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[edit] Curtiss XP-60 production
Actually, while the Curtiss XP-60 showed advantages over the P-40 Warhawk to justify a production order for 1,950 P-60As, after the US entered World War 2 following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Curtiss had second thoughts about disrupting P-40 production for production of a new type at the crucial point. Thus, because Curtiss itself was too occupied with P-40 production at Buffalo, New York, the P-60 production order was canceled, but three on the contract were relegated to be experimental aircraft. 72.194.116.63 18:00, 25 February 2007 (UTC) Vahe Demirjian 10.00 25 February 2007
[edit] Note on disappointing P-60 top speed with laminar wing
When the P51 was first introduced it was nearly 100 mph faster than the P40, with the same engine (the single-stage supercharged Allison V12). The extraordinary increase was explained at the time as mostly due to the laminar-flow wing. The North American engineers in the late 1930s had stumbled over a European report that indicated an embedded aft radiator installation would provide negligible drag - or possibly a slight thrust increase, due to the carefully-ducted heated/expanding cooling air exiting at a higher speed than it came in. But this possibility was strictly an in-house item; it was not publicly discussed until nearly the war's end (another reason for the higher P51 speed was its narrow fuselage - the P40 fuselage was essentially unchanged from the P36 Hawk, which used a radial engine). Thus the high expectation on the part of the Curtiss engineers, of getting a spectacular top speed on the XP-53 when a laminar-flow wing was adopted, and thus the disappointment when the relatively wide fuselage with a chin radiator didn't deliver the expected speed even with the new wing. FWIW Raymondwinn (talk) 03:35, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
