Martin's Overweight Flying Armory: Martin AM Mauler
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- Опубліковано 18 гру 2023
- In this video, we talk about the Martin AM Mauler, a late-World War 2 and post-war carrier-based attack aircraft designed in the United States Navy's effort to replace dive and torpedo bombers with a single, unifying class: the Attack class. We start by talking about the division of aircraft into different classes or classifications and why this was done more often on older aircraft. We then go into the effort to create the attack class and the planes up for consideration alongside the Mauler, which include the Curtiss XBTC, the Kaiser-Fleetwings XBTK, and the Douglas XBT2D Skyraider.
We then talk about the performance of the Mauler, its impressive array of weapons, and the annoying situation surrounding the engine used on it. It's one of two, I can say that for certain. Which one exactly is iffy. We then talk about the failure of the Mauler, both in flight and on the aircraft carriers it would be based on, that was caused, in part, by its sheer size and weight, along with the success of its competitor, the Douglas A-1 Skyraider, perhaps one of the best piston-engine aircraft ever made.
In case you were unaware, the Wright 3350 engine mentioned in this video is the same one used on the B-29. Several other aircraft also used this engine, including the Skyraider.
That's bigass engine lol
My Dad flew the Avenger and the Mauler, and the Mauler was his favorite plane ever to fly. Without a load of weapons, the Mauler could dogfight with any other plane of the time. He regularly sparred with Mustang drivers, always coming out on top. He said that the Mauler could do everything better except hang on the prop. The Mustang, stalling later, would then be on his six - s situation quickly reversed by employing his dive brakes.
That's a cool story.
A small critique... Everywhere you say "2nd pilot", I think you meant something like "crewmember". There was only one pilot in the SBD or the Avenger etc. Thanks for a good video!
I would add to that that most dive and torpedo bombers didn't have a proper turret, they had a rear facing MG on a mount.
and of course, the TBF Avenger even had 3 crewmen
The Avenger actually had three crew. pilot, radio man (who also could use a machine gun under the tail) and the rear machine gunner (in the turret). Later on the crew had other jobs as in the ASW versions. The Avenger turrret had a .50 maching gun when the rest SBD, SB2C, had twin .30s, but the the Avenger's lower rear machine gun was a .30.
I cannot find a citation for this, but I believe the SBD had provision for controls in the rear cockpit. [It was developed from Heineman's Northrop BT-2, a trainer]. Flight controls were simple: Rudder Pedals, and detachable Stick. [IDK about dual instruments.] To relieve the pilot, the Rear Gunner would have to secure his weapons, close his canopy, rotate his seat, attach the stick, get his feet on the pedals, find his throttle, and tell the pilot he was ready. It might be handy for very long over-water hops. Leaving the guns secured could be dicey in ''Indian Country''. In an emergency, should the pilot be incapacitated, survival was more probable to bail out, rather than execute the above procedure. It is possible this feature was not continued on successive SBD models. When the French finally restricted their surplus Dauntlesses from active service during the Indochina adventure, they were relegated to the trainer role. So the vestiges may have been there all along.
But I agree, the Rear Gunner was not a Pilot
That was starting to really bother me. Like everyone on board was a pilot. Right.
@@dougcastleman9518 Probably an AI voiceover. Robots stumble over abbreviations. So Mk is voiced as Emm Kay , not Mark, which an educated reader would say.
Martin delivered what the Navy asked for. Douglas delivered what they needed. That Mauler was well named..
Well said.
I'm somewhat surprised that the AM Mauler wasn't given to the Marines and used as a land based aircraft in the Korean War in a Ground Attack and Ground support roll. This at a time when aircraft of all types were badly needed at the beginning of the war. They could have swapped out the 20mm cannons in the wings for the lighter .50 Cal M-2's with more ammo. Then, if needed they could have installed the 20mm's in underwing pods. But even leaving the 20mm in the wings the AM Mauler might have made a decent ground attack/support aircraft especially where loitering time would have been a huge plus. It might have even served as a decent Reconnaissance aircraft. The Marines seem to be able to take aircraft that the Navy has problems with and use them in rolls that they excel in. If it had done well in those rolls the AM Mauler might have gone under some modifications that could have made it much better.
