Why Being a P-38 Lightning Pilot Was a Curse

Описание: If you flew the P-38 Lightning in World War II, you had a 75% chance of dying without ever being shot at. That was the non-combat loss rate in some squadrons. The Luftwaffe called it the fork-tailed devil and feared it in combat, but they had no idea the aircraft was killing its own pilots faster than enemy fire ever could.
This video covers the full story of the P-38 that most channels skip over, from the design decision that seemed brilliant on paper but became a death sentence at 30,000 feet, to why having two engines somehow made survival harder instead of easier. We explain the three separate ways the Lightning killed pilots: cockpit temperatures that reached 40 degrees below zero while the heater sat fifteen feet away, compressibility that locked control sticks during high-speed dives and sent pilots straight into the ground at 600 miles per hour, and single-engine failures that would snap the aircraft inverted faster than pilots could react.
You'll learn why Lockheed's dive flap solution somehow made things worse by requiring split-second decisions during 500 mph dives, and why half the aircraft still didn't have the modification by March 1945. We cover the Pacific theater incident where a pilot lost an engine during a climbing turn and hit the water upside down ten seconds later, and end with August 13, 1945, two days before Japan surrendered, when a P-38 rolled inverted during a controlled single-engine descent and dove into the Philippine jungle for reasons the official reports called mechanical failure but the wingman who watched knew was something else entirely.
Related: P-38 Lightning problems, twin-engine fighter weaknesses, WWII non-combat losses, compressibility in aircraft, Allison V-1710 engine failures, fork-tailed devil, Lockheed P-38 design flaws, asymmetric thrust accidents

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