In flight sims, the Corsair does not feel like it handles that much worse than the hellcat other than the whole supercharger at low altitude wrecking the engine.
What about it makes it harder to fly in real life?
In: Physics
Airplanes are generally designed so that if you stop messing with the controls they will level out. You can increase this tendency by doing things like set the wings higher and farther back, or do the opposite. However, the more stable you make the plane, the less responsive it is to controls. For a dogfighter, this responsiveness was very important, so fighter airplanes tended to be designed so that they were closer to the edge of stability. The Corsair pushed that limit which made it good for dogfighting, but terrible when you needed to make the rapid and precise adjustments necessary for carrier landings.
Modern aircraft usually have active computer assistance that allow the aircraft to physically be barely stable (or even unstable) with the computer interpreting the pilots inputs instead of the pilot directly controlling the aircraft. A flight sim will do this by default, or at least adjust the sensitivity of the input
An additional factor was that it was a single powerful prop engine. This created an asymmetry in flow that made the aircraft twist left at low speeds, or when the engine increased in throttle (such as when trying to land on a carrier, or trying to abort a failed carrier landing). This may or may not be simulated by a flight sim
The Corsair’s drastically different aerodynamics than the Hellcat combined with a much larger, heavier propeller gave it rather unforgiving torque issues at low speed. Basically, the torque from the propeller would try to roll the plane over and when flying slow (like during a takeoff or landing,) and the control surfaces struggled to counteract this effect.
Add in the very long nose in front of the cockpit reducing forward visibility in high angle of attack conditions (AoA is the angle of the plane vs the direction of travel,) and you end up with a very tricky plane for new pilots to handle.
These same factors, though, made the plane fast, maneuverable, and retain energy well; key factors in what made a good fighter.
It was a trade off. If you mastered the plane’s harder-to-handle characteristics, you ended up with a more capable fighter in combat.
The Corsair wasn’t harder to fly. However, it was more difficult to land — on aircraft carriers — due to aerodynamic issues at very low speeds. The issues were fixed by fitting “spoilers” on the leading edge of the right wing.
[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/spoiler-alert-1-180977803/](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/spoiler-alert-1-180977803/)
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