New Star in the Sky

Slashing air combat over savagely defended aircraft plants deep in Germany made a spectacular formal debut last week for the newest and hottest U.S. Army fighter: the P-51B Mustang. Airmen wagged their heads and wondered whether, at long last, this was it--the single-seater that had everything.

"Everything," for a fighter plane, covers a lot of ground. But on its battle performance the P-51B was clearly fast, rugged and maneuverable enough to tackle any foe at any altitude. Top speed is well over 400 m.p.h., ceiling above 40,000 ft. The Mustang packs plenty of armament (one earlier version carried four 20-mm. cannon), and within a limited radius can lug two 500-lb. bombs against ground targets.

Long Reach. But the new Mustang's greatest single contribution to the mounting air battle over Europe is its long range; it has whittled a healthy slice out of the danger zone in which daylight bombers must fly without fighter escort to hit distant enemy targets. The exact range is secret, but 1,000 miles might not be a bad layman's guess; on its showing last week, the Mustang might have enough range to fly escort to Berlin.

Like most other standout planes of the war, the Mustang needed time for growing. It is a true Allied aircraft, influenced strongly by both British and U.S. thinking.

North American Aviation, Inc. originally designed the ship to general British specifications early in the war. First named the P-51 Apache, it was shipped to Britain in 1941. In those grim days the British needed, above all else, fast-climbing, high-altitude interceptors. The Mustang's original 1,150-h.p. Allison engine could not haul it upstairs to catch the souped-up Messerschmitts that were cruising over England at 30,000 ft., so the planes were relegated to reconnaissance duty with the Army Co-operation Command--a hollow and almost academic assignment.*

Later the Mustang proved itself a magnificent low-level strafer and locomotive buster. It was fast, agile and an "honest" aircraft (i.e., with no eccentric handling traits). One P-51 set a record for ruggedness when it flew home with a yard of starboard wing shot off, the port wing half buckled and the fuselage bent and torn from collision with a tree. The U.S. noted all this and brought out its own slightly modified version of the plane as the A36 Invader, which did mighty work as a dive and glide bomber and ground-support plane in Sicily.

New Power. From the beginning the British had especially admired the Mustang's lovely lines and the aerodynamic efficiency of its sharp-edged "laminar flow" wing. More than a year ago they tried stepping the plane up with a more powerful engine, and passed the tip on to the U.S. Air Forces, which took up the same experiment. The present P-51B is ail-American except for the design of its 1,500-h.p. Packard-built Rolls-Royce Merlin engine (same type used in the latest Spitfires). It chews the air with a four-bladed propeller, has a two-speed, two-stage supercharger which gives it speed and climb upstairs and down.

* Becasue its square-tipped wings and tail surfaces resembled those of the crack German Meserschmitt 109, the Mustang suffered a painful indignity on its first sweeps across the Channel: German AA gunners held their fire, but the British let go with everything they had.

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