The Curtiss-Wright Corporation came into being in 1929 through the merger of companies started by pioneering aviators Glenn Curtiss and the Wright brothers. Within the new company, the Curtiss-Wright airplane division made airplanes while the Wright Aeronautical Corporation focused on engines. By the time of World War II, Curtiss-Wright held more defense contracts than any organization other than vastly larger General Motors and had become something of a bully. It used lobbyists, legislators, friends in high places and its own overzealous salesmen to get what it wanted. It made some adequate but unspectacular airplanes and some big radial engines, but why Curtiss-Wright could punch so far above its weight remains something of a mystery. 

Trouble arrived for Curtiss-Wright in 1943 when its engines became the focus of a congressional investigation led by a senator named Harry S. Truman. The inquiry, launched back in March 1941, was formally known as the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program and it helped propel the obscure politician from Missouri into the vice presidency and eventually the White House. Strangely enough, it also impacted the life of actress Marilyn Monroe—but more about that later.

At the time, the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk was the company’s go-to product. The design was essentially a 1933 radial-engine Curtiss P-36 Hawk fitted with an inline Allison V-12 engine. While not a bad airplane, the P-40 was obsolete by the time the United States entered World War II. Still, it was the best America had at the time. Messerschmitt Me-109s and Mitsubishi A6M Zeros ran rings around it at altitude—the P-40 had just a single-stage supercharger—but it remained an effective ground-attack machine.         

Yet the obsolete P-40 stayed in full production until the end of 1944. Why not ramp up manufacture of the North American P-51 Mustang and Republic P-47 Thunderbolt instead, Truman’s investigative committee asked? But Curtiss liked the easy profit it derived from the simple, proven, utilitarian design, and its attempts to create a successor—the XP-46, XP-60 and XP-62—were uninspired. All were canceled. Curtiss had no aeronautical geniuses like Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson, North American’s Ed Schmued or Republic’s Alexander Kartveli to push it to the forefront. Its best talent was an engineer named Don Berlin, who was held in high regard but never really rose beyond his singular success with the P-40. It is notable that when the British asked North American Aviation to license-build P-40s for the Royal Air Force, the California company said, “Hell, give us three months and the back of an envelope and we’ll design a real fighter for you.” That fighter became the Mustang. 

One new airplane the company had to offer was the SB2C Curtiss Helldiver, but it was an ill-handling, poorly manufactured, aerodynamically misshapen beast loathed by pilots, back seaters and maintainers. It was not a Don Berlin design but was credited to Curtiss engineer Raymond C. Blaylock, who seemed to have stepped out of obscurity long enough to head the Helldiver program and then disappear. (In fact, he ultimately became the vice-president of engineering of Chance Vought. He specialized in missiles and was not involved in the design of the remarkable F8 Crusader.) 

To be fair, it wasn’t all Curtiss’s fault. The Navy ordered the SB2C to succeed the Douglas SBD and demanded that a pair of the Curtiss dive bombers had to fit on a fleet carrier’s elevators while at the same time requiring that the SB2C be faster and longer-ranged than the SBD and carry a heavier load of ordnance. This led to the Helldiver receiving an awkwardly short aft fuselage, a huge vertical tail that nonetheless failed to keep the short-coupled airplane longitudinally stable, and a monster wing to lift all that weight at carrier-approach speeds. When Curtiss put a prototype SB2C model into the MIT wind tunnel in 1939, aerodynamicist Otto Koppen said, “If they built more than one of these, they are crazy.” 

The Helldiver’s poor handling characteristics, structural weaknesses—it tended to shed the aft fuselage and empennage under the stress of arrested carrier landings—and lousy stall characteristics at final-approach speeds caught the Truman Committee’s attention. It didn’t help that Helldiver production had been delayed by nine months while the Navy demanded more than 800 modifications. For many months thereafter, Curtiss failed to produce a single SB2C that the Navy considered usable as a combat aircraft. What particularly griped the Truman Committee was that Curtiss had been spending tens of thousands of government dollars advertising the SB2C to the public as “the world’s deadliest dive bomber,” despite the fact that it had not produced a single usable Helldiver.

There was even a song about the SB2C. It went, “Oh mother, dear mother/Take down the blue star/Replace it with one that is gold/Your son is a Helldiver driver/He’ll never be 30 years old.” The Australians and the British were smart enough to cancel their large orders for the SB2C before more than a few were built.

Initially, Curtiss was to construct the SB2C at a huge new government-funded factory in Buffalo, New York. Then production was shifted to Columbus, Ohio. For months, nothing happened, and rumors began circulating among the sidelined workers in Columbus that their efforts were being literally sabotaged. Nobody realized that the problem was the fact that Curtiss hadn’t been able to produce a single successful airplane in Buffalo. 

Nevertheless, the U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) ordered thousands of Helldivers as a variant called the A-25 Shrike dive bomber. Big mistake. The Germans had already learned, with the Junkers Ju-87 Stuka, that terrestrial dive bombing worked only if the bombers had total air superiority and were attacking targets undefended by anti-aircraft guns. That kind of situation was rare enough that Allied air forces had abandoned the concept of dedicated dive bombers by the time the A-25 was ready for delivery.   

Things were bad enough with Curtiss airplanes. They were even worse for the engines being produced by the Wright Aeronautical Corporation. Several Army inspectors stationed at Wright’s engine factory at Lockland, Ohio, told Truman that they were being encouraged to ignore proper inspection procedures and to approve faulty materials and even entire engines being delivered to the government for use in the Helldiver and various other aircraft. That engine was the 1,600-hp Wright R-2600 Twin Cyclone. 

The R-2600 was the engine that goaded Pratt & Whitney into designing and producing the R-2800, the best radial of World War II, but the big Wright was an excellent engine itself—when it was built right. It powered thousands of North American B-25 Mitchell medium bombers, including those that flew America’s first offensive strike against Japan—the April 1942 Doolittle Raid. 

A preliminary investigation by Truman’s staff revealed that there were ample grounds for the whistleblowers’ claims, and that the inspection failings were obvious enough that company execs and Army inspectors should have been aware of the problems.

Well, let’s not be hasty here, the Army said. We’ll look into this and report back. Brig. Gen. Bennett Meyers and his staff did so, and Meyers announced that the Army could find nothing amiss. Meyers either lied or had been duped by his own inspectors, whom the Truman Committee later found to be actively obstructing the investigation. 

The engine division blamed the snitching on “petty bickering over privileges, authority and rights.” The Truman Committee, however, soon uncovered evidence of false tests of R-2600s and the materials that went into them, destruction of records, improper reporting of test results, forged inspection reports, off-the-cuff oral alteration of the tolerances allowed for parts, outright skipping of inspections and, in general, letting Wright’s engine-production needs override the recommendations of both company and Army inspectors. 

