I worked out another idea. Alex(AXU) and his corsair and IAR 80-drawings (superb!) brought me to make a combination of both planes. The story behind it is that in 1940, with the war at hand, an Romanian pilot, Lt.Toma Lucian, escaped his country and met in a hotel in Lisbon a Vought-delegation, which returned to the USA after having a business meeting with some French navy-officers about the SB3U-Plane. The officer told them about the IAR 80. The Vought-people were interested and when the pilot offered them to get the basic drawings of the 80-machine, he was invited to the US. Two months later he managed to bring the elemental drawings to the USA and was invited to the VOught-plant. Vought, eager to have an new fighter, was already building the F4U, but there were a lot of problems. They were able to integrate the IAR model with the bubble canopy in the frame of the F4U. After tests it was at that moment a stable and trustworthy fighterplane. They called it the F3U-1 and went to the navy for tests. The Navy was very pleased with the model and after successful decktrials it was ordered.
Here is an F3U-1A version used in 1945 by a trainingssquadron from the Marines
regards
Lauhof