mastaphixa wrote:
I've never heard a Mustang whistle like that.
Any P-51D/K with the guns installed (including replica barrels) will produce this sound,
if flown in the same manner as in this video. That particular whistle comes from air passing over the tip of the gun barrels, like blowing air over the top of a beer bottle. In the case of the P-51D/K, the singular whistle is actually made up of a two-note chord/harmony - one note generated by the four gun barrels that stick out of the wing, and another, lower note, generated by the two wider tubes that stick out from the two inboard guns that are set further back in the wing. The whistling is brought on based on angle of attack, and the greater the angle of attack and g-force the louder the whistle becomes - when the aircraft is maneuvering, you can actually hear the whistle cut in/out with stick forces (when the aircraft is really going along at a good clip, the pilot pulls back on the stick and the whistle develops, and then if the stick force is relaxed the whistle goes away). If the aircraft is in level flight/attitude, the gun barrels likely won't generate a sound, since air is passing through them/through the same direction - though I've heard some produce more whistling than others, depending on how the guns are angled/adjusted to the overall level in-flight attitude/thrust-line. You can hear this whistle too even just when Mustangs fitted with gun barrels land in a three-point attitude - the whistle increasing as the pilot pulls the aircraft into the three-point flare. I know of at least a couple different P-51D operators that were able to test this out by taping over the tips of the gun barrels and discovering the whistling stopped altogether. Maurice Hammond, in the Plane Resurrection episode about his Mustangs, also demonstrated this by blowing compressed air over the tips of the gun barrels and producing the very same sound.
Of course there are some other "orifices" on the P-51 that can generate a "whine", but not comparable to the "scream" that the gun ports can make.
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