P-40 Strafes YouTube

“Unlikely” doesn’t begin to describe a P-40 Warhawk strafing desert landscape with real .50-caliber machine guns spitting out live ammo in 2026.

But there is new, artfully produced footage on YouTube of a P-40 Warhawk firing its six .50s at ground targets. This is not grainy black-and-white, but rather the culmination of a recent high-definition effort to inject some reality into the warbird scene.

See for yourself:

Putting pin to primer on all this was Coy Pfaff, executive director of Soaring by the Sea Foundation. This outfit’s creative name is the first clue this is not just another aviation museum. Based in Eugene, Oregon, the youthful Soaring by the Sea—Coy is 31 years old—emphasizes original, combat-veteran aircraft and flies them.

Currently, Soaring has a PBY-5, Douglas Skyraider, and the P-40 in its hangar, with a UH-1 Huey helicopter added just as this article went to press.

The foundation’s mission is to “Aviate, Honor, Inspire,” so Soaring by the Sea Foundation is very much interested in flying its authentic and historically significant aircraft in front of the public—or, in the case of live-firing machine guns, on video so the greatest number of people can experience the impact of these aircraft’s original intentions.

When not lighting up the internet, Soaring by the Sea Foundation gives veterans aircraft rides, spreads ashes, and gives youth free rides in a Cessna 172. It also has youth programs for budding pilots and mechanics.

In a monumental understatement, wanting to resurrect the tenacious rip of six M2 Brownings was no easy task, what with the numbing expense surrounding automatic firearms, not to mention the fortress of bureaucratic hurdles involved. All was accomplished with Soaring handling the aircraft and McCluskey Arms Co., also of Eugene, Oregon, re-creating the six Browning machine guns.

Originally supplied to New Zealand under Lend-Lease in WW-II, the P-40 returned to the U.S. as part of Soaring’s collection in 2024, packing a war record along with the complex and almost extinct gun mount castings, ammunition chutes, and ammo boxes. In fact, there were six machine guns rigged for firing blanks, but these proved impossible to import to the U.S. due to regulations. Therefore, McCluskey Arms—another youthful group of 10 employees led by the detail-oriented and never-say-die Erik McCluskey—fabricated from scratch seven (one spare) new Brownings, accurate to the last detail. The entire receiver was manually machined after reverse engineering an original “Ma Deuce”; only the barrels were built elsewhere.

Of course, with no major sponsor, cost has been a huge factor, right down to operating the six .50s. In WW-II, these guns were each set to fire at approximately 1100 rounds a minute, or 6600 rounds per minute total. This mechanically demanding high rate was necessary because the attacking pilot had so little time on target and was possible because the guns were fired in brief bursts and benefited from ample air cooling. But the Gatling gun rate of fire is too expensive for a museum to sustain even when firing blanks, much less live ammo at something like $3 per round. The P-40 carried 15 seconds of ammo at full wartime chat, or roughly $1,950 at today’s prices. At least it was an attention-getting 15 seconds.

No wonder McCluskey set the guns to run at approximately 600 rounds per minute. This is akin to standard .50-caliber rate for ground-based guns and still makes spectators accurate witnesses to what the P-40 was all about.

With the P-40 fully outfitted with guns and ammo, the obvious question becomes where can you pull the trigger on such a thing? There’s a nondisclosure agreement covering this part of the story, so the details remain secret, but the public version is that the use of a U.S. government air-to-ground range was obtained after six months of negotiations, and the P-40 set about ventilating targets in air-to-ground gunnery there. Suitable jet- and helicopter-mounted cameras augmented the usual ground photography to obtain “terabytes of footage” of such a unique activity.

One criticism of the YouTube videos released to date is that background music and voiceovers mask the sound of the flying and shooting. Coy explains wind noise has been an issue with recording the in-flight firing, but Soaring by the Sea Foundation is working on it. Studio-style microphones on the P-40’s wings and cowling are being used to obtain wind-free audio of the guns firing, which will then be overdubbed onto the aerial footage to produce longer, high-definition video with raw audio, which will be released soon.

Watching a live-firing P-40 is both technically fascinating and emotionally powerful. Now that society is at least one generation removed from firsthand WW-II experience, it’s too easy to see WW-II fighters as engaging airshow acts, full of glorious engine noise and exciting propeller-driven performance. Spectators watch in a festive environment in a holiday mood, but the reality is these aircraft were built for something not even close to glorious or comfortable, enjoyable, or even civilized. Rather, they were designed to prevail in terrifying, mortal combat—aerial assassination if you were lucky.

To borrow from Robert Coram, seeing one of these machines “invoking the lightning and summoning the thunder” helps us keep a healthy perspective.