This is why the AD or A-1 Skyraider (AKA Sandy & Spad) was able to stick around for so long. It filled a niche that jet and turbo prop aircraft couldn't do, do well or had enough loitering time. Even the Skyraider underwent modifications during its time that made it better than it originally was. It was so good that when the USAF was using them, they contacted Douglas to see if they could build more. Unfortunately the cost to reset up a production line was too expensive to justify a small run.
But the AM Mauler, like many other aircraft that showed potential, suffered from 2 problems, one could have been solved, the other nothing could have been done to fix it. The problems were 1: Trying to make a single aircraft design take on a multi roll, multi mission capability. This has been done in other aircraft with some success. But overall, those aircraft wind up being a jack of all trades and a master of none. Even today, the military is looking for that one golden aircraft that can fill every combat roll possible that would make all other combat aircraft obsolete and it can never be made. To do more than one job, you must give up something from all the jobs. You can't change the laws of physics.
Politics. USN politics.
I once met a retired Navy pilot and he was surprised that I knew about the Mauler, which he had flown. He said it was beast to fly and a maintenance hog. He then went on to fly the Skyraider and the Skyray.
The F/A-18 actually currently serves the multi-role.function, and does it quite well. Precision strike, air superiority, ECM and tanker.
Love the “Cool Logo”! (AND enjoy the videos, which is the important thing.)
I believe you have brought me more information about more WWII aircraft previously unknown to me than anyone else.
Thank you!
The AM displayed in the Tillamook, OR air museum had the P&W R-4360 installled.
I saw that bird at Tillamook quite a number of years ago as my late wife and I did a tour of the west coast of Canada and the US (I live in Ontario, Canada...so it was QUITE a tour!). That airship/blimp shed was IMMENSE! Imagine doing a spark plug replacement on that engine! Just my preference but I think that it was a better looking aircraft than the Skyraider. Looks can be deceiving though and the Skyraider WAS the better aircraft. Given the impetus of war, the Mauler might have had the bugs worked out but time was not on its side. I am a model builder and a 1/48 kit of this beast would be fantastic. Fairly recently a company released a 1/48 model of the A2D Skyshark (a nice kit but how many were built and tested...2 or 3?) so surely someone can put out a kit of an aircraft that actually saw production (limited as it was) and actually saw limited service!
FYI, there’s a Mauler on display at the Erickson Aircraft Museum in Madras, OR. It’s a pretty cool museum of mostly airworthy WWII era aircraft. Cool ones like the Bearcat, P-38, P-47 etc.
I've stopped by several times. It looks like it had an R-4360 in it.
14:45 That is clearly an R-4360 inside the cowl on the plane shown. The R-4360 had a sort of corkscrew shape to its cylinder banks so they could all get airflow.
I really like planes that can essentially be called oversized fighters and those that while not actually ginormous fighters like here, but still have that kind of look/feel. E.g. Lancer. There is just something fun about them.
30 or 40 years ago there was a Mauler at Hobbs N.M. I remember the engine as a P&W 4360.
Nothing but!
The 28 Cylinder (4 row) Radial R-4360 was a maintenance nightmare! Fortunately, turboprop came soon afterwards! (Numerous failures, and fires.... also occurred)
Not as bad as the R3350!@@timengineman2nd714
I saw that aircraft at the Hobbs, N.M. airport back in the late 80s. It looked to be in flying shape at the time. It was owned by the Confederate Air Force....not sure if it's still there or not....might have to run up there next year and take a look.
Wow I can't believe they made a plane based on me. Thank you Martin, very cool.
This airplane look’s very similar to the SkyRaider used in Vietnam 🇻🇳!
There's a rebuilt AM-1 at the Erickson Museum in Oregon. Definitely a large airplane. It was involved in a fatal accident, but you cannot tell from its outward appearance.
Really Good Video.
