TBF/TBM

As further explination, the Navy used a different designation system back then than the Army Air Force. In the case of TBF, it stands for Torpedo/Bomber/Grumman. F was the letter the Navy assigned to Grumman. TBM is Torpedo/Bomber/General Motors. M was the letter assigned to GM.

This makes things kinda confusing when you've got various contractors making the same plane, but they all have different designations. For example, the Corsair can be an F4U (Fighter/4/Vought), FG (Fighter/Goodyear) or F3B (Fighter/3/Brewster). Or another example, a Wildcat can be a F3F (Fighter/3/Grumman) or FM (Fighter/General Motors).

The story I heard was that the Navy designations were too confusing for MacNamara, so he forced the Navy to switch to the Air Force's method of designating aircraft. I guess he was made to look like a fool during a meeting because he didn't know the difference between a C-130 and it's naval designation and that prompted the switch.

Michael

wrote

It wasn't just confusing to McNamara, I'm sure, as evidenced by your Corsair example. How much you wanna bet Vought, Brewster, and Goodyear had different part numbers for the same piece of metal? I'm sure that really helped logistics. The Navy should've be forced to change in 1947.

KL

And yet, when I was a teenybopper I had it figured out. Macnamara was a big one for standardisation. At one point while at Ford he tried to standardise all the dashboards of Ford products. The closest he got was with the '61 models. The full-sized Ford and the Mercury had very similar instrument panels.

Bill Banaszak, MFE

Speaking of Army & designations, doesn't the Army have umpteen different items using the same designation? Like M-1 tanks & M-1 rifles & M-1 this & M-1 that? Even today?

Another Grumman product is a good example - the Wildcat.

F4F built by Grumman F4M built by GM.

And taking the F4 designator as another example - e.g. the 'fourth' fighter from a particular manufacturer, we get :-

F4B Boeing biplane F4C Curtis biplane F4D Douglas Skyray F4F Grumman Wildcat F4H Mc Donnel Phantom F4M GM Wildcat F4U Vought Corsair

and that's just US Navy fighters !!! and no other manufacturers got around to a fourth fighter or there would be even more !

Ken

snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com wrote:

FM for Eastern's Wildcat, but I'm with ya.

The Navy system was a friggin' mess. Scrapping it may have been the one thing McNamara got right in his life. The Navy's way wasn't all bad though - F)ighter is a helluva lot better descriptor than P)ursuit. And yet I still find it impossible to ever refer to a P-51 as a F-51, though that is correct for Mustangs of the KW era.

Interestingly enough, this one began life as the AH-1 attack aircraft. Imagine the confusion around 1968 with that fine Bell Helicopter product -

*IF* the Navy system had been in place *AND* the Navy hadn't redesignated the Phantom as a fighter.

I suspect the world was no worse off with the 1962 demise of the biplane era Navy system of nomenclature.

WmB

Actually, the Wildcats manufactured by GM were designated just FM. The reason being that, although it was someone else's design, it was the first fighter made by GM. It wasn't designated F1M as the design number designator was not used for the first design, just the second and subsequent designs. Similarly, Corsairs made by Goodyear were designated FG, not F4G or F1G.

Dave

The TBF stands for Torpedo Bomber Grumman (F), and the TBM is the same build by General Motors. Basicly the same plane, but with minor differences

From what I've seen at NARA that part number example isn't the case unless it was a Vought/Brewster/Goodyear specific part. Common parts had common numbers from the drawings I've seen.

Corrrect.

Dead wrong...FM-1 and FM-2 for GM produced Wildcats.

"Jim" wrote

In WW II there was a

Tank, light, M3 Tank, medium, M3 Car, half-track, M3 Submachine gun, cal..45, M3 Gun, 75mm, M3

and so forth. The difference being was that the Army didn't have different designations for the same end item. There was some initial problem with part numbers (the same wheel bearing used on a Studebaker and a Dodge might have different army stock numbers) but they worked to sort this out throughout the war.

KL

"Ron" wrote

But what was a vendor specific part? The small hatch M4 medium tanks were built by a number of different companies (American Locomotive, Baldwin Locomotive, Pressed Steel Car, and Pullman Standard). Apparently each manufacturer produced their own drawings for the "non-interchangeable" parts like the hull pieces. They also chose their own subcontractors. The things that could easily be replaced used common parts, but a great deal of those tanks were "vendor specific" parts with different part numbers. Was that much different than the situation with aircraft? On a tank - where most things were welded - it probably didn't matter much, but I imagine on aircraft, where parts were held on by fasteners rather than welds, more easily damaged, and more likely to be replaced, it was a bigger issue. (It wasn't until 1943 when the large hatch hulls were designed that there was a concerted effort to use common parts.)

In the tank case the real problem was stateside. Essentially the same castings often had four different part numbers, so a foundry might have to make 250 of four different parts rather than 1000 of a single part. If Pullman was low on an item, Ordnance couldn't just shift excess ALCO pieces over to them to use because they were different parts.

Nevertheless, the Navy should've been forced to change their system 15 years earlier. If I had my druthers we'd have privates pulling up anchors in BDUs on the right side of the ship too, but that's me.

KL

Part numbers aside, that's still one very confusing 'system'.

Bill Banaszak, MFE

"Mad Modeller" wrote

Not really when you consider that the nomenclature is really the noun and its adjectives, not so much the model number. Look at the Navy: Name - Mark/Mod/Alt for everything but planes. (There are plenty of Mk 9s out there - anybody complaining about that?) The alternative is to have a new M-number for every item, in which case we'd be up to M34567 of some things (already at M11xx for vehicles alone). Heck, why not just refer to everything by its NSN alone?

KL

That would be interesting - when I was in the Navy and worked on the Mark 53 Attack Console, one of the frequently used parts had an NSN one digit different from a case of hand grenades.....

Bob

Now if authors & kit manufacturers could get it right. How many times do I see "Grumman TBM"?