I always wondered with all that duct work running the length of the fuselage sending intake air back to the turbocharger, which then fed cooled air back to carburetors serving 18 cylinders, what enemy fire damage would do to this complex setup. Presumably this doesn't have single points of failure in a sealed compressed air system but it almost feels like race car level tuning for optimal performance, let alone for limping home with fuselage damage.
For contrast, one time he was in a P-51 that swallowed a valve, and he said he was lucky he was over the airfield, as that airplane was going down promptly. The P-51 had a much more fragile engine, I wouldn't want to fly one over water.
He was forced to land immediately.
The story was more about the P-47. He was nearing the airfield (again!) when the valve broke loose. He was asked by the tower if he could do another lap of the airfield and give someone else priority in landing. The vibration wasn't so bad, so he said "sure".
After landing, the chief mechanic called him over and chewed him out for doing the extra lap. The mechanic showed him the engine, which was just turning rubble.
He was a B-17 navigator during WW2. On one mission, one of the four engines was hit by flak and stopped. The pilot talked to the crew, saying they had a choice. Three engines meant the B-17 couldn't keep up with the formation, and would get picked off by the trailing Me-109s, so they would preemptively bail out over Germany. Or, they could drive the 3 engines way past their rated power, and pray they kept turning for the many hours of the return flight. They risked crashing into the Channel.
They chose the latter, the engines held, and they landed back at base (the engines were scrapped).
I have my dad's "Lucky Bastard" certificate, he earned it :-) He passed away a few years ago, I doubt there are more than a handful of WW2 aviators left.
Dead stick touched down on the runway.
Got chewed out for saving the airplane instead of his ass.
He admitted to me decades later that he should have bailed out, but had never done so and was afraid of doing it.
http://generalatomic.com/jetmakers/introduction.html
So, yes!
He really liked the F-86 Sabre.
You're right, my dad had a great life. When people would ask him "how are you?" he'd reply "shot at and missed!"
In the olden tymes, ordinary lusers were able to turn the machine's dial past 10..., knowing that their account might be terminated.
Now all that's left is excel.
The FADECs have a control panel, where universally there's a button for "screw the engines, give me power". Required for things like losing one of two engines immediately during takeoff, or having to do go-around on one.
This ties in with a question I was asking myself after seeing this impressive setup: did anyone build a skin surface intercooler? I seem to remember reading about at least one plane that had its oil cooler in the skin early in development until they accepted that the added vulnerability was worse than the drag from a conventional box radiator and abandoned the idea. But with the intercooler the tradeoffs might be very different. You could even add a bypass mechanism for when the skin/cooler has become so leaky that the engine has effectively become naturally aspirated and turbo without intercooler would be an improvement.
I recently had a pressure leak on my turbocharged car on the air intake between the turbo and the block. It seriously wrecked the performance. The engine was close to stalling and my gas mileage dropped by half. These big radials aren't quite as picky, but I bet you'd still feel the difference.
Conversely, the German fighters of this era were much more heavily automated. A Bf 109 pilot had a throttle lever: RPM, mixture, and radiators were controlled automatically (with manual overrides available).
If you ever look closely at the P-47's throttle quadrant, you'll notice one small feature that's pretty interesting. There is a one-way gate on the throttle lever that catches the RPM lever as it's advanced, precisely because without it, it was too easy for a pilot to (in the heat of combat) shove the throttle forward without adjusting RPM and blow the engine apart.
The downside was that even a small rifle caliber hit to the cooling system caused the coolant to flash to steam and rapidly escape through the hole, giving the pilot only minutes until the engine seized.
I’m guessing neither of those applications care too much about turbo lag or throttle response.
Back in the 90s (and maybe still, I've lost touch) rally cars used to do off throttle "anti-lag" by using the direct fuel injection to pump fuel into the cylinders during the exhaust stroke, so it'd burn in the exhaust manifold and keep the turbine spinning to make boost without needing the engine to be creating torque by burning the fuel in the ignition strokes... They had less hard requirements for gradual application of torque than circuit race cars though, they mostly wanted to be able to get back on the throttle exiting a corner and immediately start spinning all 4 wheels again.