It wasn't Martin Aircrafts fault that it ended up the size of a medium bomber. The Navy and the powers that be wanted the ultimate tinker model of flying swiss army knifes and they got it. It could literally do not about everything but it wasn't great at anything. A few years later the A-1 Skyraider came along and violet it was just what they were looking for .
voila.
Nothing to do with lila flowers
@@Ugly_German_Truths Finger slipped it was Viola
The Mauler was a good looking plane. (As were most of Martin's offerings.) It took all the hard edges the Skyraider had and smoothed them out. It looked particularly good in natural metal as in the photo at 12:59. (Also, notice that rudder deflection! I wonder what was going on in this shot?) The discrepancy between the 3350 and 4360 could be chalked up to the fact that the 4360 was still a new engine and still undergoing development. The 3350 although still also fairly new had better availability and could be installed allowing flight testing to progress. (Substitution of engines was not unheard of during the time especially when testing planes relying on exotic engines like the Lycoming XH-2470 or Allison V-4320.)
The 'bigger is better' Yank approach got the better of them on this aircraft, the mass was a bit overwhelming ! , maybe they could have ironed the controlability snags out with time, but the lighter Douglas skyraider had already filled that gap! A remarkable design none the less,showed how far the piston single could be pushed!! That ordinance carrying capacity was amazing !!💪💪
One day you're at 15k 1 day later you're at 18🎉🎉🎉
Such a cool name for a warplane.
The Mauler is indeed a beast. I've been involved in restoring one with the Glenn L. Martin Maryland Aviation Museum. If you want, i could get you in touch with our Archivist Stan if you'd like more information.
Do you guys have a channel? I'm sure people would love to see the restoration!!
@@robertharper3754 We do have a channel, but it's mainly event promotion. we don't really have a multi-media department for that sort of thing.
The Torque from a 2900 horse power engine must have been really nasty. I should imagine it would have been easy to find oneself caught in a torque roll at low speed if one was not careful? Judging by the small size of the vertical stabiliser and short fuselage, even with the addition of the large fuselage extension of the vertical fin, the Mauler's longitudinal stability must have also been questionable? In addition, the design of the Mauler engine installation looks like it could cause a lot of drag. At the same time, its high weight must have made its wing loading excessive, which in combination with its other design flaws must have made it a proverbial beast to fly?
Shame this thing didn’t pan out in the long run, I personally think it looks much cooler than the Skyraider
Another way to view the 9,000lb ordnance capacity is in relation to what came before the Mauler. Not taking into consideration how to physically do it but the AM can carry the weight of a nearly fully loaded prewar TBD Devastator.
I had a similar problems with info on the Kaman Battle Helicopter.
I have seen and touched one of the Maulers while in training on a small Navy base in Maryland absolute beast with a very high carry capacity. The Skyraider was much better than the Mauler with many variants for different missions.
I’ve heard that the Navy actually approached Douglas to build more sky raiders but the cost to retool for the plane costing to much per unit during the Vietnam war.
Pretty cool! I didn't know anything about this aircraft. Martin also got the PR short-shrift with its Mariner, a pretty good plane not well known.
Skyraiders shot down the first North Vietnamese jet in 1963 i believe.😮
The TBM Avenger, didn't have a 2nd. pilot, going to use and control, the turret gun. That was actually, a real turret gunner. The TBM Avengers had 3, flight personal. Pilot, navigator/bombardier, and turret gunner.
Thanks for the video but what is going on with using half metric measurements and half standard measurements? You read off items like length and wingspan in metric and then weight in pounds, speed in MPH and altitude in feet. During its time, the plane's dimensions would never have been expressed in anything but feet and inches. Does UA-cam give you some kind of points if your use metric measurements in a video?
They did manage to install the R-4360 on the Super Corsair.
The National Navy Aviation Museum is simply wrong if it claims that the Mauler had an R-3350 installed at any point of its development and production. You'd think they'd get it right but who knows who put together their publicly available information. The Mauler always flew with an R-4360, and if you examine the length to diameter ratio of the engine cowling in all the Mauler photos, I think you will agree that there can be nothing but that giant 28-cylinder 4-row 'corn-cob' inside all of them.