There almost certainly had been crashes and deaths caused by the failure of faulty Wright R-2600s, but nobody could identify any specific examples outside the mass of wartime catastrophes attributable to everything from thunderstorms to pilot error. Truman himself said, “The facts are that [Wright was] turning out phony engines, and I have no doubt that a lot of kids in training planes were killed as a result.” The fact that no 1,600-hp Wright Twin Cyclone had ever powered a trainer escaped his attention, but never mind.

As is often the case in such relationships, a culture had grown that encouraged Army inspectors to believe their primary duty was toward Wright rather than the AAF, and that keeping their jobs depended on keeping the company happy. If an Army inspector refused to accept material that he knew was faulty, he got a reputation as a knucklehead who failed to “get along.” Failing to get along meant you risked anything from an inconvenient job transfer to outright losing that job. When one Army inspector produced an honest report on conditions at the Lockland factory, he was immediately prohibited from entering any Wright plant. 

Testimony to the Truman Committee revealed that whenever an Army inspector tried to reject suspect engine material, a Wright exec would insist that the material was “important to the company.” If Wright appealed an inspector’s decision—to the inspector’s supervisor, to an AAF technical advisor, to the Army’s Wright Field itself—the appeal was invariably allowed. Inevitably, Army inspectors came to realize that objections were futile if Wright Aero disagreed.

Wright denied Army inspectors access to the company’s own precision instruments for their inspections, meaning they were limited to purely visual examinations. If they couldn’t see a crack, it didn’t exist. Wright’s excuse was that the Army inspectors weren’t properly trained in the use of the equipment. This was particularly true, the company said, for a device used to test the hardness of the gears in the R-2600’s drivetrain. It became an open secret that Wright was faking the hardness testing of these gears. The military inspectors were also denied the use of rejection stamps or embossing warnings to identify failed parts or engines, since Wright wanted to sell those wares to unsuspecting commercial and export operators. 

More than a quarter of the R-2600s built at Lockland failed a basic three-hour test run. Randomly selected engines were also put through a 150-hour quality test, but the Truman Committee found that since 1941 not a single engine had completed the test. One of them failed at 28 hours. 

Truman claimed to have personally rejected 400 ready-to-ship Lockland engines. “They were putting defective motors in planes, and the generals couldn’t seem to find anything wrong [with them],” he said. “So we went down, myself and a couple of senators, and we condemned 400 or 500 of those engines. And I sent a couple of generals who had been approving those engines to Leavenworth.” (Fort Leavenworth was the Army stockade in Kansas.)

Wright company inspectors often weren’t the problem. The AAF’s own people too often wanted to go along to get along. Chief Inspector Lt. Col. Frank Greulich tried to intimidate and discredit witnesses who gave negative testimony to the Truman Committee, and Greulich himself lied to the committee a number of times. As one observer put it, “The Committee witnessed the unpleasant spectacle of a lieutenant colonel, a major and several high civilian officials all telling entirely contradictory stories.”     

Once the Truman people had finished their investigation, the AAF insisted on repeating their work, inevitably making the same negative findings. But those faults led the AAF to a different conclusion: that the record of engines built at Lockland compared favorably with the record of other types of engines built elsewhere. The best they could say of Curtiss-Wright’s products was that “they were not always the best [but] have been usable.” 

One thing became readily apparent. The Lockland scandal was a prime example of what happened when a huge government-built, spare-no-expense factory tried to turn out an enormous quantity of material with inexperienced management and impossible production schedules while maintaining quality in the face of constant changes in tolerances and specifications.

Middle management was so overextended by the sudden wartime demands that a lot of the execs were simply incompetent, the workers inadequately trained and experienced engineers and supervisors too few. The more plants the government built for Curtiss-Wright, the more diluted the cadre of qualified and talented managerial personnel became. Only two percent of the first batch of applicants for jobs at Curtiss-Wright’s new plant in Columbus, Ohio, had any experience in aircraft production, yet they would soon be building Curtiss SB2C Helldivers, which had been described as the most complex single-engine design of its time. The Lockland plant was the biggest single-story industrial facility in the world, but its inept management soon turned the sleek new factory into a cluttered, crowded, ill-lit dump. One AAF report called it “a disgrace to the company and to the Air Forces.” 

It was thought at the time, at least by some, that Curtiss-Wright was untouchable because its president, Guy Vaughn, was a big-time player on Capitol Hill. Vaughn was a former automobile racer and speed-record holder who had come up through the ranks at Wright Aero. He was responsible, at least in part, for the development of one of the most important aircraft engines ever built, the Wright J-series Whirlwind. Particularly in its nine-cylinder J-5 form, the Whirlwind was the first reliable, bulletproof aircraft engine available. It was so reliable, in fact, that Charles Lindbergh chose it for his 1927 transatlantic flight, and it never missed a beat. (In truth, though, engineer Charles Lawrance did the heavy lifting and designing for the Whirlwind.)

Vaughn griped that the problems the Truman Committee claimed to be finding were simply “standard and recognized manufacturing and inspection procedures.” During his cross-examination by the committee, Vaughn demanded to know exactly what was wrong with three specific R-2600s that had been crated and ready to ship before being rejected by inspectors. It turned out that one of them lacked a lockwire on a gear, another had corroded cylinders, and the third had a driveshaft gear with a broken tooth and an inoperative magneto—defects that could have led to crashes. Vaughn huffed that he didn’t consider these engines to be defective. 

In the end, the Truman Committee toned down its report and Curtiss-Wright ended up suffering no penalty. This despite the fact that the Lockland plant had plainly turned out defective engines with the cooperation of dishonest AAF and company inspectors, and that some of those engines almost certainly went on to kill pilots and crewmen. The Justice Department did sue Wright and eight of its executives for selling the government known defective aircraft and engines, but the suit was never pursued. Three Army Air Force officers, including Greulich, did end up at Leavenworth, however, after being court-martialed for neglect of duty. (Despite Truman’s claim, none of them were generals.)         

The Truman Committee also concluded that Curtiss-Wright had received “far more contracts from the Army and Navy than warranted by the quality of its products or its ability to produce them.” The committee recommended that all Curtiss-Wright contracts be renegotiated, but this never happened either. 

However, the committee’s investigation marked the beginning of the end for Curtiss-Wright, a company that had once manufactured and sold more different aircraft, engines, propellers, accessories and parts than anybody else in the industry. Curtiss-Wright had become good at cranking out quantity, but less adept at creating quality. It continued to build second-best P-40s, concentrating on increasing the production rate, lowering costs and maximizing the profit. 

