[Gielle]

I’ve been always amazed by the different accounts you can find on the Airacobra, depending on weather is an American pilot speaking or a Soviet one. While it’s well known the dislike of the USAAF pilots for the P-39, which eventually lead to its retirement from front-line service, it’s also known that Soviet pilots employed many lend lease P-39s with success.

There’s a very interesting interview of a VVS pilot who flew the Airacobra during WWII in http://lend-lease.airforce.ru/english/articles/golodnikov/index.htm.

I’m quoting from the article:

A. S. Nikilay Gerasimovich, could the Cobra really contend with the Bf-109G and FW-190 in aerial combat?

N. G. Yes. The Cobra, especially the Q-5, took second place to no one, and even surpassed all the German fighters.

I flew more than 100 combat sorties in the Cobra, of these 30 in reconnaissance, and fought 17 air combats. The Cobra was not inferior in speed, in acceleration, nor in vertical or horizontal maneuverability. It was a very balanced fighter.

A. S. This is strange. In the words of one American pilot, the Cobra was an airplane “suitable for large, low, and slow circles”. To go further, if we judge by references, then the maximum speed of the Cobra fell below that of the Bf-109F, not to mention the later German fighters. The Allies removed it from their inventories because it could not fight with the “Messer” and the “Fokker”. Neither the British nor the Americans kept it as a fighter airplane.

N. G. Well, I don’t know. It certainly did well for us. Pokryshkin fought in it; doesn’t that say something? [Aleksandr Pokryshkin was the number 2 Soviet ace at the end of the war and flew a P-39 from late 1942 to the war’s end – J.G.]

It seems that everything depends on what you wanted out of it. Either you flew it in such a manner as to shoot down Messers and Fokkers, or you flew it in a way that guaranteed 120 hours of engine life.

Let’s take the speed of the Cobra and the Messer. I had a Q-25 Cobra, with cameras for reconnaissance. Behind the engine were a vertical AFA-3s and two oblique AFA-21s. I simply flew away from a group of Bf-109Gs in this airplane, admittedly in a dive. Perhaps a single Messer could have caught me, but I flew away from a group.



How can you explain such a different point of view about the same machine, being the positive feeling above expressed shared by many others VVS fighter pilots?