America's First Turboprop...And It Sucked: Consolidated Vultee XP-81
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- Опубліковано 7 лют 2025
- In this video, we talk about the Consolidated Vultee XP-81, a late-World War 2 mixed-propulsion escort fighter design that was a first for the US Air Force and the military, with it using the first American-made turboprop engine. We first talk about the corporate merger of Consolidated Aircraft and Vultee Aircraft into Consolidated Vultee, also known as Convair. We then talk about the turboprop engine and how it was effectively a midpoint between older piston engines and new jet engines, attempting to combine the best of both worlds.
We then talk about the initial XP-81 that flew without the turboprop and how it performed with a normal piston engine and a jet engine. We then talk about the performance with the turboprop, all the growing pains that came with it, and the eventual cancellation of the XP-81 after the war ended. We end by talking about what the engines used on the XP-81 did after the project ended, where turboprop engines went, and the usage of the jet engine on aircraft carrier strength tests.
Why have I been watching your vids for several months and only now worked out that your channel name means I Hope You Learned Something…
so thats what it means.... i feel kinda stupid now lmao
So, it turns out... You DID learn something.
You and me both. Thanks.
Well you've ruined that little mystery for me. Hope you're proud of yourself!
Damn, me neither. Many thanks!
this guy deserves more subscribers.
GREAT site Binge watching it now!!
"The first day of winter. How festive!"
I subscribed because of this video. I enjoy your writing.
Technically mid-winter. ;)
I'd call it a pretty good first try. Often the only way to learn what the problems really are is to try something.
🇬🇧 Happy Christmas from the UK 🇬🇧 Love your content, thanks for the information, entertainment, and perspective you bring. Wishing you a Prosperous New Year 👍 🇬🇧 🇬🇧
Hope you had a great Christmas.
Thanks for the video!
Turbine technology offered some advantages over conventional piston engines. However, the technology was not yet available. Turbines were not “ready” yet as they were still very much in development and were rushed into use before they were fully developed. Data on air circulation through the turbines was incomplete. In a wartime environment such data was pushed from a theoretical perspective. However, actual results yielded little resemblance to what had been desired. As a result, turbines were designed for desired output, not actual output. It took a while to get things right.
AVCO was the company formed from E. L. Cord's empire after he declared bankruptcy in 1937. The automobile assets (Alburn, Cord, Duesenberg) were liquidated and the aviation parts that included Lycoming, Stenson and Vultee were reorganized as AVCO.
Definitely wouldn't call the plane a failure. For all intents and purposes it was a test bed design, which it served in well. I agree this plane needs to be in a video game. Looks sweet.
The list of aircraft with great potential let down by their engines is a long one.
Start with the Original p-51 mustang with the Allison engine, if the brutish had not stuck a RR Merlin in it, would have been on the stink it up list
Heinkel He 280 had the opportunity to be active in WW2, but it got screwed over by engine development problems.
Martin XB-48 had six engines clustered very closely together and resulted in really bad airflow.
@@Realitygetreal Let's not get too hasty to condemn the P-51A/MkI. It remained faster and lighter than the B and C models for lower altitude work and was a favorite of Rhubarb ground attack missions 'cross Channel throughout the European side of WWII. Longest serving version of the Mustang.
@@tauncfester3022 Maybe so, but they likely would not have thought to use it for that purpose if it had failed so epically for other purposes.
@@anon_y_mousse Huh? What part of the Mk I's long service in the RAF as a low altitude fighter are you not getting? This is not failing epically?
At 6:27 Jet thrust isn't quoted in ft/lbs, just lbs.
21:25 The issue with the V-22 is the complex rotating design, it isn't a normal turboprop plane or turboshaft helicopter.
The V22 is controversial...but it shouldn't be. It's actually resulted in less fatalities than the Blackhawk, despite carrying more people, and most of the crashes have been due to pilot error, not the aircraft itself.
1:46 I find it funny how you said, “successful”, and then followed it up with a picture of the B-32 Dominator
Really love how informative this video is. Do not love the unnatural & forced sounding roller-coaster-y voice tone changes. Subscribed.
I truly love that the factory production line image often shown to show American might (and appropriately in this case) is a line of Consolidated B-32s…..their *unsuccessful* B-29 competitor!
Then again if you can produce more of a basically unneeded plane in one facility than the enemy can of their “wonder weapons”…..yeah.
