigger misshaps. Nothing says "Ow Sh|t" like two big balloons inflating on your wings in a dive.

I hope you dont mind all the questions.

[R Leonard]

There were only a couple of accidents involving the floatation bags, one of which was fatal. An unexpected inflation resulted in the bag blowing back and collapsing against the tail surfaces causing a loss of control.
After the fatal accident Grumman stopped installing the bags and in the squadrons the bags were removed and the frangible retainers for the detachable covers were replaced with screws. All of this occurred around February 1941.
Another danger was the windscreen with the telescopic sight. On several occasions, while at high speed, the windscreen would collapse inward. A field fix was the installation of L shaped reinforcing struts which solved the problem. The ultimate solution was the change to reflector sights. As more and more F4Fs became available with reflector sights you could always tell which of the dash 3s originally had telescopic sights by the presence of the extra hardware.
The F4F had some landing characteristics that could ruin your day. The structure and positioning of the landing gear gave the inexperienced pilot the opportunity to bring a landing roll-out to a grinding halt. The structure of the landing gear allowed for some lateral play. You could walk up to a parked F4F's wingtip, grab it with both hands and chin yourself. In the process, the shock absorber on the side you were on would depress and that wing would go down and the opposite wing would go up. When you let go, all would return to an even keel. The positioning of the gear was close to the fuselage and allowed, even accentuated this tipping effect.
Now picture an F4F coming in for a landing . . . anything, like a sudden cross wind, that might tend to push the plane to the left, or worse, to the right due to engine torque, would have the same effect on the landing gear. A push to a given side causes the landing gear to depress on that side with the resulting raising of the wing on the opposite side. If the push is hard enough, it can even cause the wheel on the off side to lose contact with the ground. This is especially likely if the push occurs early in the roll-out when the speed of the airplane is still high enough to generate lift and thus create a vicious circle of events. The wing on the off side starts to go up, creating more lift on that side due to change in attitude, causing the wing to go higher still, causing the off side wheel to break contact with the ground.
A pilot without any practice in dealing with this problem tends to want to do something about it as soon as it starts to occur . . . the problem is that the instinctive reaction is to hit the brakes . . . except by then lift has taken over and the brake you want to hit is on a wheel that is up in the air. If the pilot hits both brakes (“gotta slow this damn thing down so there's no more lift”) then he winds up braking on the downside wheel only with a result that increases the forces pushing that side down causing the wingtip to contact with the ground which in most cases results in a great cloud of dust and screeching of unhappy metal as the plane pivots around on it's wing tip and come to the above mentioned grinding halt . . . a ground loop. "I was thoroughly scared the one time it happened to me," said Himself.
There's ways to avoid this. The first way is not to do anything. When a wing starts to go up don't respond. Let nature take it's course and eventually the plane will lose enough speed to lose lift and the off side wing will come down of it's own accord. Takes a lot of willpower, but can be done. The second way is to avoid the problem by making the plane work for you. Remember that the F4F, and 99.44% of its contemporaries, were tail draggers. If your landing gear is out under the wing somewhere, like the SBD or the A6M2, for examples, the ground loop is not a common, indeed a rare, problem. But for planes like the F4F and, say, the Me-109 or Spitfire, the landing gear placed very close to the fuselage presents the problem. The natural tendency is to strive for the "3 point" landing, with all wheels contacting the ground at the same time. This type of landing finesse contributes to the problem . . . with the tail wheel contacting the ground at near to the same time as the main gear, the wings are at an attitude that still provides lift. (Put your arm out your car window with you hand out flat, fingers together, parallel with the ground. Now, rotate your hand at the wrist so that the leading edge of the flattened surface is angled up about 5 degrees . . . Viola! Lift.) If you land the F4F in a tail high position (move your hand back to where it is parallel to the ground) lift goes away. The solution then was to land tail high and then as the plane slowed to where its speed was no longer sufficient to provide lift, the tail would come down of it's own accord and you have a nice smooth landing with no (or little, anyway) possibility of a ground loop.
The reverse of this landing method worked just as well for take offs. As you start the take off run, you get your tail up as soon as you can by gently applying forward pressure on the stick. This causes the tail to come up while keeping the wings parallel to the ground as speed builds up. At the proper speed you only need center the stick, the tail starts to go down, the main wings start to rotate up, and it feels like you're jumping off the runway. This take off method became a handy habit to have when the tail draggers started to go away as tricycle gear came in to more and more use in the late 40's and into the 50s'. With tricycle gear, you were already in a tail high position, so you merely needed to exert enough pressure to keep the plane down on the runway until the desired speed was acquired, then off the pressure and off you go.
Himself says he got in the habit of using the tail high landing and take off methods with all the tail draggers. It has the added bonus of providing adequate visibility over the nose in either evolution, something that went away as soon as the tail went down on landing or that didn't appear until the tail came up on takeoff. It worked remarkably well in the F4U-1 with its well-known, near legendary, landing bounce. Most of the landing bounce problem was cause by folks attempting the "3-point" landing and succeeding. He said he never had a landing bounce in an F4U because he used the tail-high method. Couldn't understand what everyone was upset about when there was a simple solution to the problem.
Of course, all of the F4F ground loop issue is a landing field problem. The problem goes away on carrier landings because of the arrestor hook. He said he knew pilots at whose land landings he would just cringe and wait for the loop, but when they came in on a carrier it was like the easiest thing in the world.

Photo of Himself after Battle of Midway where he was XO of VF-3
http://ihost.it-mate.co.uk/users/rdkcleon/files/WNLafterMidway.jpg
If you look close you can see the ring of the auxiliary ring and bead sight arrangement.

Probably more than you wanted to know.

Regards,

Rich

[mwk_tke]

Recommendation for background on the gunsight question: A book called "The First Team" by John Lundstrum. It covers Naval fighter operations from Pearl Harbor to Midway. Squadrons VF-2, 3, 42, 6 and 8 are covered in detail. (including 'himself's "intense bird-dogging" of reflector gunsights in San Diego in January 1942).

R Leonard - please email me. [email protected] If your source (USNA 1938)is willing, I would like to query him (via yourself if convenient). I want to model an early F4F-3 and would appreciate any info he could provide.

Thanks!