North American T-6 Texan

Whether you call it a North American T–6 “Texan,” as the U.S. Air Force did, or an “SNJ,” as the U.S. Navy did, or a “Harvard” like the Canadians and Brits, the brawny, two-seat, 600-horsepower trainer has a split personality that rewards proper technique and punishes mistakes.

A well-flown approach and landing is an emotionally satisfying thing of consummate beauty. A botched touchdown is a jolting, tire-squealing hot mess. Aerobatic maneuvers can be smooth and graceful, or they can quickly devolve into unintentional snap rolls and stalls based on pilot performance. This vintage airplane has no memory, and it cuts no one any slack.

The reasons for the T–6’s benign/vicious behavior have to do with its swept-wing leading edges, heavy engine, and relatively small rudder. It flies beautifully until it departs, and then any amount of yaw makes the outboard wing create substantially more lift than the inboard wing, and a snap roll can be the immediate result.

The T–6’s lack of forward visibility on the ground requires constant S-turns to clear the area ahead, and it’s totally blind in the takeoff and three-point landing attitude. Its performance metrics aren’t terribly impressive, except that it’s said to convert avgas into noise better than anything else.

But pilots who learned to master the T–6 beginning in the 1940s went on to fly some of the most demanding and technologically advanced fighters, bombers, multiengine transports, and swept-wing jets with little difficulty. And they frequently credited the T–6 with giving them the fundamental skills they needed to succeed in everything they flew later.

The T–6 was known as the “pilot maker,” and that legacy is still available to the fortunate pilots who get to learn from this piece of history.

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