By 1947, with war profiteering a distant memory, Curtiss-Wright shut down 16 of its 19 plants. The company’s only possible moneymaking program was an attempt to turn the Curtiss C-46 Commando cargo plane into a pressurized airliner. But C-46s were so cheaply available as surplus that operators were buying and refitting the airplanes themselves. (And none saw the need for pressurization.)           

The CW-32 was to be a four-engine airliner with military airlift capability, but the project was canceled in 1948. The company was testing an all-weather jet interceptor, the XP-87, but when an expensive wing modification appeared necessary, the U.S. Air Force insisted that Curtiss pay a major part of the expense. CEO Guy Vaughn refused, and the Air Force retaliated by canceling the project. 

After 40 years, Curtiss was out of the airplane business.

Chaos took over the company’s front office as the focus shifted to profit-taking at the expense of R&D. As the excellent book Curtiss-Wright: Greatness and Decline puts it, “A vigorous and well-planned course of action was desperately needed. This, in turn, required a high degree of managerial skill and perhaps a bit of luck. Curtiss-Wright, it seemed, lacked both.” The leadership that took over Curtiss-Wright “came from the world of corporate finance and investment banking,” the book notes, “and had almost no direct connection with, or understanding of, the aviation industry.” By the mid-1950s, Curtiss-Wright “no longer had a distinct identity. The company had no viable product to develop and sell, and overdiversification was dissipating its resources.” 

Today the Curtiss-Wright Corporation has its headquarters in North Carolina and manufactures components for aircraft, but the days when the company dominated the U.S. aviation industry ended long ago. 

In 1944, Harry Truman became Franklin D. Roosevelt’s running mate and advanced to the vice presidency after FDR’s reelection to a fourth term. Some say he was chosen to shut him up, others that it was a reward for years of chasing down fraud, waste and abuse in the defense industry. (This part of Truman’s career is detailed in Steve Drummond’s excellent new book The Watchdog: How the Truman Committee Battled Corruption and Helped Win World War Two.) Truman became president only months later, when Roosevelt died  suddenly  in April 1945. 

Marilyn Monroe is perhaps the most unlikely person to have had her life changed by the Curtiss-Wright catastrophe. That’s due to a young American playwright, Arthur Miller, who would later write Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and other classics. But in 1944 he had written a play that flopped after only three performances on Broadway. He decided that if that was the best he could do, he’d take up accounting, or selling insurance. Fortunately, he decided to give playwriting one more try. 

In January 1947, Miller’s play All My Sons opened on Broadway, became a huge success and launched his career. Based directly on the Curtiss-Wright scandal, the play told the story of a man who knowingly produced bogus aircraft parts. One batch of his parts—badly cast cylinder heads—resulted in the crashes of 21 P-40s, including one that killed his own son.

In an odd but fascinating mismatch, the now-celebrated Miller fell for actress and sex symbol Marilyn Monroe. Monroe herself sought escape from her dumb-blonde image, and marriage to a successful playwright and intellectual like Miller, she felt, was her ticket to legitimacy. They wed in 1956 but the marriage, like Curtiss-Wright’s dominance of the U.S. aviation industry, soon came to an end.

But for Curtiss-Wright’s fall from grace, it never would have happened.

Donald L. Miller’s massive book Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany came out in 2007 and provided the basis for the new series on AppleTV+. In 2019 Aviation History had contributing editor Stephan Wilkinson look back at the then 12-year-old book in light of the announcement that HBO was going to turn it into a series. Now that the series has begun (but not on HBO), we thought it would be interesting to revisit a review of a book we had already agreed was a classic.

The epic of the Eighth Air Force during World War II is fertile ground thoroughly plowed by aviation historians. A search of Amazon’s e-shelves elicits nearly 200 such books, and several writers have made entire careers of covering the Mighty Eighth.

The best of them all is Donald Miller’s Masters of the Air. Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg apparently agree, as they are basing their proposed 10-part HBO project, “The Mighty Eighth,” on this book. If—and that’s a big if—the miniseries comes to fruition, it will be the third in the trio that includes “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific.” No release date has been specified, and filming has not begun.

The Eighth’s bombing campaign has been called the Children’s Crusade, for the crews were made up of young men in their early 20s, even teenagers. The horrors they suffered are incomprehensible to anybody (like me) who hasn’t gone to war.

Some of the most gripping chapters of Miller’s book are those that describe the conditions into which bomber crews were thrust in 1943 and ’44, when B-17s and B-24s were sent into stratospheric winds and temperatures minimally understood by the aeromedical professionals of the time—ill-equipped flight surgeons whose resources dated back to the 1920s. Nor did the vaunted Norden bombsight come anywhere near living up to its PR-stoked reputation, and the minimally trained gunners who supposedly made their aircraft “flying fortresses” might just as well have been firing .50-caliber garden hoses.

Miller’s book is not without minor faults. He believes that contrails are created by an aircraft’s propellers and repeats the myth of the crushed ball-turret gunner who died when his B-17 had to land gear up—a tale traced back to famously creative reporter Andy Rooney. Most are irrelevant except to rivet-counters. The comprehensiveness and well-written grace of this book vastly outweigh them and simply make it plain that nobody knows everything.

The Boeing Stratocruiser was the largest and most luxurious airliner of its time. Passengers loved it, but it still failed as a commercial transport. Its mainline service career lasted only a decade, thanks to the one-two punch of eye-watering operating costs and the arrival of the more efficient Boeing 707. It didn’t help that the Stratocruisers’ high-tech propellers often tore themselves loose from the engines, leaving the worldwide fleet with a stupefying accident record. Of the 56 Stratocruisers Boeing built, Pan American Airways alone lost seven—almost one a year between 1952 and 1959. United, Northwest Orient and BOAC each crashed one. Surviving Strats ended up being sold for scrapyard prices. But those junked airplanes led to the development of a remarkable new category of aircraft known as volumetric transports—or, more familiarly, Guppies.

Boeing called the Stratocruiser the Model 377, and its lineage led from…well, nits are painstakingly picked over this issue. Many say that the roots of its family tree were fertilized by the B-29 Superfortress, or at least the later B-50 version, which used the R-4360 engines that would power the Stratocruiser. Others point to Boeing’s double-deck C-97 Stratofreighter and its aerial-refueling tanker version, the KC-97. (To Boeing, these two B-50 derivatives were called Model 367s.) Conventional 1940s aeronautical engineering theory held that there was a limit to an airplane’s fuselage diameter relative to wingspan and powerplants, so most aircraft were designed with a small fuselage and large wings. The porcine Douglas C-124 Globemaster II, the first big postwar transport, pushed fuselage diameter to the max that convention would allow. The C-97, however, pushed things even further.

