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A restored WWII fighter with operational machine guns

submitted by SFOGuy

1 decade 1 month 1 week ago

Fully restored P-51s are rare enough birds; fully restored with six working .50 caliber machine guns, never in my knowledge.

But this guy, who runs his own Aviation Museum in Minnesota, pulled it off. Apparently, it required getting a full license from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms as a machine gun armorer---then the modification and installation of six machine guns in the wings of the P-51.

You can see the aircraft rock backwards as the tester fires short bursts (no tracers) into a range target. The elevation looks slightly off, but that could be easily enough corrected.

Interesting sidelights:
--This exact aircraft had 3 kills in WW-II; two ME-262 jets (probably landing) and one ME-109.
--As I recall it, expert marksmen would set their machine guns to "converge" into a cone at about 200-250 feet ahead of their plane, so that the concentrated bullets would "buzzsaw" through an enemy fuselage; less accurate marksmen would leave their guns in a wide dispersion pattern to ensure at least some hits.
--In its day, the P-51 was a marvel; it had a laminar flow wing (super efficient, long range) and even the hot air exhaust flowing out of the engine bay was engineered to give it a bit of thrust that added a little more speed.

http://www.fagenfighterswwiimuseum.org/aircraft/tt/tt.html