A recent post from my REPUBLIC P-47 THUNDERBOLT collection. The P-47 is one of my favorite fighters from WWII. The aircraft-in-focus.com web site is awesome!
Originally shared by Pete Panozzo
The P-47 is the United States’ all-time most-produced fighter plane, with 15,660 built. It grew out of the general design philosophy embodied in earlier Seversky and Republic designs, using a reliable and damage-resistant radial engine with a general shape conforming to the teardrop-fuselage and elliptical wing theories of the mid 1930s. Compared to its predecessors, its main point of difference was scale. Using an engine designed for use in multiples in large bombers and transports, attached to a large and heavy turbosupercharger system that took up much of the interior volume of the fuselage, the P-47 had almost unprecedented power and could afford to be a lot of airplane. It was armed with eight .50 calibre machine guns (two more than the standard for U.S. fighters) and could carry a substantial amount of ordnance. Though not as nimble or long-ranged as its rival the P-51 Mustang, and progressively phased out in favor of the P-51 in U.K.-based units for that reason, the Thunderbolt was much tougher and better at the fighter-bomber role. It continued to be important in the Mediterranean and Pacific theatres to the end of the war and was also used by the British, the French and by two unusual Latin American units, a fighter squadron from Brazil that operated alongside U.S. forces in Italy and a Mexican Air Force squadron that operated with the U.S. 5th Air Force in the Phillippines.
After World War II, the U.S. equipped some of the new Air National Guard units with P-47s (later called F-47s) and supplied others to friendly air forces including those of Italy, China, Turkey, and numerous Central and South American countries.
Despite its vast production count, airworthy P-47s soon became very rare in the United States. It could not compete with surplus P-51s as a racer or recreational aircraft and did not have many research or other uses. By the early 1960s, when there were still dozens of P-51s around, only a single restored P-47 was flying, maintained by Republic as a public relations tool. Fortunately Peru kept its P-47s in active service until 1966, after which the entire inventory was acquired by entrepreneurial individuals associated with the Confederate Air Force and the nascent warbird movement. The several complete airframes and extensive parts inventory shipped from Peru, plus a handful of aircraft recovered from trade schools and memorials and a few others that have dribbled in from Brazil, were the basis of the dozen or so airworthy P-47s extant today. In recent years, more have been recovered from wreck sites in the south Pacific. Perhaps 25 more P-47s exist in static display condition, mostly in the United States but also in the U.K. (2 aircraft), Brazil (5 aircraft), Chile (2 aircraft), Croatia, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Serbia and Turkey.
See and Read more at: http://aircraft-in-focus.com/republic-p-47-thunderbolt/
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