Quote:
Originally Posted by Jon B
You make a good case for Gayler, and you might be correct. I was only relating what was being discussed elsewhere.
It's said that Vorse ended up landing on the Yorktown, and that he flew more than one Wildcat that day.
There is general speculation that after their initial assignments, pilots at Coral Sea were being sent back up in any plane that was fueled, serviced, re-armed, spotted on deck and ready to go.
Do you know otherwise, that they only flew their personally assigned aircraft, and waited, during a battle, for those aircraft to be serviced, re-armed and re-spotted on deck?
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Looking at surviving pilot logbooks for the period you'll see even in the heat of combat the fighter pilots stayed with the same a/c. The example below is from a pilot at Midway. The VF tactical structure usually assigned two six a/c divisions for rotating CAP duty and two 6 a/c divisions for escort duties. This pilot flew four CAP missions and one intercept and was in the same a/c each time. Later in the war when there were more pilots than a/c assigned to the VFs you see much more variation in the individual a/c flown. If you look at Marine log books, they almost never flew the same a/c.
