Stephan Wilkinson wrote:
So maybe he has for a long time been wildly overrated?
Sounds like his best design was the mid-1930s P-36, which he turned into the semi-obsolescent P-40 by re-engining it. (And remember, even the P-36 was beaten in the fighter flyoff by de Seversky's P-35, though de Seversky was unable to actually manufacture the 77 airplanes for which he won the contract.) Then Berlin went on to design the bad Seamew and the worse Assender. And got pushed out of Curtiss because he insisted on trying to make a not-very-effective P-46. Went to GM and created perhaps the worst warplane of all time, the Fisher P-75.
This is a great aircraft designer?
Well maybe he wasn't an awesome designer. But the P-40 held the line for quite some time and had some success.
And let's remember that there were other manufacturers/designers that generated designs contemporary with the P-40 that were also inferior to the other team's aircraft. The F4F-4 and the P-39 were also mainstream designs that held the line but were inferior to the Zero, Spitfire and the ME-109.
Nobody calls the Grumman design team inferior. Not everybody is a Schmued or Johnson.
And remember also that the F4F Wildcat was an evolution from a biplane...so a P-36 evolving into a P-40 was not unusual . For that matter so was the Hurricane an evolution from a Biplane.
Still one has to admit that even with the P-75 Berlin kept those very strange rearward retracting gear (Yes I know they were on the Corsair and F6F but they still look outdated and less efficient to me). And according to Wiki, the "design" was really a bunch of airplane parts from other planes all thrown together. So it wasn't so much a "design" as a Lego assembly job to attempt to make a high performance airplane.
So while I agree that Berlin was not the most talented or forward looking designer, I wouldn't denigrate the fact that the P-40 evolved from the P-36.