If memory serves there is a static display at the Ericson Air Museum in Madres Oregon.
I have a copy of 1949 Naval Aviation News that gives the narrative of Mauler pilots on a Mediterranean cruise.
The bouncing on landing was a problem on the F4U as well, fixed with some adjustments to the valving of the landing struts. (something modern off road motorcyclists will be familiar)
I suppose the A-20 Havoc could, and maybe was, classed as a "medium bomber" but compared to the B-26 and B-25 it was on the light side. A reason for the "A" designation? But then the A-26 was redesignated B-26 after the AAF destroyed all the Martin B-26s at the end of WW2. (they didn't even bring them back to the US just blew them up and scrapped them in Europe)
The concept of a multirole aircraft came to full fruition with the F4 Phantom.
The Swordfish could dive bomb, level bomb and torpedo. It was not obsolete in WW2 it had two wings to take off from small carriers.
The Grumman TBF Avenger was a superior aircraft. By the way, The "Stringbag" was so slow, that when intercepted, Bf109 pilots had to extend flaps and landing gear to stay behind the biplane.
Yes, it was obsolete. That is why the UK didn't bring them to the Pacific. It was successful in attacking in the early part of the war. It also got a lucky shot that damaged the rudder of the Bismark. It could land very slowly and it had radar fitted so it was great at night attacks not to mention the RN invented night operations. Had it been at Midway it would have faired just as badly as the TBD except that it had working torpedos so it might have gotten a good hit. So yes it was obsolete and could not have survived facing fighters but as an antisubmarine weapon with no fighters to worry about it was fine. BTW The small Jeep carriers that carried Swordfish also carried F4F (Marlet) and the TBF/TBM Avenger.
@@DavidSiebert I won't argue with your comments as the Swordfish and it's successor the Albacore were both outdated by 1941 but there were a few Swordfish in Singapore used against the Japanese in limited observation roles and withdrawn prior to the surrender.
The engine is the 4360-4W. We have two of them in our shop.
If you want to see 'big' Naval attack aircraft, look up Douglas Skypirate. Single engine, roughly the size of a Mitchell bomber.
there as a Mauler in lubbock tx in the mid 80's that was recovered from a target in white sands. it had the 4360 . it had a 19' 4 blade prop. I saw it being taxied around after engine issues were sorted. I heard it flew later. don't know what happened to it.
That one eventually was in a ground loop accident and was grounded. It and another airframe are currently being combined into 1 aircraft for display at the Glenn L. Martin Maryland Aviation Museum. I've personally put work hours into it, but not nearly as much as some of my fellow Volunteers.
A-20 Havoc was light bomber. Not medium as like B-26 marauder.
And there were no 2nd pilot but just crew member as there was only one pilot and others in navy`s one motor attack planes..
14,179 pounds is still less than the Skyraider record of 14,491 pounds. Of course these numbers don't account for fuel onboard or effective range. I will add that a family friend who flew Skyraiders in the 1950s swore he carried a 16,000 pound ordnance load which is double what I've read they carried. He showed me a photo of his plane fully armed while he listed the weight of each piece of ordnance. I don't question his sincerity, but I believe he may have been mistaken about the actual weights. Such a load did not even account for the fuel and ammunition.
Side on the Fin and dorsal filet look similar to the B-17.
How is it that the closed captioning spells Mauler as, merer, mher, and mer with the plural version as MEHRS?
I knew of one owned by the (then) Confederate Air Force that was hangared at an airport in northeast New Mexico.
Ed Heinemann created a masterpiece with the Skyraider.
Surprised the Mauler was not more popular than the Thunderbolt. The thing is a brute.
A-36 Apache was a phenomenal dive bomber.
TBM Avenger is the most successful torpedo bomber in history.
A-1 Skyraider was a capable dive bomber and torpedo bomber.
The F4U also proved to be an excellent dive bomber.
Mosquito was everything, except a dive bomber.
...........