Some Boeing nerds nominate a single modified Model 367 as the Stratocruiser’s daddy. It was a C-97 that had been fitted out as a passenger-carrying VIP transport, with 80 seats and multiple windows on two levels, called the YC-97B and later designated the C-97B. Boeing built only one.

Its mechanical antecedents notwithstanding, the Stratocruiser came into being thanks largely to one man: Pan Am founder and CEO Juan Terry Trippe. Some assumed from Trippe’s first name that he was Latino. Others accused him of adopting the name to make himself attractive to the South American market where Pan Am originally flew. The truth is that Trippe was a whitebread Yalie who had been named after a distant Venezuelan relative, Juanita Terry. After graduating from Yale, Trippe had worked as a Wall Street financier until he decided to enter the aviation business in 1922, first with a company called Long Island Airways and later with a Florida-based company that evolved into Pan American World Airways. In the years leading up to World War II, Trippe made Pan American Airways synonymous with luxury, grace and prestige by operating a fleet of four-engine Boeing and Martin flying boats over Atlantic and Pacific routes, particularly from San Francisco to Hawaii. These airplanes were the most opulent of their time, and they flew for a coterie of wealthy travelers who had survived the Great Depression. After the war, Trippe wanted to lure this clique back to the Pan Am, but the long runways constructed during the war could now support landplanes like the Lockheed Constellation and the Douglas DC-4 and -6, effectively putting the fancy flying boats out of business.

Pan Am had been operating a small fleet of Boeing 307 Stratoliners—a pressurized derivative of the B-17 Flying Fortress—but the “Stratoclipper,” as Pan Am dubbed it, was not a success. It didn’t have the range to either cross the Atlantic or fly nonstop across the U.S. The Constellation blew it away, and the Constellation was being operated by Howard Hughes’ TWA. This infuriated Trippe, who hated Hughes, and it had a lot to do with Trippe’s motivation as the Model 377’s launch customer.

Trippe wanted to offer luxury travel with a new semi-double deck airliner that Boeing president William Allen proposed in 1945 and called the Model 377 Stratocruiser. It had a distinctive stepless, glazed-beachball nose and a 14-seat “downstairs” cocktail lounge, accessed via a tight spiral staircase. (Not until the 747 would there be another such extravagance, though the lounge was upstairs rather than down and was quickly turned into revenue space with rows of first-class seats.) Boeing suggested a high-density, 95-seat version of the 377 to be called the Stratocoach, but Trippe recoiled. He wanted a luxury liner, not a cattle car—an airplane to compete with sumptuous ocean liners. 

Trippe ordered 20 Stratocruisers (and later purchased the prototype) with the proviso that Boeing supply none to any airline before Pan Am had at least six. Pan Am paid $1,304,390 each, not including spares, and the airline took delivery of that batch in Oregon instead of Boeing’s home state of Washington, to avoid paying the latter state’s sales tax. At the time, Constellations sold for $1,200,000 and DC-6s went for under a million. After Pan Am, Northwest Orient became the second-biggest Stratocruiser operator by purchasing ten. American Overseas Airlines ordered eight and United bought seven. Swedish Intercontinental Airlines (SILA), soon to become the core of the Scandinavian SAS consortium, bought four, and Britain’s BOAC ordered six to use until the de Havilland Comet jet became operational.

For its Stratocruisers, Pan Am hired the modernist industrial designer Walter Dorwin Teague to lay out the interiors. Teague used muted colors and simple patterns—no busy floral prints, just gentle lines to match the horizon, so passengers wouldn’t be jarred by looking out a window and then back into the cabin. Everything was done to make the cabin seem wider and taller and to avoid designs that might encourage motion sickness.

At Pan Am’s request, Boeing installed air conditioning that could run independently of other aircraft systems, so that passengers who wished to stay asleep in their berths after the Stratocruiser landed could do so in comfort. Some sleeping berths were wide enough for two, encouraging membership in the four-mile-high club, and an aft compartment was even dubbed the Honeymoon Suite, since Hawaii was a popular destination for newlyweds. Unfortunately, it could turn into a rough ride, since the Stratocruiser was prone to porpoising in turbulent conditions.

The Stratocruiser was originally intended to have four 2,200-hp Wright R-3350 engines—the B-29’s powerplant—but it was Trippe who suggested using the R-4360s that had been developed for the B-50. They were the most advanced and powerful piston radials to go into production, but Trippe would come to regret his choice. It quickly became apparent that the bleeding-edge technology of the R-4360 and its huge four-blade propeller was not synonymous with reliability or safety. The Pratt & Whitney Corncobs (so named because their 28 cylinder heads resembled rows of kernels) were remarkable engines, putting out 3,500 water-injected horsepower on takeoff, but they pushed the materials and technology of the time beyond reasonable limits. They were a-bridge-too-far engines. Hawaii passengers on 377s would later routinely boast that they’d made it to Honolulu on three engines, occasionally two.

Boeing claimed that the 80-seat 377 would provide luxury, speed and range for just a penny per passenger mile, though this was almost certainly before the true specific fuel consumption of the R-4360 became apparent. Although R-4360s powered all of the super-large postwar airlifters—C-97, C-124 and XC-99—the engine had poor fuel specifics. It burned .43 gallons of gasoline per hour per horsepower while the ubiquitous Pratt & Whitney R-2800 used .38. DC-6s powered by R-2800s soldiered on well after the Stratocruiser was put out to pasture. 

The Strat was the first airliner with turbochargers, though they weren’t used to provide takeoff power. The advanced General Electric turbos joined the chorus during climb and cruise, to turbo-normalize the engines’ rated power. In fact, they doubled the R-4360’s output at altitude, which allowed it to cruise at over 300 mph at 25,000 feet. (Top speed was 340 mph.) The Stratocruiser was also the first American commercial aircraft to employ water injection, which boosted takeoff power from 3,000 to 3,500 horsepower. And it was the first airliner to use the more efficient underwing pressure fueling instead of above-wing gravity-fed fueling, but it still took about two and a half hours to top up the airplane’s standard 7,790-gallon nylon wing bladders. (Pan Am added capacity for an additional 360 gallons to 10 of its Strats, so they could make the New York-to-London trip nonstop. They called them Super Stratocruisers.) Northwest Orient claims to have used its Stratocruisers to become the first airline to serve liquor in U.S. airspace, in August 1959.

