On July 4, 2016, I flew in the P-51C. Got a little instruction and stick time, and a 0.7 hour log book entry I will treasure for the rest of my life. It was every bit as amazing and cool as I expected.<\/p>\n
After a few mins getting the feel of the P-51, this conundrum hit me. Sure it has enough fire-breathing power and performance to kill you in a blink, and there’s this foreboding sense of responsibility not wanting to screw up and destroy a magnificent 70-year-old piece of history despite having the CFI on board doing the real flying. Yet at the same time I expected the P-51 to be this beasty monster and instead found it so smooth and responsive and natural feeling, not just fast but also quick despite its weight, sensitive but not twitchy, just a really sweet flying airplane. I don’t mean to imply it’s easy to fly, at 0.7 hours I’m no judge of that, I don’t even have the skill to fly it on my own – the CFI up front did all the hard work. Even so, it seemed much more well behaved than I expected which left me in even greater awe of the men who designed it, and admiration for the men who mastered this airplane and flew it into battle.<\/p>\n
From what I’ve read, more than half the pilots and planes lost during WW-II were in training or other non-combat activities. That goes to show that flying warbirds like the P-51 and AT-6 is like holding a tiger by the tail. I expected the tiger to be evident in every aspect of the plane: noise, control, handling, vibration, twitchiness, etc. What I didn’t expect was such a smooth responsive sweet flying airplane. Yet this actually makes it even more scary and dangerous because the tiger hides and whispers “you can do it”, until it suddenly strikes.<\/p>\n
Photos & videos here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On July 4, 2016, I flew in the P-51C. Got a little instruction and stick time, and a 0.7 hour log book entry I will treasure for the rest of my life. It was every bit as amazing and cool as I expected. After a few mins getting the feel of the P-51, this conundrum … Continue reading P-51 Flight Experience<\/span>