whistlingdeathcorsairs wrote:
in all the ww2 birds flying today. How far can the plane and engine be pushed before it's considered unsafe? In a corsair, can that still top 400mph in level flight or having the lack of high octain fuel not make the engines do what they used to in ww2? This question goes for all the fighters and bombers.
It's not about fuel. Remember these are aircraft for 'play' or commemoration, not fighting wars.
Few warbirds fly with the loadings or equipment that the would have done in their primary service. (There's an inverse ratio of 'activity' between the heavilly restored fully complete with original widgets warbirds, which are flown careful, and limited, by and large, against the stripped back, gunless hot-rod fun 'planes.)
Apart from at Reno, there's no good reason for pushing the airframe, engine (and pilot) as hard as they were in wartime, where there was a supply-chain to back up wastage, including, we remember here, of aircraft and crew.
No warbirds fly at wartime operational heights, with oxygen, for instance.
Sure, you can make more noise and speed with the aircraft by pushing the throttle; but your costs go rapidly up straightaway, and for Americans, Uncle Sam's not funding that this time. So there are a few who fly hard at times, but the majority don't.
Thanks to Reno, there are options for going as fast (low down) as W.W.II but the engine (and airframe) consumption rate reflects that. And don't forget that pushing the envelope cost lives back then; doing it now would increase the number of warbird accidents.
Muddy; Lead (euphemisms Ethyl, TEL, tetraethyl
lead) helped reduce 'knocking' and allowed greater power out of engines, and 'lubricated' things like valves to avoid the valve head leaving parts on the valve seat - all at the great cost of literally putting cumulative heavy metal poison into every man, woman and child on the planet.
I'm sure there are those here who can explain the lead fuel additives benefits better than I can, meanwhile if you'd like to see how amazingly we can screw something up on a global-effect level by believing a business when they tell us something's harmless, may I introduce Thomas Midgley Jr and the Ethyl Corp?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr.
Just a few thoughts...