At one point Trippe asked Boeing to engineer a six-engine version of the Model 377. He wanted two Wright R-1820s outboard of the number-one and -four R-4360s. It’s not clear why Pan Am dreamed up this impractical mix. Perhaps because it knew how prone to failure the Pratts were? Or was Trippe simply fond of the classy six-engine airliner concept?  He was, after all, the only airline executive to express interest in a commercial version of the six-engine Convair B-36 bomber. Convair had proposed an airliner version of its XC-99, essentially a double-deck B-36, which Trippe saw as a 400-passenger leviathan that could support transcontinental ticket prices equivalent to bus fare. But feeding six ravenous R-4360s exceeded what any airline could afford. 

One of the secrets of the 377’s speed and range was the famous high-aspect-ratio “Boeing wing,” with its proprietary 117 airfoil. Originally designed for the B-29, it was particularly light yet efficient. The Model 377’s wing was 16 percent stronger, 650 pounds lighter and 26 percent more efficient than the original B-29 wing.  

Stratocruisers began coming apart within nine months of entering service. In January 1950 a Pan Am Strat dropped an engine into the Pacific en route to Tokyo. A day later, a Northwest Orient 377 had the number-one engine separate from the wing near Chicago. Pan Am suffered its first 377 passenger fatalities in April 1952, when a prop blade separated from the number-two engine over Brazil and the airplane shook itself to death, the pieces falling into the Amazon jungle. The wreckage was finally spotted three days later, but there were no survivors among the 50 passengers and crew. Nor was the number-two engine and prop ever found.

Investigators were initially baffled by the crashes, but it soon became apparent that the props were the airplane’s Achilles’ heel. Some Stratocruisers had Curtiss electric propellers, usually looked upon warily because of electric-gremlin-induced overspeeds and sudden in-flight prop reversals, but the Curtisses proved docile on the Stratocruiser. However, the typically reliable hydromatic Hamilton-Standard airscrews were not. That’s because the propeller company had lightened the big steel blades for the Stratocruiser by hollowing them and filling the voids with rubbery neoprene. The filler, glued in place, would break loose and quickly stuff itself into the outer extremity of the hollow space, flung outward by the prop’s rotation. The sudden imbalance would cause the prop tip and even the entire blade to break loose. The hollow blades were also prone to cracking or simply breaking.

The most notorious Stratocruiser accident occurred in October 1956, when a Pan Am Strat flying between Honolulu and San Francisco, on the last leg of a round-the-world trip, had a runaway number-one prop that the crew was unable to stop or feather. They oil-starved the engine, which seized, but the prop continued to windmill. The drag was massive. And then the number-four engine decided to ignore its throttle.

Barely aloft on two good engines in the middle of the night, the crew headed for the Coast Guard cutter Pontchartrain, which was on ocean-station duty just 40 miles away. The airplane orbited the cutter until daylight, and then the crew skillfully ditched alongside the ship. All 24 passengers and crew were rescued. Not until pilot Chesley Sullenberger and first officer Jeff Skiles ditched their Airbus in the Hudson River in January 2009 was a water landing so celebrated, or so fully documented.

On November 8, 1957, another Pan Am Stratocruiser plunged into the Pacific somewhere between Hawaii and San Francisco. Thirty-eight passengers and six crew were lost, and the cause of the accident remains a mystery. Both the FBI and Pan Am were convinced that foul play was involved. Conspiracy theories revolved around the fact that there were a number of important French businessmen aboard, including a vice-president of automaker Renault, as well as a U.S. Air Force major supposedly involved in a clandestine operation of some sort and a former Navy frogman and demolition expert. Nor did it help that the flight’s purser was known to be an unhappy employee who owned a handful of blasting-cap detonators. 

In late 1958, 12 years after the 377 had first flown, the Civil Aeronautics Board finally issued an airworthiness directive requiring the removal of its hollow-core props. By that time, disintegrating props had resulted in the loss of a quarter of Pan Am’s Stratocruiser fleet, but federal bureaucracy ensured that the airplane’s propeller problems were dealt with somewhere between slowly and not at all.

The 56 Stratocruisers that Boeing built, including the prototype, were just a small portion of the 888 Model 367s and 377s Boeing manufactured, the vast majority of them C-97s and KC-97s. But the Stratocruiser was the airplane that established Boeing as an airliner builder. (The Model 314 Clipper flying boat was a small-run specialty airplane—just 12 built—not a mainline airliner.) But by the late 1950s, their luxury cachet meant little when the real jet set had turned to the 707. Low-cost airlines still flying props were looking for airplanes that were cheap to fly, not Stratocruisers. Transocean, an off-brand carrier that had amassed a fleet of 14 Stratocruisers, sold them all for $7,500 apiece—well less than the cost of a new Aston Martin DB-4 sports car.

The Stratocruiser’s rebirth as a family of super-sized Guppies was initially the work of two men: Jack Conroy and Leo Mansdorf. Conroy was a former B-17 pilot who had become a POW after being shot down over Germany. After the war he was an airline captain, California Air Guard weekend warrior and coast-to-coast record setter in an F-86A Sabre. Mansdorf was an obscure aircraft broker. Yet Mansdorf had bought up almost the entire surviving Stratocruiser fleet at literally a dime on the dollar. He had no idea what to do with them, but he couldn’t resist the bargain.

Mansdorf initially had the idea of grossly inflating Stratocruiser fuselages so they could transport rocket components for NASA. The space agency had been shipping rockets by barge from Texas to Florida’s Cape Canaveral, and the voyage took 25 days, with sea-air corrosion always a problem. Transport by air would cut shipping time to 18 hours, including loading and unloading, and every hour counted during the space race. For his part, Conroy had wanted the airplanes to start a California-to-Hawaii VIP airline, but he bought into Mansdorf’s concept after a well-lubricated lunch with Mansdorf and a bunch of airplane buddies who tossed around preposterous suggestions of what they could build to snare a NASA contract. 

NASA didn’t have the budget to develop the needed heavy lifter itself, and it would have been wildly expensive for Boeing, Douglas or Lockheed to design and engineer such a limited-use craft. Conroy, however, decided to develop a volumetric transport from surplus aircraft—Mansdorf’s Stratocruisers—using private funds from speculators. Conroy himself poured almost a million dollars into the project, under the company name of Aero Spacelines, Inc.

It was an enormous leap of faith. No established aeronautical engineer would buy into the concept of trying to fly an airplane with so extreme a fuselage diameter. But Conroy took the design beyond those assumed limitations. It was hard to imagine anybody developing a successful cargo carrier from the husks of so unsuccessful an airliner. And husks they were, for intact Stratocruisers weren’t used to build Guppies; instead, mix-and-match major components—cockpit sections, empennages, fuselages, wings—were patched together. Many of them were from C-97s, not Strats.

