Originally Posted by
Packrat
As I climbed out of Navy Corpus in a T-28 I remember wondering how a Japanese pilot with my level of experience would feel facing a pair of Navy Hellcat pilots with 500 hours of combat time in 1944.
Talk about your "dead man walking".
I can not imagine the difficulty and fear of a young/low time american getting into a dog fight with a battle hardened luftwaffe pilot.
The fact that these guys could navigate as well as they did at night, or other adverse conditions behind enemy lines to drop bombs, etc. Really incredible.
Meanwhile, here I am trying to fly a little 172 and I am at around 30 hours. I wonder how many hours a typical fighter pilot had during WWII prior to being deployed?