Customer Reviews

Bell P-39 / P-63 Airacobra & Kingcobra - Warbird Tech Vol. 17

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This is my 8th book about the Airacobra, and I was pleasantly surprised with the amount of -new or at least unknown to me- information and the quality of the photographs. Though modellers might probably prefer the Osprey "P-39 Airacobra Aces of World War 2"; the Squadron/Signal aircraft in action no.43 "P-39 Airacobra in Action" or even the Aircraft in Profile no. 165 "The Bell P-39 Airacobra" for the color sideviews and paint schemes or will value the Squadron/Signal "P-39 Airacobra in detail and scale" for it's description of the various kits which are available, plus the detail photographs.
This book however is more in the line of Rick Mitchell's "Airacobra Advantage: The Flying Cannon", one of the best overal books about the Airacobra. Compared to this book it is better illustrated and has a more pleasant layout, comparable to two books about the Airacobra who are sadly not easily available: the Polish AJ-Press "Monografie Lotnicze Nos. 58 and 59.

Amongst all these books this book still manages to offer me new facts, photographs, overviews and drawings, a remarkable fact considering that it is by far the cheapest book around for this plane.

The book is good only for engineers, lots of technical explanations, not many pictures, many drawings. Most of the pictures are B&W. I bought it thinking in use to get painting schemes for models, but it didn't work very well.

Bell P-39/P-63 Airacobra & Kingcobra
Warbird Tech Volume 17
© 1998 Specialty Press
By Frederick A. Johnsen
Reviewed by Ned Barnett


Hasegawa just came out with a 1/48th scale P-400 - the export version of the P-39D Airacobra - that is by all accounts (including my own) the best-of-breed. There are other good-to-great kits of the P-39 series by Eduard, Accurate Miniatures (re-released as a post-war air racer - and it's so good that it's hard to believe the Hasegawa kit is better) and even the venerable Revell/Monogram kit, which isn't too bad. And that's just in 1/48th scale.

That is reason enough to revisit the 1998-issued Warbird Tech book on the P-39 and P-63. This series of 100-page photo-and-text books are of uniformly high quality - interesting to historians and aircraft buffs and extremely welcome for modelers who appreciate seeing the details, as well as the overview. This one is a classic example of the breed.

This book begins with the development of the P-39, a radical and revolutionary aircraft that was largely robbed of its place in American military history by an "official" decision to build the plane without a turbo-supercharger. This lack of supercharging hamstrung the aircraft at any altitude above 15,000 feet - making it useful for ground attack and for aerial combat on the Eastern Front, where high-altitude combat was few and far between. However, for North African and Western European combat - and in air-to-air fighting against the Japanese - the plane was a pale shadow of what it could have been. American combat pilots - except for a relatively few ground-attack fighter units in the Southwest Pacific - were eager to transition out of the `Cobras and into something a bit more suited to all-altitude combat.

Fortunately, many P-39s and almost all P-63s - the upgraded redesign of the Airacobra - were Lend-Leased to the Soviets, who knew how to use it in both ground-attack and air-to-air combat. They appreciated the hard-hitting 37mm Oldsmobile-built aircraft cannon and the two .50 caliber Browning heavy machine guns - to enhance performance, the Soviets often stripped off the wing guns as unnecessary. Although this fact was almost a state secret until the fall of the Soviet Union, a significant number of the Soviet's most successful aces ran up their scores in Bell-built aircraft.

An interesting side-issue covered by this book is the US Navy's Airabonita - a tail-dragging fighter very similar to (but hardly identical to) the early-model P-39s. The book includes three rare photos and several pages of insightful narrative about the XFL-1 Airabonita, a fascinating "might have been" that never got beyond the prototype stage.

Except for the butt-ugly TP-39Q two-seat trainer, and a single one-off XP-39E (which was really a prototype for the later P-63) the P-39 seemed to stay the same from P-39D to P-39Q. However, the P-63 became the basis of a variety of interesting conversions. One P-63 was used by the Navy - post-war - to test both tricycle landing gear and swept wings on carriers. This paved the way for the FJ-2 Fury and other swept-wing carrier combat aircraft. Another was used to test a "butterfly" tail, such as later appeared on the Beechcraft Bonanza, and discovered that it offered no meaningful performance increase. I've built the Navy version - it was an interesting kit-bashed conversion - and have thought about the Butterfly Kingcobra as well.

However, for my money, perhaps the most fascinating conversion - and the only one that saw active service in the USAAF - was the "Pinball." This was a heavily-armored, sensor-laden but unarmed aircraft that was used to train bomber gunners. These gunner-trainees would use a light .30-caliber machine gun firing frangible bullets - and shoot at the brightly-painted (high-visibility) Pinballs, which flew pursuit-curve attacks for the gunners' benefit. Every time the target plane was hit, a light bulb in the nose flashed - hence the name. These aircraft saw extensive service in the Southwest US during 1944 and 1945 - and this book not only traces their operational career, but provides detailed drawings highlighting the areas of the Pinballs that were up-armored. If you want to build a Pinball, this book will be extremely helpful. It's not the only source on the Pinball, but it's got a lot of useful information - text, photos and line drawings.

Bottom line - you can't go wrong with Warbird Tech titles. If you've got an interest in the P-39 Airacobra or the P-63 Kingcobra - or the prototype US Navy Airabonita - this book is for you. The last time I was at my local Hobbytown USA, I saw one on the shelf, so I presume this book is still in print. And of course it's available here at Amazon.