My father (a WWII USAAF vet) has always complained that modern P-51s don’t look “right”. He points out that the canopy is too open without the armor plate, and the gear doors are always open on the ground. Every P-51 he saw while in the service had the main landing gear doors (the bit that covers the tires when in flight) closed while on the ground.
I was looking at an Accurate Miniatures P-51 the other night and realized that the gear doors are molded to be installed in the open position. You have to do some minor surgery to make them right. I looked in a book with a lot of war time photos, and out of hundreds of P-51s on the ground in pictures, only three had the doors open and one was obviously under going maintenance.
I also looked at a Tamiya and a Hasegawa P-51 I happened to have here and they show the doors being installed open.
People are so used to seeing modern restored Mustangs with the doors hanging open that they don’t notice that wartime P-51s didn’t look that way. Of course installing the doors correctly obscures the landing gear bay detail.
Just thought I would toss that out there. I don’t know if it’s been discussed here before or not.
Bill,
Modelling a P-51 with the gear doors both open OR closed is correct…similarly, dropping the flaps or having them retracted is also correct…
The reason is that the gear doors and the flaps were hydraulically actuated, and after a given time period after landing, the hydraulic pressure of a fully charged system (just after landing) begins to bleed off - and then gravity takes over and the gear doors begin to drop, as do the flaps.
Have you noticed (in all those pics) that some have the doors up, some have them down, and mostly the planes that have the doors down also have the flaps down?
From what I’ve read, the normal procedure is to drop flaps for landing, then raise them during taxiing…but how many P-51’s have you seen with BOTH flaps and gear doors down? Remember, there’s no mechanical system for lowering the gear doors when the landing gear is down, so there’s gotta be SOME reason for the doors and flaps lowering all by themselves.
It’s all pressure and gravity…
I’d be interested to see pics of the armour plating though… I had the pleasure of seeing 3 Mustangs at the weekend, and all of them had the droopy gear doors associated with the loss of hydraulic pressure. BOY did they sparkle though… something I bet the WWII birds never did.
Another thing that people always get wrong on the Mustang is the panel lining on the wing. They used to fill the joint lines wherever possible to improve the performance of the Laminar Flow wing - apparently, this gave quite a performance boost to a well-filled wing.
In the wartime pictures, there were more P-51s with dropped flaps than dropped gear doors.
Back when I was a kid, I asked a P-51 owner at an airshow and he said that during the war, the maintenance manual for the P-51 specifies keeping the hydrolics for the doors in such a condition that they don’t droop on the ground, but people who maintain flyable P-51s today don’t bother to maintain the gear door hydraulics to that level because it’s too much of a pain and it’s not an essential system.
The B-25 had a similar system of gear doors that closed after the gear was down. Nobody ever builds a B-25 with the gear doors open. I have never seen a B-25 with landing gear bay detail, nor have I seen any after market sets for B-25 landing gear bays. I’ve been around B-25s quite a bit and I’ve never seen the inside of a B-25 wheel well!
The restored birds do sparkle. There are static P-51s in museums that have the armor plate. There are also a few authenitcally restored birds that have it. Of course there are always all the pictures in books.
To be honest, panel detail on kits really is much more exagerated than on the real thing. Even the finest panel lines on a kit are much bigger than on the real thing. On the real thing, what you actually see are the lines of rivets (flush or raised, it doesn’t matter). Most aircraft are made from rather large pieces of alumunim. There aren’t many areas where different pieces of aluminum meet.
Looking at a kit with plywood panels, like a Mosquito can be kind of odd at first because there is no surface detail at all. It’s all smooth surfaces with no features.
I like kits with the nicely recessed panel lines anyway. They look nice.