German rocketeer Wernher von Braun, who had become the director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1960, had been a pilot since the mid-1930s and had flown everything from Messerschmitt Me-109s to helicopters. He involved himself substantially in the Guppy program. The initial idea had been to carry rocket loads externally, atop Douglas C-133s, but von Braun quickly nixed that scheme. He was also a big help when the Federal Aviation Administration became antsy about granting Conroy’s monsters the supplemental type certificate required for a modified aircraft. Von Braun leaned on the FAA to get with the program.

The first of the bloated Stratocruisers was called the Pregnant Guppy and in 1963 it transported components of the Titan rocket used for the Gemini program and went on to fly parts of Apollo’s Saturn. The Super Guppy, next in line, replaced the PG’s R-4350 engines with either Pratt & Whitney or Allison turboprops (five were built). The Mini Guppy reverted to R-4360s and was built to carry conventional oversize commercial cargo. It was the only version to be fully FAA-certificated.

And here the Stratocruiser line dies out, with just one Super Guppy still being operated by NASA. Not a single Stratocruiser survives, not even as a static museum exhibit. The jets arrived just in time. Had anybody tried to push the Stratocruiser’s 1930s technology just one level further, it would have been a disaster. 

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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Roald Dahl was not an admirer of the Gloster Gladiator. “They have taut canvas wings, covered with magnificently inflammable dope, and underneath there are hundreds of small thin sticks, the kind you put under the logs for kindling, only these are drier and thinner,” wrote Dahl, the British novelist and short-story writer, creator of Willy Wonka and a Gloster Gladiator pilot himself. “If a clever man said, ‘I am going to build a big thing that will burn better and quicker than anything else in the world,’ and if he applied himself diligently to his task, he would probably finish up by building something very like a Gladiator.”

Dahl’s understanding of his airplane’s structure was lacking, since its wings were all metal, but he nearly died in a flaming crash of his own Gladiator in the North African desert, so we’ll give him some leeway.

The Gladiator—it had no nickname, was never called the Gladdy or the Blazing Breadbox—was the last British biplane fighter, an anomaly that the Air Ministry clung to out of both necessity and romanticism. As an aerobatic plaything for the finest flying club in the world—the boys of the RAF’s Volunteer Reserve prewar university squadrons at Cambridge and Oxford—there was no lovelier airplane.

In the 1930s, the RAF was lumbered with slow, draggy, open-cockpit biplane fighters like the Hawker Fury and Bristol Bulldog, which could trace their lineage to World War I. But relief was in sight: already under development were “the monoplane fighters,” which we now know as the Hawker Hurricane and Supermarine Spitfire. They were a reaction to the threat of what would become one of the finest piston-engine fighters of all time—Germany’s Messerschmitt Me-109. But “development” was another way of saying, “maybe next year…or two.” Something was needed in the interim. 

The company that built the Gladiator was called Gloster. (Initially it was the Gloucester-shire Aircraft Company, until the Brits found that foreigners were pronouncing it “Glau-cess-der-shyer.” So they invented the briefer phonetic title.) It seems odd that Gloster created something so antediluvian as the Gladiator, for its very next design was the first British jet, the tubby little E28/39 Whittle-engine testbed. After that Gloster designed the only RAF jet to see combat in World War II, the Meteor.

The Gladiator’s designer was engineer Henry Philip Folland, who would eventually found his own aircraft company, best known today for the Folland Gnat light fighter and trainer that once served with the RAF Red Arrows display team. Folland had been the lead designer of the Royal Aircraft Factory S.E.5, which was so fast and successful in combat that it is sometimes called the Spitfire of World War I. He went on to design several of the Gladiator’s predecessors—the Grebe, Gamecock and Gauntlet. With his Schneider Trophy contender, the Gloster IV float biplane, he acquired a reputation as a drag-deleting expert. With the Glad-iator, Folland brought the biplane fighter to the pinnacle of prewar excellence.

In 1930, the Air Ministry had issued a specification—what the U.S. would call a request for proposals—and they got a dozen relatively advanced biplane candidates, at least on paper. Unfortunately, the spec had urged the use of the Rolls-Royce Goshawk engine, a V-12 design that used evaporative cooling rather than straightforward liquid cooling. The theory was that having an engine turn its coolant into steam removed more heat than simply having it make hot water hotter. Maybe so, but the Goshawk turned out to be a lousy engine. For one thing, the cooling system didn’t work during high-G maneuvers. Nor did it help that steam cooling required a large condensing radiator atop the upper wing to turn the steam back into liquid. If a single rifle-caliber round punctured that, it could easily down the airplane.

Gloster had wisely steered clear of the Goshawk and instead worked on a private venture, upgrading its already-successful Gauntlet biplane fighter. The Gauntlet had a Bristol Jupiter nine-cylinder radial, but Bristol did a bit of engineering and turned the Jupiter into the very successful Mercury engine by shortening its stroke an inch and thus reducing the circumference of the engine, meaning less frontal-area drag. It also meant less power, but Bristol dealt with that by doing an unusual thing. Super-charged aircraft engines use their blowers to maintain sea-level power as altitude increases, but Bristol decided to give the Mercury some extra power by ground-boosting it—tuning the supercharger to work even at sea level. The Mercury also had four valves per cylinder—unusual for a radial.

In an attempt to reach the 250-mph top speed then beloved of the Air Ministry, Gloster strengthened the main spars and changed the biplane configuration from a two-bay design—two sets of interplane struts on each side of the fuselage—to a single-bay configuration. Eliminating four big struts and their yards of cables and rigging cleaned up the airplane substantially, as did simplifying the draggy landing gear. Straightforward Stearman-like Dowty dampers enclosed in nicely faired wooden legs were far cleaner than the multi-strutted Gauntlet design.

The one thing that clearly turned a Gauntlet into a Gladiator, however, was a fully enclosed cockpit with a sliding canopy—the first on any RAF fighter. Yet many photos of Gladiators in flight show that canopy slid wide open. Like early airline pilots who decried the Ford Trimotor because its enclosed cockpit kept them from feeling the wind on their cheeks (which is how, they claimed, it was possible to make coordinated turns), experienced RAF pilots felt constrained by a canopy. It limited their visibility, they said, and insulated them from their proper milieu. One Gladiator pilot claimed that he had tracked a bogey for miles before realizing that it was a fly strolling around the inside of his canopy. Nor did it help that a Gladiator’s cockpit often filled with engine fumes that needed to be blown away.

The canopy wasn’t the only Gladiator innovation that met with disapproval. The big biplane was the first British fighter to utilize flaps, though they were intended solely for landing. They were small but deployed from both sets of wings, so their total area was meaningful. Many old-timers wouldn’t touch them, complaining that they upset the airplane’s trim. Perhaps they felt that using the big pitch-trim wheel just to the left of the pilot’s seat was not their job.

