It was also of course mechanical fuel injection which got complex in a hurry. I can't imagine working on one of those Double Wasp type engines, and they did fail in flight fairly often, more often than would be tolerated in any civilian application.
Agreed, those are insanely complex. For those unaware, the Double Wasp engine that
@Cincydawg is referring to here is the Pratt and Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp. It was a twin-row, 18-cylinder radial.
Radial means that instead of the pistons being in a single line (like an inline four common in smaller cars today) or in two lines in a "V" shape like the classic American V8's, the cylinders were arranged radially out from the center crankshaft.
Twin-row means that there were two rows of cylinders so for this 18-cylinder engine each row had nine cylinders.
What is truly amazing is that the US needed and managed to successfully train and deploy literally thousands of guys like
@Temp430 's dad to maintain these insanely complex engines all over the world.
The US built a little better than 125 THOUSAND of the R-2800's and used them to power the Corsairs, Hellcats, Marauders (2x per plane), and Thunderbolts among others.
They also built the even larger Wright R-3350 Duplex-Cyclone which was a similar twin-row, 18-cylinder radial of 3,350 Cid or nearly 55L.
My dad was a Staff Sargent and aircraft mechanic in the Marine 4th Air Wing in WW2. He loved the Corsair. One of his many interesting stories was how they routinely would dump brand new aircraft engines, among other things, into the lagoon on Peleliu since they had no need, or space, and couldn't send them back.
That is awesome and thanks to him for his service.
The story of dumping unneeded surplus engines (which cost a fortune to build)* into a lagoon really explains why the US won. Omar Bradley said "amateurs study strategy, professionals study logistics."
I once saw a WWII German Soldier interviewed and he stated that the point at which he realized that the Reich was finished was during the Battle of the Bulge. Despite the location of the Battle of the Bulge being right on the German border and only a few hundred miles from the German Industrial Heartland his army was out of or running out of nearly everything. Then, when he advanced into formerly American-held territory he saw MOUNTAINS of surplus equipment, parts, weapons, ammunition, etc just like the surplus engines chucked into a lagoon by your dad and his buddies because they had more than they needed. The German Soldier pointed out that this was thousands of miles and an ocean away from the American Industrial heartland and yet the Americans had a seemingly limitless supply of everything they needed.
*Just to be clear, this is not AT ALL a criticism of your dad and his buddies. The story you shared perfectly illustrates American logistical prowess that the Axis (and for that matter the other allied) powers simply couldn't imagine let alone duplicate. Everybody else was dealing with shortages of more-or-less everything while the biggest logistical problem your dad had was that he had too many aircraft engines to store so they had to chuck them in a lagoon to make room for stuff that they did need.