They do look nice don’t they? I’m inclined to do my Mustang correctly when I get round to it, and there’s an article pinned at the top of the props forum over on ARC that will help anyone wanting to do that, but for the most part, I’m a panel line fan. NOT raised panel lines though… they’re 'ORRIBLE! [;)]
The thing that drives me nuts on many built models I see is the ANGLE of the landing gear. On the 1/1 mustang, the tire sticks out slightly past the leading edge of the wing. I’ve seen to many otherwise excellent Mustang models with the landing gear 90degrees to the bottom of the wing. It makes it sit to high and just looks wrong. This is also a common problem with many P-47’s I’ve seen built.
drooping gear doors was actually a killer when the P-51/D came out the first D models did not have solidly locking landing gear struts and when the hydraulic flow between the landing gear fluctuated it banged the landing gear doors open which in a several hundred Mph slipstream pulled the landing gear down ripping the wing from the aircraft this flaw killed several pilots and grounded the D for several weeks until the probelem was discovered and remidied by reinstaling the B models type landing gear locks and maintenence requierments for the D’s hydraulics
The panel lines on the Mustang wings weren’t all filled as the article on ARC suggests. Certainly many were, but after air superiority had been achieved late in the war the practice was pretty much discontinued.
I have photos of both Janie and Big Beautiful Doll at the Walney Airshow, back in July. While parked they both had flaps down and gear doors open. When taxiing gear doors and flaps are up. Neither of the planes has the armour plate fitted behind the pilot.
I can crop some detail pictures and add them to my Fotopic gallery if you are interested. I also have some head-on shots I could add.
I’m surprised at the photo of the Mustang with the doors bled down after supposedly only 30 minutes after landing. It’s usually much slower than that. I had a friend who locked himself out of his Phantom at the annual CAF airshow. He came back in the morning (this was a high-time fighter pilot, a Lt. Col., so especially embarrassing) and found that he’d left the down locks off (he had not crew chief with him) and the canopy had, durin the night, verrrrry slowly hissed all the way down. He had a devel of a time getting it back up by himself, too, since there was no huffer or APU help around, and he was ready to leave. But then, it’s air that controls the Phantom canopies, not hydraulic fluid and lines.
TOM
As for removing the armor plate and the fuel tank behind the pilot in restored warbirds: well, the armor plate is no longer needed (and it’s heavy). Removing the fuel tank makes room for a passenger (or luggage). Wartime P-51s were said to fly a little squirley until that fuel tank was empty because of center of gravity issues.
That’s interesting. I have several of their P-51s and they all show the doors open. The pictures on the box show them open too. All the kits I have are older kits, pre management change. Maybe they redid the instructions when they put the 51s back in production?
I’ve heard the same thing about the fuel tank. In Zempke’s book he noted that ws one of the disadvantages of the Mustang. He otherwise thought the Mustang was superior to the P-47. The 56th ended up flying P-47s to the end because Schilling told 8th Fighter Command that the 56th would rather stick with P-47s when Zempke had been sent to the States on some promotional thing for a couple of months.
I fully understand why the tank and armor are removed on modern restored warbirds. And without the seat back there, there would be a lot of people who never got a chance to be airborne in a P-51. Me included.
That, was one heck of a ride!
If I had a flyable P-51, I think I would look at fashioning some kind of replacementf for the armor plate. Something that looked like the armor plate was there, but was much lighter like aluminum or wood.
Just was watching the Military Channel with a show about the B-29. When they got to the part about them finally getting cover from the “little friends” they showed the takeoff run of a P-51D. They guy lifted off just as he passed the cameraman and there was a beautiful shot off the bottom of the plane, with the gear doors up, they opened, they LG retracted, and the doors closed again.
The earlier P51s had a lock that stopped the landing gear doors dropping so it is the P51D that usually has them down.
The fuselage fuel tank affected the c.o.g and some P51B/Cs were fitted with a a fin fillet to help with this problem. Michal Cywnar in Wartime Recollections “When escorting bombers at hieghts of 20,000ft or more, we always flew for 25 to 30 minutes on these tanks to make sure we used up a certain amount of fuel. That eliminated the Mustang’s adverse lateral instability.”
