Curtiss P-40 Warhawk
The Flying Tiger
“The shark-mouthed fighter that held the line early in the war.”
Curtiss-Wright · military
The P-40 was not the best fighter of the war, but it was the one America had when the war began, and it was built in numbers: nearly 14,000 across Tomahawk, Kittyhawk and Warhawk variants. The Flying Tigers in China painted shark mouths on theirs and made the type famous; it fought in North Africa, the Pacific and Russia. Around 30 fly today, more of them wearing the shark mouth than ever did in wartime.
The Flying Tigers copied their shark-mouth nose art from a photograph of an RAF P-40 squadron in North Africa, which had copied it from a German Bf 110 unit.
A deep chin radiator under the nose that gives the shark mouth its jaw, a long greenhouse canopy with a razorback behind it, and a tailwheel. The shark mouth does most of the identifying.
One might be overhead right now.
Bogey turns the The Flying Tiger from a dot in the sky into a card in your logbook.