Re: the motor. I had always heard it was a corn cob. But here's an idea. Set an AI on sifting historic photos of maulers for specimens with their cowls open.
I have to imagine that Lockheed Martin has a historian on staff. Don't they have a museum?
LM did finally deliver on that aforementioned requirement mentioned in the video of a "single-seat, single-engine, multi-role" aircraft. The F-35C Lightning II fits all those criteria. As for a historian and a museum, I am not aware of any. Also, given "Fat Amy" is often criticized due to weight and maintenance "Mauler II" would have fit as well.
My Dad flew TBFs from '42 - '44 in the Pacific. His logs don't show a single torpedo attack. I think they got wise after the debacle at Coral Sea and Midway. '2pilots for aiming the bomb'?? Not a thing. Also, the TBF(M)s were excellent torpedo bombers, it's just that that mode of attack was severely on the wrong side of the risk/reward curve. They were highly effective as 'glide bombers' - if a 40degree, 300mph attack can seriously be called a 'glide', and the SBDs that were initially onboard CVL-25 were later replaced by F-6 Hellcats.
The problems at Coral Sea and Midway were slow speed of the TBD Devastator and the utterly useless Mark 13 torpedoes. The TBF/TBMs also dealt with those torpedoes. By the better torpedoes came along there was less Japanese shipping for them to attack.
It really needed contra-rotating props.
Usually if a plane looks good, it will perform reasonably well. The Mauler looks like a plane, the Skyraider looks HMS Glowworm in april 1940. Guess that's a lesson in not judging a book by its cover.
I should have been able to guess it was the Skyraider that took the prize...
but I didn't...
The additional crew members were not pilots nor were they trained to be. They were gunners and or radio operators/bombardiers. As for WWII Navy dive bombers being less capable than fighters of the day, perhaps that was generally true but don’t tell that to Captain Swede Vejtasa who shot down 3 Japanese Zeros at the controls of his Douglas Dauntless dive bomber.
Douglas Skyraider is cool
Mauler is the Hornet we have at home
This topic is so interesting. There is a Mauler at a museum in Oregon. Had to leave the video early though because of the nausiating voice. Why does'nt this guy speak as if he were talking to you in person? Muted the video as l wrote this comment.
Cool story bruh
It’s not a bad looking plane.
The second or third crewmember you are calling "pilots" were almost never actually trained pilots. They were enlisted gunners or specially trained navigators. But not pilots and they didn't have flight controls.
Less is more. The Skyraider, 🙏
AM Mauler: a PT Boat with wings
12.5cm Long?????
Defense controlled by a second pilot? Umm….that guy is called a gunner.
U know what if they made this at the beginning of the war 39ish they would have given the soviets them and they could have done well
Another so-called good idea that was not thought through to the end...not unlike the overrated F-35 Lightning II a few decades later...
It's incorrect to call the crew in addition to the one actually flying the plane pilots.
2nd pilot in the turret? WTF
Is that code for wheres the facts?
R-4360 thats all.
Plz don't call other crew pilots.
The insistence in recent decades on "Multi-role" capability has ruined or killed off many excellent combat aircraft. Being a "Flying Swiss Army Knife" is highly overated. 🙄
There is nothing overrated about being a FLYING KNIFE.
That sounds like the greatest job ever.
Zooming through the air, stabbing things. It's the dream!
The point is training. It's to expensive to have more than one training program
Do you even know what a plane is?
@@690_5 A knife with wings, right?
I disagree. I'm from a small country, and we don't have the budget to have too many different types. Multirole (or swing role) fighters are the only option.
Once again Martin gets shafted by the US Navy.
By the way, Lockheed Martin is not in a position to settle ANYTHING related to the AM-1 or any other Martin aircraft. Aside from a few which may have "escaped" with employees over the years, little to no factory records of any kind remain. They were all destroyed in a fire.
Nice pictures, but it sounds like the AI narrator is set to 'sing-songy' with the same exaggerated voice tones in every phrase.
Why don't you set your narrative to music since you delivered it in a sing-song that was very annoying. Otherwise, the video was very interesting.