Thanx for intressting presentation and Happy New Year to You
Consolidated designed the PBY Catalina - arguably the worlds most successful flying boat and the B24 Liberator - the US bomber with the largest production run of any American type. So, while Vultee wasn’t very successful in WW2, Consolidated did pretty darned well I’d say.
That Consolidated was on war footing more than a year before Pearl Harbor and was responsible for the B24 being able to be pumped out like canned ham are also important things to remember.
And the real surge in B-24 production came with Ford Motor company building the enormous plant and associated city at Willow Run.
The application of automotive-production style precision stamping and punching for airframe and skin components immensely increased overall production and finally introduced full interchangeability to the end product. They may not have been the "perfect bomber", but there was a a LOT of them rolling out of the big sheds.. 19,000 or so from a bare farm field to the end of the war. Production was being wound back even before Japan folded.
A similar thing happened when GM looked at building Browning machine guns for air and ground use. Basically the GM engineers decided that the Colt plant was really manufacturing steel shavings, with machine-guns as a by-product. GM was a very busy operation across quite a few field in the war.
See also the story of the US production of the Rolls Royce Merlin aircraft engine by Packard. In testing, the Packard motors could not always match the British-built units. Rolls-Royce HAND FITTED their motors and all field repairs required more hand-fitting. Essentially "custom / blue-printed" racing motors. The Packard motors? Disassemble ten off-the-line Packards and dump the parts in a big pile. Basic engine mechanics could assemble ten perfectly functional engines from random parts in that pile and they would all start and run. Packard could thus churn out "interchangeable" motors at a staggering rate compared to the originals. (Insert old joke about thrifty tradesmen always having parts left over).
Interchangeability had been a key US industrial concept since the late 1700s. The end product might not be "perfect" , but it worked as advertised and was easily maintained using "stock" parts. In wartime, especially, "perfect" might be ideal. but in reality, "good enough", consistently delivered, is "perfect".
@@bruceinoz8002 Although Ford didn't get the Willow Run plant up and going till late 1942 or early 1943, probably half of all Liberators an well as USN variants were built there. Henry J Kaiser leased and later bought the plant to build Kaiser and Frazer cars until 1953 when the GM Hydromatic factory burned down and Kaiser sold them Willow Run. Wags at Kaiser said Edgar Kaiser personally lit the match to the GM plant.
...and a Happy New Year.
Spanning the globe to bring youse a constant variety ..... the thrill of victory... and the agony of defeat...see yeah?
Hi can I add a turbo fan used on today's airliners is just a turbo prop with the propeller placed in a duct. I believe the very first one was the engine used in the Harrier jump jet.
This is incorrect.
High bypass ratio turbofan != turboprop
Also, the pegasus is neither.
@womble321 --2 problems with your statement. First, Turboprops derive 90% of their thrust from the propeller, almost none from the exhaust (ie the air coming out of that hot nozzle on the back of the engine). Second, TurboFans still derive most of their thrust from their hot exhaust. While the bypass air does provide some thrust, it is mostly used for cooling the engine and the exhaust once it has left the nozzle. What makes it high bypass is the engine takes in only the air it needs for combustion and the rest goes around the engine (this also makes them very fuel efficient). TurboJets and their intakes are like a big scoop/funnel going through the air trying to ram all of that air in the intake, with the engine only capable of taking so much air through it and the rest either gets pushed along creating a pressure wave in front of the intake or bled off using dump valves in the intake (no where near as fuel efficient as TurboFans).
I'm confused, thrust is typically measured in either newtons or pounds of force, commonly abbreviated to lbf. Foot-pound is a unit of energy, not power, not force, sometimes abbreviated to ft-lb. 1 ft-lb is 1 pound of force (1 lbf) applied over a linear displacement of 1 foot. And 3,750 ft-lb per second is less than 7 hp.
Foot-pound is a measure of torque, not energy.
@@gort8203 Pound-foot is torque, foot-pound is energy. Different things.
@@fishyerik You're right, we can't call torque foot-pounds like we used to. I'll get used to it one of these days. At any rate we agree that neither is a measure of thrust.
It's called turbo lag and can be experienced in any car with a turbocharger. It results from the time required for a turbine to spool up the new speed and thus improve performance.
Turbo-lag in cars was common until the 1990s.
Well turbo lag is still a thing today, just in a smaller time frame.
This and the XP-75 are honestly some of the coolest looking aircraft if you ask me.
I thought you might find it interesting that the J33 was powering T-33s in active duty till at least Febuary of 88.
