Grumman Bearcat inspired by FW-190?
I'm working on a cover story on the F8F Bearcat for the American magazine Aviation History, and I have a problem.
The common legend has long been that the Bearcat was designed as a direct result of a couple of Grumman pilots flying a captured Focke-Wulf FW-190 that the RAE had, and being so "inspired" by what seemed to them a simple, lightweight, high-horsepower fighter--the smallest-airframe/biggest-engine concept--that they rushed right back to Bethpage and urged the building of what would become the Bearcat.
I don't believe it, partly because I don't think that's the way fighters get developed and partly because I have at least some evidence showing that LeRoy Grumman outlined literally all of the basic parameters of the Grumman design G58, which would become the F8F, in a memo to Chief Engineer William Schwendler on 28 July 1943, and no Grumman pilot ever so much as saw an FW-190 until September of that year.
Problem is, Grumman test pilot Corky Meyer, in his book "Bearcat," recounts that legend as truth. It's hard to disbelieve a guy that close to the program--he flew the Bearcat throughout the test program--but for the fact that he was a 24-year-old test pilot who'd been with the company for six months at the time of the supposed FW-190 inspiration (he was not one of the two pilots who went to England to fly it) and I can imagine that he might have been taken in by company gossip as much as anybody without real access to what top management was doing, and that he later helped to perpetuate the myth as truth.
Can anybody offer any evidence one way or the other as to what the real story is? If you have serious references or expertise, I'll be happy to credit you in my story.