4/19/08 - Fargo Air Museum

[High-Test]

Today I went with a few friends to the Fargo Air Museum. It's a pretty cool place, and they have a nice collection of aircraft.

I'm sorry for the bad pictures. I'm not a photographer and my camera is terrible.

The Zero is beautiful. I was looking at the engine, and saw a bunch of Roman letters in the castings instead of Kanji. It's powered by a Pratt and Whitney something or other now. Most of my pictures are of the Zero, because it wasn't in really harsh lighting. The Museum has a huge glass wall, and lots of lights. Light reflected everywhere off of the glossy paint.

Obligatory P-51 pictures..

Imagine all the drag from the fasteners..

I couldn't get any decent shots of the DC-3's interior. It's almost hard to believe that the DC-3 was once state of the art, and the typical airliner of its day. The rake of the floor is an interesting experience.

The Main Cheese of the Museum, in my opinion. It's an F2G Super Corsair. It's one of three in existence and the only one still flying. The last time I went to the Air Museum, the Super corsair was out flying. It is one impressive aircraft. They also have a regular F4U next to it, so the differences are very easy to pick out, apart from the gigantic 28 cylinder engine. The Super Corsair has an extra flap on the rudder to compensate for the tremendous torque that the Wasp Major Generates. Imagine all the force one would need to put on the right rudder to overcome the plane's desire to turn left...

 

[superberkut]

Lovely shots. Very few Sakae engines remain today (only one in fact), therefore the Zero you saw had its original engine replaced by an American equivalent. Sakae radials of the late-war Zeros are very poor and difficult to maintain, thus the American engine, while unoriginal, is the best alternative in this case.

I remember Duggy...

 

[High-Test]

Thanks!

I didn't know that about the radials.. I should have figured though, with the Japanese having very scarce materials near the close of the war.

A couple of the SuperCorsair in action:

Standard Oil of Ohio... The guy who owns it owns another SuperCorsair, apparently. So he's 2 for 3 on the existing F2Gs.

 

[superberkut]

And as we all know, 2 out of 3 ain't bad.

Does the owner live in the area?

 

[Greycap]

As far as I know the Sakae was based on the Gnome-Rhone 14K which wasn't the best engine to begin with and they boosted the power by almost 60% without making that large modifications on the structure, no wonder it was a bit unreliable! The Zero being a genuine A6M2 is a feature in itself, there are way too many T-6 conversions around that people think to be the real deals. The propeller of the Mustang gets my attention, it's the normal Hamilton Standard of the P-51D but with the blade root fillings missing it looks more like the Aeroproducts propeller of the P-51K. Wonder why, maybe it's been used as a racer at some point.

 

[High-Test]

I wouldn't doubt the P-51 having been an air racer at one point. On the landing gear cover, it says "P-51 crew" and it lists a family.

EDIT: The owner if the SuperCorsair is from Kindred, ND.

 

[V1P3R]

A Zero? how'd that get over here in one piece? lol