Such a shame... if the power issues would have been solved, it would have been a great close air support like the skrider, sort of a great uncle of the A-100 Great video as always, thanks for sharing!
I think, conceptually, the design would have worked if the Axial Flow TurboProp engine had been available. However, that Centrifugal Flow TurboProp they were saddled with just didn't have the power to give in real use scenarios (versus in the test cell). I don't know that it is very fair to compare that old turboprop to the turboprops of today, since centrifugal flow engines haven't been manufactured in over 60 years and all of today's turboprops are of the axial flow design. Good video though. I thought it was well put together and had some really good info.
Absolutely not true. Several small turboprops use centrifugal compressors - Garrett/Honeywell TPE331is a good example of this, and the hugely popular Pratt & Whitney PT6 has a final centrifugal stage, so does the Lycoming T53 and the Allison 250
Excellent video, thank you for that!.
thanks always wondered what the first turboprop was
You may wish to look at the Rolls Royce RB 50 Trent to identify the first practical turbo prop
I really miss the chrome aircraft of yesteryear….so beautiful
The J-33 also flew in the Lockheed F-94A & F-94B
I think jet engine thrust is measured in pounds force, not foot-pounds
That's your mama's nickname for me
Newtons. The civilized world uses newtons.
Correct but 99% of the world uses metric.
@@toolbaggerscope
@@UA-cam_user3333 And this engine wasn't built there, so pounds force it is.
To it!s credit, at least no one was killed unlike so many others.
I have never heard turbojet thrust expressed in "foot pounds." The A-4F I worked on in the Navy had 11,200 pounds of static thrust.
Thanks
1:05 Dude. I already knew you were a - N E R D - but you SUPER didn't need to make it THAT obvious 😂😂😂😂
Great stuff 😀
One could argue the TG-100 was bleeding edge technology cool concept but not ready for primetime
Still a mixed propulsion bomber escort fighter for world War II would have been absolutely insane and let's just say for the hell of it this would have reached 510 mi an hour which would have still given the Me 262 some 50 caliber hemorrhoids
I personally like the way the plane looks and the fact that both airframes still exist is absolutely mind-blowing considering these were prototypes of an obscure airplane
546 mph with straight wings? Ain't that something
Another Great video, yes, all great aircraft came from failed experiments. Lets just leave it that. Merry Xmas and Happy New Year.
The P-80 Shooting Star came out in 1945, so why continue with this aircraft past then?
There is a theoretical size for the most desirable configuration of a V-22, but they had to reduce the size below that in order to fit them on the Marine Assault Ships in use at the time they were produced. That may be the source of many of its issues.
Because it would have more range than the P-80 by cruising on the turboprop only.
I wouldn't see this plane as a flop. More like a flying test bed. Nazis didn't have time to discover durable turbine blades. Brits had a same problem making jet engine strong enough to last.
Ok, all that being said the COOLEST PLANE EVER is the Convair Model 48 Charger !!!
20:35 “look really stupid and I love them” 20:35 ❤❤❤😂😂😂😂🎉🎉🎉
12:40 I'm imagining FPS Doug as a WW2 experimental pilot and screaming at the laggy engine "F***IN' LAGGY POS!"
IIRC the Consolidated Vultee merger was encouraged and facilitated by the War Production Board to increase the capacity and resources for production, it was NOT a regular corporate merger you implied at the start. That kind of... consolidation did not really start happening until the 60s and 70s.
Companies often produce prototypes as part of the competition process, because the contracts need more than one bidder. They do get get paid for it or otherwise gain "credit" on the next contract.
17:56 huh, at quick first glance I thought we're looking at an A-10 Warthog! Now I'm wondering if there is some "genetic" ancestral relation.
The cars dont look stupid. I love them too!
Sorry to be an engineer but jet thrust is measured in lb. (pounds) and not ft-lbs - which is a measure of torque and not force.
Seems like the biggest issue is trying to create an aircraft with 2 different experimental power plants…. To create a crossover aircraft that could be finished in a timely manner and actually sold… seems like they needed 1 mature technology engine to narrow the challenge of creating a successful aircraft
If they had built this with top-in counter-rotating propellers on a bar across the front instead of a single prop they could have taken care of a great deal of the issues AND been able to mount center-of-body guns... but yeah either way the plane was doomed the moment the rocket-men took over the air forces. I imagine Korea would have gone a little different if full force development had gone into turboprop fighters. The main design problem with this plane is the location and airflow complications across the air intakes.
