Recently I spotted something about the F4U that I had never noticed previously. I was watching a flight demo, and on a high speed low level pass I noticed that the airplane had a slight, but noticeable, nose down attitude. This was repeated on each low pass.
I wondered if it was something I seeing or imagining, so I looked up several other videos of Corsairs, and noticed the same thing in all low level fly by's.
I surmised that this was due to the AOA of the wing on the F4U, and mentioned this to an old mentor. I was mildly criticized for misunderstanding what I was seeing. I was told this was due to light fuel load on short demo hops.
I wasn't buying it.
I spent some time tonight looking at further videos of other modern flights with various other fighters at similar airshows. P-51, P-47, P-38, Spitfire, Hurricane, FW-190, etc. All of these, when viewed profile in low level passes at speed, failed to show any peculiar attitude in respect to the wing AOA.
I've seen this with other types such as the B-52, which flies with a noticeable nose down attitude , at least when absent heavy ordinance.
Is this due to a slight deviation between the long axis of the fuselage and the chord of the wing in the F4U? Or am I deed utterly misunderstanding what I saw in nunerous videos?
Gary