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The list of aircraft of World War II includes all of the aircraft used by countries which were at war during World War II from the period between when the country joined the war and the time the country withdrew from it, or when the war ended.
A captured Messerschmitt Me 262, the most numerous jet fighter of World War II. World War II was the first war in which jet aircraft participated in combat with examples being used on both sides of the conflict during the latter stages of the war. The first successful jet aircraft, the Heinkel He 178, flew only five days before the war started ...
Stinson O-49/L-1 Vigilant - Observation/liaison aircraft; Stinson O-62/L-5 Sentinel - Liaison aircraft; Supermarine Spitfire - Fighter/reconnaissance; Taylorcraft O-57/L-2 Grasshopper - Observation/liaison aircraft; Vultee A-31/A-35 Vengeance - Dive bomber; Vultee BT-13/BT-15 Valiant - Basic trainer; Vultee XP-54 - Prototype fighter; Vultee P ...
Engine power and aircraft performance increased steadily throughout the war, with liquid-cooled inline and vee engines competing with air-cooled radials much as they had competed with air-cooled rotary types in the First War. As an example, at the start of the war the Rolls-Royce Merlin III liquid-cooled V-12 engine developed just 1,000 hp ...
Fighters. The Zero was among the world's best fighters at the time of the raid on Pearl Harbor. It was little improved over the war, while the Allies introduced more powerful planes with better protection. [34] Over time, the Zero lost its competitive advantage due to development by the Allies of more capable aircraft as well as improved tactics.
The Soviets relied heavily on Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik ground assault aircraft—the single most-produced military aircraft design of all time with some 36,183 examples produced, and the Yakovlev Yak-1 fighter, the beginning of a family of fighters from Alexander S. Yakovlev's design bureau in its many variants during the war years with just ...
In the US Air Force the naming convention for fighter aircraft is a prefix "F-", followed by a number, ground attack aircraft are prefixed with “A-” and bombers with “B-”. Fighter aircraft from the second world war onwards are sorted into generations, from 1 to 5, based on technological level. [1] [2] An American F-16 fighter jet
Fighter aces in World War II had tremendously varying kill scores, affected as they were by many factors: the pilot's skill level, the performance of the airplane the pilot flew and the planes they flew against, how long they served, their opportunity to meet the enemy in the air (Allied to Axis disproportion), whether they were the formation's leader or a wingman, the standards their air ...