Interesting video content. Thank you. You may want to take some voice lessons. I noticed that your voice is constantly ranging from baritone to high tenor when you speak, which detracts from the viewer's enjoyment of the video.
Foot pounds is a torque measurement, not a thrust measurement. I think you meant lb•f which is pound-force
Newtons.
@@toolbaggers That is also an option, yes
Huh. I wonder if anyone ever tried an afterburning turboprop.
The thunderscreech i think had one. It was an attempt at a supersonic turboprop if i remember correctly. What i do know for sure is that it didn't go very well
The point of turboprop engine is not tailpipe thrust, but torque, and an afterburner would not increase torque. The jet engine could have an AB, but with a propeller and straight wings the plane could not go fast enough to need one.
Oh, so that's who the Ruben H. Fleet Science Center was named after
"They looked really stupid and I loved them".😂😂😂
Here's the context of my game I'm about to make: us modern people discovered & mastered time travel and found out through alternate timeline imperial japan made time-traveling tech, too (thanks to Germans and through "yanagi trade") in an effort to turn the tide in the pacific. But we in 2023/24 found out, so we intercepted them on a fictional island group close to the Philippines
Here's my Revamped version of the plane (among lots of others) for my video game:
* turboprop is a lycoming t55. OR, a purpose-built engine intentionally made to look like tg-100/-110 (you don't want that "future" t55 to fall on enemy hands in a 1940-45 timeline now, can you?). And the prop is a skyraider's; as the original hollow-blade aeroprop, made by aeroproducts (I think an offshoot of bell), is notorious for high-rpm vibrations, as stated in the vid.
* a higher output j-33 variant (used in p-80 and t-33)
*some variants of xp-81 in the game have forward-swept wings (because why not?)
*electro-mechanical flight controls in addition to its original controls for redundancy
* majority of the internal complex parts are 3D-printed with modern manufacturing techniques
* interchangeable guns are either an/M3 (You could opt for an/M2 to be period-correct) and colt mark 12s (again, you can swap them for Hispano/oerlikon guns to be period-correct)
There's more I can say but this comment will be to long.
Thrust is not foot pounds but pounds-force.
Every plane Vultee made was either mediocre or really bad. They're really only known for making trainers.
Ummmm.........No. The piston engine IS the Rolls Royce Merlin, ALSO KNOWN as the Packard V-1710. NOT the other way around!
It was a good idea but it didn’t work out.
Your artificial tonality and condescending demeanor are difficult to listen to. But I'd like to point out something which I think is kind of important. At the very end of your video when you start talking about how this should be in a video game, your voice starts sounding very natural very good. I really think you should consider doing your entire videos in your natural speaking voice it is much much better then what you're putting into these videos. I say this with all due respect I do like your videos otherwise. If you ever need some help I would be happy to do the voiceovers for you I have quite a good speaking voice I'm kind of a voice talent. Normally I would say keep up the good work, but please consider my suggestions I think they would make your videos much better.
The merlin version looked like a Goblin Shark
That's pretty spot on
Convair was so stupid, they funneled employees in thru the exit lane at the front gate in Fort Worth!
You should consider getting someone else to narrate. I don't mean to be rude, but your artificial stepped and condescending tonality is rather painful to listen to. I would love the opportunity to audition for you I would do your voiceovers free of charge.
I enjoy watching your video but your delivery is painful. up down up down up down... I had to check out 3/4 the way through the video. No like or subscribe until you do something about your painful delivery.
Quit using torque for jet engines.
Sucked what? Nothing rude I hope!
I'm sorry but wtf Convair not being prevalent in WW2 are you on crack? For starters, they made the PBY Catalina series. They were one of the most important planes in the whole war used for maritime patrol search and rescue they were pivotal in the Atlantic and Pacific they also made almost 10000 B-24 liberators one of the most important planes of the Battle of the Atlantic and of the war in Europe, they also made over 11,000 of V-54 which was the main trainer for the USN and USMC as well as making the A31-Vengence which was the primary dive-bomber of commonwealth forces in the Asia Pacific region, while the P-66 Vanguard was one of the main fighters used by Chinese Nationalist forces outfitting the 3rd and 5th Fighter group.
Pretty but a flying migraine
Terrible narration.
I turned off when you used metric measurements.
It's really annoying that you use metric units to describe an American aircraft that would never have been described using metric units especially in 1943. Then to have you use imperial units when describing other items, such as range, speed and rate of climb.