The Gladiator prototype flew in September 1934 but did not enter service with the RAF until early 1937, and by then the RAF had already ordered its first Hurricanes, signaling the biplane’s impending obsolescence. Those early Mk.I Gladiators came armed with World War I Vickers and Lewis machine guns—two of the former in the fuselage sidewalls firing through the prop, plus a Lewis under each lower wing. The old .303-caliber popguns often jammed the instant the trigger was activated. Savvy Gladiator pilots carried rubber mallets with which to pound on the Vickers breeches, which extended back into the cockpit.

Why did aircraft guns jam so often back then? There were many reasons, but perhaps the most meaningful one is that machine guns were designed to operate in an upright, stable, 1G ground environment, often carefully belt-fed by second gunner. Bolt them onto a vibrating, cavorting, G-loaded airplane, and all of the finely machined sliding and rotating parts inside the breech get minutely twisted and racked by an airplane’s maneuvers and position. Nobody designed those guns to fire upside-down or sideways. A partial solution was to replace all four British guns with somewhat more modern Colt Brownings manufactured under license by Birmingham Small Arms, the company that went on to produce the classic BSA motorcycles of the 1950s.

The guns “actually fired bullets through the revolving propeller,” marveled Roald Dahl. “To me, this was about the greatest piece of magic I had ever seen in my life. I could simply not understand how two machine guns firing thousands of bullets could be synchronized to fire their bullets through a propeller revolving at thousands of revs a minute without hitting the propeller blades. I was told that it had something to do with a little oil pipe and that the propeller shaft communicated with the machine guns by sending pulses along the pipe, but more than that I cannot tell you.”

More than that one does not need, and it is a satisfying explanation, unlike the usual muttering about “interrupter gears.” Dahl, never a technologist, managed to give as brief and useful a description of gun/prop synchronization as one can imagine.

The Gladiator’s career was too short to allow for many variants to be developed, so there were only three near-identical versions of the airplane. The original Mk.I had an 840-hp Bristol Mercury driving a fat two-blade, fixed-pitch wooden prop, and the Mk.II received a more efficient three-blade metal prop, plus the Browning guns. The Royal Navy found itself without a fleet-defense fighter, so it got the Sea Gladiator. It had a strengthened tailcone and A-frame arrestor hook, and a pod holding an inflatable raft on its belly between the mainwheel struts, activated by a cable in the cockpit. The dinghy pod was well-located, since a ditched Gladiator would turn turtle the instant its landing gear hit the water, but it was asking a lot of a drowning and upside-down pilot to free himself from a flooded cockpit while remembering to find and pull the raft cable.

Gladiators had some tricky handling qualities, exacerbated by pilots unfamiliar with its relatively high wing loading and flapped landings. During the airplane’s introduction to squadron service, the accident rate was appalling. A brisk stall often led to a spin, which would go flat and become unrecoverable in unskilled hands. During combat maneuvering, Gladiators sometimes spun out of the fight (which might have been a good thing, considering some of its monoplane opponents). Intentional spinning at night was forbidden, and it probably should have been during daylight as well.

Still, the Gladiator was wonderfully aerobatic and became a popular air-display act during its brief late-1930s career when a trio of Gladiators flew formation maneuvers while “chained together” at the wingtips, in the words of one commentator. The chains were actually far more frangible tethers with breakaway fittings.

Dahl had his own concerns about flying the Gladiator, and he wondered, “Who will teach me to fly it? ‘Don’t be an ass [said his squadron commander]. How can anyone teach you when there’s only one cockpit? Just get in and do a few circuits and bumps and you’ll soon get the hang of it. You had better get all the practice you can because the next thing you know you’ll be dicing in the air with some clever little Italian who will be trying to shoot you down.’”

The Gladiator’s wartime career was necessarily brief and, despite some mythmaking, largely ineffectual. Not surprising, since there were few less-capable fighters in action, and all of Germany’s and Italy’s bombers easily outpaced it. The RAF usually sent Gladiators to war zones normally out of reach of Luftwaffe Me-109s. Only one Gladiator squadron participated in the Battle of Britain, and it was stationed in the southwest of England to protect the ports of Plymouth and Falmouth, which were beyond the range of German fighters. Its only contribution to that conflict was the interception of a force of Dornier Do-17 bombers and Messerschmitt Me-110 escorts at the end of September 1940. The Germans were too fast for the Gladiators, and two of the Dorniers bombed Plymouth unchecked. Though Gladiators notched victories against Italian Macchi C.200 and French Dewoitine D.520 monoplanes, there is no record of a Gladiator shooting down an Me-109.

The first Gladiator victory had already been scored by an American, Captain John “Buffalo” Wong, one of the 15 volunteers who flew for the Chinese against the Japanese more than two years before Claire Chennault formed the short-lived American Volunteer Group. In February 1938, Wong shot down an A5M Claude, the fixed-gear, open-cockpit predecessor of the Zero. (Some records credit him with two Claudes.)

Wong’s Chinese American squadronmate Arthur Chin became an ace, with eight victories before the U.S. even entered the war, and 6.5 of them were with the Gladiator. Chin receives credit as the first U.S. ace of World War II. One of his Gladiator victories involved ramming a Claude and then bailing out from his wrecked airplane. The apocryphal story is that he stripped a machine gun from the wreckage of his Gladiator and showed it to Chennault, then an aviation advisor to the Chinese, and asked if he could please have another Gladiator to go with it.

The ultimate Gladiator pilot was Flt. Lt. Marmaduke Thomas St. John “Pat” Pattle, a South African who scored at least 15 victories with Gladiators, first in Egypt and later in Greece. (The rest of his 50-plus shoot-downs were accomplished with Hurricanes.) “Usually outrun, often outgunned but seldom outmaneuvered,” reads one tribute to Pattle, arguably the most skilled and dogged of all Gladiator pilots.

Gladiators fought in the hands of a wide variety of export customers as well as the RAF, and they reached many war zones, including North Africa, Greece, the Middle East, France and Scandinavia. The Norway campaign was one of the Gladiator’s bloodiest battles, and for the RAF, it was a disaster. 

