CAC Mustang
Australian fighter aircraft
The CAC Mustang is an Australian variant of the North American P-51 Mustang. It was built under license by Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation in the final stages of World War II, and though it was too late to see combat, it did participate in the Occupation of Japan after VJ-Day.
Design and development
Local assembly of the P-51D (CA-17; Mk 20)
In December 1942, the Australian War Cabinet began looking to acquire a fighter aircraft with greater range than the Supermarine Spitfire. As a result, arrangements were made in November 1943 for Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation to build 690 aircraft through kits supplied by North American Aviation (NAA). Only the first 100 unassembled aircraft were delivered, and four reportedly had the "razorback" style canopy of the P-51B/C variant. 80 of the kits were assembled under the designation CA-17 Mustang Mk 20 with Packard V-1650-3 Merlin engines, the remainder being used for spare parts. The end of the war led to most of the orders being cancelled.
Local manufacturing of the CA-18 Mustang (Mk 21–23)
In late 1946, CAC received a contract to build 170 (later reduced to 120) Mustangs locally from scratch. These aircraft carried the new designation CA-18.
The first 40 were designated Mustang Mk 21 and powered by Packard V-1650-7 Merlins.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “CAC Mustang” is australian fighter aircraft. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Mustang, Australian and fighter, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q108803838. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1942, 1943, 1650 and 1946.
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This entry incorporates text from “CAC Mustang” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.