Hellcat wing fold: hydraulic and manual?

[Stephan Wilkinson]

Wikipedia says that the F6F Hellcat wing-fold mechanism is hydraulic as well as manual. Is this true? I always think of half a dozen deck apes muscling them into place and hadn't realized they are also powered.

[bombadier29]

They are manually folded but I believe the locks are hydraulic

[alang]

FHC's are manual with hydraulic locks and the wing can be swung into position by 1 man with a guy in the cockpit to activate the lock and another under the wing tomake sure the pin locks.

[pjpahs]

Excuse me for going off subject, but didn't the Wildcat have manually operated landing gear, along with other aircraft . Had to hand crank or pump up-down.

[Stephan Wilkinson]

Hand crank. I've heard everything from 27 to 42 turns, but I did have an acquaintance (Lex Dupont) who owned an F4F, and he said the climb-out was always herky-jerky while you cranked and as a result pumped the stick. I frankly never noticed it while watching him fly.

[pjpahs]

I'm sorry, but did the entire production run of the Wildcat have the manual landing gear or were they "modernized" with power at a later time ? I do subscribe to "Aviation History", great magazine, I recognize the author of this thread.

Last edited by pjpahs on Fri Mar 29, 2013 8:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

[Glenn Wegman]

Just the lock pin is hydraulic. Used to fold and unfold them by myself.

Not a big deal to do.

You had better be in the cockpit and not standing on the wing reaching into the cockpit to unlock them though...

[JohnB]

Excuse me for going off subject, but didn't the Wildcat have manually operated landing gear, along with other aircraft . Had to hand crank or pump up-down.

The same system used on the FF, F2F, F3F and J2F Duck, I'd expect.

[Stephan Wilkinson]

I recognize the author of this thread...

I'm impressed! I thought only mothers and spouses read one's byline. Thank you!

And your question is an interesting one. I don't know if later models got a hydraulic system. I doubt it, because the hand crank seemed to work fine, so why go to the considerable expense of changing it? (As Eddie Rickenbacker once famously said when he was president of Eastern Air Lines, "Hell no I won't buy autopilots for our DC-3s. That's what I pay copilots for." I somehow doubt the U.S. Navy had any greater sympathy for the overworked right arms of its F4F pilots.)

Anyway, since I'm currently working on an F6F article--the reason for my original post--I scurried to my new copy of Winkle Brown's "Wings of the Navy" and scanned the Wildcat chapter. Brown indeed says the F4F he flew had a hand crank, and that it took 29 turns. More interesting, and tragic, is that he mentioned the Martlet accident in which an RN pilot got his headset cord tangled in the crank and cranked his head right down into the cockpit and crashed badly as a result.

Re.the "Wings of the Navy" book: I just bought it, used, from Amazon, and I think it was $4. Incredible bargain, as I've so often found buying used aviation books from their used-book sellers. I would rate its condition as excellent, and I've never bought a used book from them that I would consider worse than very good.

I went back to edit this post because when I looked at it, it seemed that I had typed "heck no" at the start of Captain Eddie's remark. That will never do! Rickenbacker would never have been that fruity. But then I saw that the site software had changed my "H@ll no" to a "Heck no." How 19th century. Bollocks.

[Rick65]

From the FHC threat courtesy of Spooky, first few seconds show one wing unfolding then some good noise and flight.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsUYZ6Wq ... e=youtu.be

[warbird51]

Hand crank. I've heard everything from 27 to 42 turns, but I did have an acquaintance (Lex Dupont) who owned an F4F, and he said the climb-out was always herky-jerky while you cranked and as a result pumped the stick. I frankly never noticed it while watching him fly.

It's 29 turns. I'm reminded every time we do gear swings during the annual. Guess who has to do the cranking?

[Fearless Tower]

Excuse me for going off subject, but didn't the Wildcat have manually operated landing gear, along with other aircraft . Had to hand crank or pump up-down.

Kermit Weeks has some videos on YouTube using his 'Kermie Cam' where he explains and demonstrates both the gear and wing fold on the Wildcat.

[famvburg]

ISTR an article in Air Classics decades ago when they featured a CAF aircraft in each issue and when they featured the Wildcat, whomever they were interviewing talked about the wobbly climbout and this one particular pilot would roll inverted while retracting the gear as being inverted made the cranking easier.

[The Inspector]

Hand crank. I've heard everything from 27 to 42 turns, but I did have an acquaintance (Lex Dupont) who owned an F4F, and he said the climb-out was always herky-jerky while you cranked and as a result pumped the stick. I frankly never noticed it while watching him fly.

It's 29 turns. I'm reminded every time we do gear swings during the annual. Guess who has to do the cranking?

Maybe, but imagine the headlock you could put on some guy

[Randy Wilson]

I have 200+ hours in a couple of FM-2 Wildcats and it was 29 turns in each for the gear. You also had to keep the airspeed down to around 100 knots or less while raising the gear or the air load in the last half of the cranking could get pretty high. The only thing hydraulic was the brakes, as the flaps were vacuum operated, all up or all down. The wings were unlocked manually with a crank stored under each wing near the leading edge - one person unlocked and one or two caught the wing and swung it back, where a strut (I've also seen a cable) locked the wing folded connected to the horizontal stabilizer. You could fold just one wing, which we sometimes did at shows just to show how the folding worked.

I'm not aware of any production Wildcats that had a powered gear retract system but at least one civilian FM-2 was modified with an electric drive (HP's) if I remember correctly.

The Hellcat system is as described in posts above, with a hydraulic unlock and manual fold, similar to the Wildcat sequence. The advice to not unlock while standing on the wing walk outside the cockpit is very true, as a friend suffered some bad cuts to the back of his legs doing that once.

Randy