Yes I do believe that the are zero's or Zate's, But are Japs by their Drop Tanks,
Planemad
lol!, kill stealing caught on camera.
The second plane that drifts into the picture is a Hellcat that also fires on the Japanse fighter that's att the center of attention.
The 2nd plane looks like a F6F.
Edit: lol, too late !
yes i do think also that the second one is a helicat that has a fuel tank also....but when he arrives the left wing is already smoking...then he gets a strafe of bullets..
now i'm not positive, but i thought the smoke coming from the wing of the the intruding hellcat was from him firing his guns at the enemy fighter. I've seen this clip umpteen times on Discovery, but it never loses its cool factor!
Have to agree with every one its a F6F but as to why he flys in like that, I don't know. Only thing I can think of is its a Green pilot that's got caught up in the heat of the action seeing as he's gone into battle with a the his external fuel tank still attached and he chases after that zero with out look around first and so flys into a hail of friendly bullets.
So lucky he didn't end up as Swiss cheese or collide with the gun-camera F6
If you are on the way to the target, or have fuel still in the droptank, on a long mission, I'd rather risk losing performance, then risk going in the drink.
Two things that caught my eye: - The gunsmoke from the "kill stealing" Hellcat was brown/black-ish instead of the white smoke we have ingame now.
- The tracers are yellow. Ingame, the american .50cal tracers are red. Why are they red ingame? Both from guncam footage (colour obviously) in europe and the pacific the tracers are yellow. Is there a fix for that?
The most likely reason the F6 pilot ended up flying into the path of the other F6 is probably due to target fixation. I have seen that a few times in real life. Once I saw a F-104 pilot get target fixation and crop the tops off of some trees. He was lucky but was so shook up that when he made it home he took out all the aproach lights at the end of the runway. It happens especially in the heat of combat, you see only the target nothing else.
Nothing rare about that footage, really. I've seen it on just about every air war documentary, and every old 1950's war movie. That was back in the days before CGI, when they used old WW2 films to show combat scenes. It was quick and cheap. They used to overdo it, though. The same films over and over...
Yeah, that's an F6F jumping in front of another F6F. The smoke is the poacher blasting away as dives on the Zeke. Not him being hit. Fifty caliber slugs make big flashes of light when they hit their target, in those old films. The Grumman would have been lighting up like a Christmas tree if he'd been taking hits.
