Talk:Midway Princess/@comment-27926642-20160312140241

It's a little bit misleading to say

"Furthermore, the Hellcat was designed based on performance data gathered from the Zero recovered at the Aleutian Islands"

because this isn't exactly accurate, for those not aware, Akutan Zero was recovered on July 1942.

Hellcat was designed since 1938 and it's flyable prototype was tested since June 1942.

They did use the previous combat experience against Zero particularly drawing from the account of pilots who have fought against Zero with their Wildcat or even the older Tomahawk (which was used successfully by the Flying Tigers in China) to shape the direction of the design since 1941 and early 1942...

but as one can probably guess... given the time frame, it'll be a miracle if they can do any significant change in design for Hellcat based on the recovered Zero at Aleutian Islands, Hellcat had been in design for  YEARS   prior to the Zero recovered at Aleutian Islands and it was mere months away from full production (ie: finalized and design freezed for production).