F-86 main weapon

[beachbumflyer]

Hi guys,

I just wanted to know what was the F-86 Sabre main weapon during the
Korean war.

[rigpiggy]

6x.50 M3 brownings@ 1200 rpm with 265 rpg

[VinRouge]

Shrivenham student questions inbound!

[PLovett]

Now I know this is being a bit anoraky but the .50 cal Browning in army mode is a M2. What makes the airborne version a M3?

[Load Toad]

Wiki says:

During World War II, a faster-firing .50-inch aircraft Browning was developed, the AN/M3, using a mechanical or electrically-boosted feed mechanism to increase the rate of fire to around 1,200 rounds per minute. The AN/M3 was widely used in Korea on such planes as the F-86 Sabre and in Vietnam in the XM14/SUU-12/A gun pod, and currently in the Embraer EMB 314 Super Tucano.

[Brian Abraham]

Depends on what you define as weaponry. The Mig had better firepower with its cannon, but many other factors come into the equation. The Americans had better training (many were ex WWII), aggressiveness and experience. The 86 gun sight was regarded as giving a great advantage as well. The all flying tail on the later 86 gave an advantage in maneuverability, and the Mig was not a very good gun platform. The main weapon I would say was the professionalism of the people, the equipment and training.

[Archimedes]

Perhaps worth noting (particularly if the question is being asked because there's a beer involved as the settlement of a polite dispute...) that a handful of F-86s (ten, IIRC, but less than a dozen) had 4 x 20mm T160 cannon installed under Project GUNVAL. A number of these were deployed to Kimpo and participated with a reasonable degree of success on ops.

The .50 Browning remained the main air-air weapon for the F-86, though. Not quite sure what would constitute the 'main' air-ground weapon for those FBW which re-equipped with the F-86 as the war went on, though.

[zlin77]

Just for info, The Australian licence built version by CAC had 2 x 30mm. cannon.

[GreenKnight121]

While they never served in Korea, the last 360 of the 475 F-86Hs produced had 4 x 20mm cannon.

The F-86H-5-NH, which appeared in January of 1955, introduced an armament of four 20-mm M-39 cannon. The M-39 was formerly known as the T-160, which was first tested in Korea. These guns weighed 286 pounds more than previous Sabre gun installations, but packed a lot more punch. Ammunition supply was limited to only 600 rounds, which was only about six seconds of firing time. The last of 60 F-86H-5-NH was delivered in February of 1955.

Similarly, the F-86H-10-NH had the same 4 M39 20mm cannon, 300 of which were delivered from January 1955 to April 1956.


By 1957, the F-86H was already being phased out of active service with the USAF, and by June of 1958 all F-86H aircraft in active USAF use had been passed on to the Air National Guard (ANG).

The F-86H remained in service with the ANG until well after the United States had committed itself to the Vietnam war. However, no F-86Hs ever went overseas to participate in that conflict. The last F-86H Sabre was phased out of ANG service on January 8, 1972, when the 138th TFS of the New York ANG officially retired its last H.


After withdrawal from ANG service, F-86H aircraft with the lowest air time were turned over to the Navy. The Navy used them both as target drones and as MiG simulators for TOP GUN aggressor training. The F-86H had a similar size, shape, and performance as the MiG-17 fighter then being encountered over North Vietnam, and many a Navy F-4 pilot was "killed" by a F-86H Sabre during these mock battles.

[ATPMBA]

I think there is an airshow act in the USA where an F-86 and Mig cross swords in a mock dog-fight.

[GreenKnight121]

Oh, yes... the F-86H used the General Electric J73-GE-3 engine, which produced 8,920 lb.s.t. (later uprated to 9,200 lb.s.t.), instead of the J47-GE-27 (5,970 lb.s.t.) of the F-86F.

The F-86D had the previous most-powerful engine of a US-built Sabre, the J47-GE-33, rated at 5,500 lb.s.t. dry and 7,650 lb.s.t. with afterburner.

The J73 was dimensionally-interchangeable with the J47, but had an airflow of 120 lb/sec ; vs the 103 lb/sec of the J47.

[Modern Elmo]

The Korean War (1950-1953)

...

The MiG-15 was originally intended to intercept American bombers like the B-29. It was even evaluated in mock air-to-air combat trials with a captured U.S. B-29, as well as the later Soviet B-29 copy, the Tu-4 "Bull". To ensure the destruction of such large bombers, the MiG-15 carried cannon armament: two 23 mm with 80 rounds per gun and a single 37 mm with 40 rounds. These weapons provided tremendous punch in the interceptor role, but their limited rate of fire and relatively low velocity made it more difficult to score hits against small and maneuverable enemy jet fighters in air-to-air combat. The 23 mm and 37 mm also had radically different ballistics, and some United Nations pilots in Korea had the unnerving experience of 23 mm shells passing over them while the 37 mm shells flew under. ...

...

The Korean War (1950-1953)

...

Their decision to introduce the MiG-15 not only closed the jet fighter gap, its performance leapfrogged all of the opposing straight-winged jets. The MiG-15s proved very effective in its designed role against formations of B-29 heavy bombers, shooting down numerous bombers. In a match-up with the F-86, the results were not as clear-cut though American histories record that the F-86 had the advantage in combat kills. The Soviet 64th IAK (Fighter Aviation Corps) claimed 1,106 UN aircraft destroyed in the Korean War, compared to Allied records that 142 Allied aircraft were downed by the Soviet MiG-15 pilots. Western experts do acknowledge many Soviet pilots earned bigger individual scores than their American counterparts due to a number of factors, though overall figures from both sides were probably overstated.[9]

For many years, the participation of Soviet aircrews in the Korean War was widely suspected by the United Nations forces, but consistently denied by the Soviet Union. With the end of the Cold War, however, Soviet pilots who participated in the conflict have begun to reveal their role.[10] Soviet aircraft were adorned with North Korean or Chinese markings and pilots wore either North Korean uniforms or civilian clothes to disguise their origins. For radio communication, they were given cards with common Korean words for various flying terms spelled out phonetically in Cyrillic characters.[10] These subterfuges did not long survive the stresses of air-to-air combat, however, and pilots routinely communicated (cursed) in Russian. Soviet pilots were prevented from flying over areas in which they might be captured, which would indicate that the Soviet Union was officially a combatant in the war.
The USSR never acknowledged that their pilots ever flew over Korea during the Cold War. Americans who intercepted radio traffic during combat confirmed hearing Russian voices, but only the Communist Chinese and North Korean combatants took responsibility for the flying. Until the publishing of recent books by Red Chinese and Soviet authors, such as Xiaoming Zhang, Leonid Krylov, Yuriy Tepsurkaev and Igor Seydov, little was known of the actual pilots. ...

Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-15)

[4Greens]

Slight thread creep but..... The late George Hale shot down a MIG with an RAAF Meteor.