A squadron of Gladiators flew to Norway from the carrier HMS Glorious to help blunt the German invasion in late April 1940, and they surprised the Germans by landing on a frozen lake in the country’s center. (The lake had been selected by Sqdn. Ldr. Whitney Straight, an American racecar driver who in the years before the war had won more international Grand Prix than any other American.) The Gladiators arrived without support personnel, and the pilots found themselves rearming and refueling their airplanes themselves with bitterly cold hands, often using milk cans supplied by local farmers for the fuel. The Luftwaffe reacted quickly with bombing raids, and the lake, already thawing in the spring weather, became increasingly cratered and unstable. After 48 hours of this, the Gladiators were finished as a fighting force, burnt out on the ground and sunk into the boggy water. The squadron hadn’t shot down a single Luftwaffe aircraft. The Air Ministry admitted that the Gladiators had been sent to Norway “as a token sacrifice.”

The squadron received another 18 Gladiators and returned to Norway, this time to an established airfield. They scored several victories over Heinkel 111s and possibly even a Focke-Wulf 200 Condor. Ultimately, what remained of the squadron flew back to the Glorious, despite the Gladiators having no arresting hooks nor any pilots who had made deck landings. Soon after the carrier sailed, the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau sank it and all but two of the Gladiator pilots aboard. It was the end of the Gladiator’s Norwegian adventure.

Nobody can write an account of the Gladiator’s career without extolling the feats of the most famous of all Gladiators, the six airplanes that went by the names of Faith, Hope and Charity. Starting in June 1940 they defended the Mediterranean island of Malta against the Regia Aeronautica, the Italian air force, and unfortunately, their story has become a mix of legend and reality. There were no individual Gladiators named Faith, Hope or Charity, and the honorific was applied to the entire flight of fighters by a Maltese newspaper well after the island had been saved from defeat, largely by Hurricanes and Spitfires. (The remains of a Gladiator on display at Malta’s National War Museum purports to be from Faith.) 

Yet the Malta Gladiators were immensely reassuring to the Maltese as the biplanes stood watch from dawn to dusk and frequently barreled off to intercept incoming Savoia-Marchettis and Capronis. The only way they could attack the bombers was to climb above them and pick up speed in a dive, so they snarled their way upward, full throttle and superchargers set to max (officially forbidden). Their high-angle, low-forward-speed climbs overheated and destroyed their engines, but to the Maltese, they were brave pit bulls lunging to the ends of their chains.

It’s often forgotten that, not counting trainers, there were at least two dozen types of biplanes used on the front lines during World War II. Everyone remembers the Fairey Swordfish torpedo bomber—the Stringbag—but other biplane fighters included Polikarpov I-15s, Avia B-534s, Hawker Furies and particularly Fiat CR.42 Falco biplanes, the Gladiator’s most evenly matched rival.

The Falco was in fact a sesquiplane, not a biplane; it had lower wings of less than half the area of the upper wing. It also had an open cockpit and fixed landing gear, yet it was about 15 mph faster than the Gladiator. The Gloster was more maneuverable than the Italian fighter, particularly in a turning fight. The Gladiator’s biggest advantage was that it carried a radio with about five miles of air-to-air range, allowing coordinated attacks while the Italian pilots could only gesture and nod their heads. Gladiators had a 1.2-to-1 victory ratio over CR.42s—much the same as the Me-109’s advantage over the Spitfire during the Battle of Britain: close enough to call it even. 

After the war, Gladiators were essentially worthless. British collector Vivian Bellamy bought two hulks for a pound sterling apiece in 1951 and created a single flyable airplane, which he sold to the Gloster company for £50. That airplane was later restored and today is part of the Shuttleworth Collection in Bedfordshire, England. It is one of only two flying Gladiators remaining. In September 2021, the Malta Aviation Museum announced plans to create a flyable replica built around one small part salvaged from what they claim was the sunken Gladiator Charity, but that project seems to be in limbo.

The Gloster Gladiator: honor this cranky and archaic yet iconic and innovative fighter, but offer a prayer for all the pilots who had to go into combat with it. 

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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It is said that the first automobile race took place the moment the second car was built, but motorsport took a bit longer to appear in aviation. The first air race was flown in 1909, in France, more than five years after the Wright brothers’ first flight. There were four entrants. Two started the race and none finished. The rules had foreseen that. They specified that the winner would be the competitor who had traveled farthest. 

Things hadn’t progressed much by August 1927, when the Dole Derby, a heavily promoted race between California and Hawaii, limped to an unfortunate start. Eleven racers entered the contest, six actually flew and two finished. Ten people—pilots, navigators and one unfortunate passenger—died before the race was over. Two entrants later died while searching for survivors.

Call it the Dole Disaster and blame it on the pineapple.

In 1899, 22-year-old James Dole moved to Honolulu with a Harvard degree in agriculture in his suitcase, and he began canning pineapple. In 1907, Dole set about advertising his exotic product throughout the U.S. mainland and soon had a hit on his hands. By 1922, Dole pineapples were so popular that young James bought the entire Hawaiian island of Lanai as a 20,000-acre pineapple plantation.

In May 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris, and aviation suddenly became the hottest game in town. Airports and airlines sprang up everywhere; aviators set and broke records weekly. The months after Lindbergh’s flight were called the Summer of Eagles, and some people were seeking a Pacific Eagle. Hollywood theater mogul Sid Grauman offered $30,000 for the first flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo. Dallas stockbroker William Easterwood put up $25,000 for anyone who could make the first flight from Dallas to Hong Kong in less than 300 hours, with no more than three refueling stops. And immediately after James Dole announced plans for what would become the infamous California-to-Hawaii Dole Derby, the San Francisco Citizen’s Flight Committee promised an additional $50,000 prize to extend the route all the way to Australia.

The idea for a Hawaii-bound air race didn’t originate with James Dole. It took a pair of Honolulu newspaper reporters, Riley Allen and Joseph Farrington, to light the fuse. Just two days after Lindbergh’s flight, they sent Dole a telegram—simultaneously printed in the Honolulu Advertiser—pointing out that the post-Lindberghian swoon made the times ripe for someone to offer a substantial prize for a nonstop flight to Hawaii. If Dole ponied up, the reporters said, his reward would be “all the press coverage he could stomach.” 

Dole bit. He assumed he would be promoting the first such flight and thus a significant world record. He offered $25,000 and $10,000 (about $426,000 and $170,000 in today’s dollars) for the first- and second-place finishers in a “Derby” in which the only requirement was the aviators had to fly from the continental U.S. to the Territory of Hawaii—no specific takeoff or landing points were named, although Oakland did become the starting point—and that the race would start on August 12, 1927.

Perhaps he should have said the Dole Derby would start the next morning, for two months before the date that Dole set, two Army Air Corps lieutenants in an Atlantic-Fokker C-2 trimotor named Bird of Paradise quietly and professionally flew from Oakland, California, to Honolulu in just under 26 hours. Their airplane was a military version of the Fokker F.VIIa, built in Fokker’s Teterboro, New Jersey, factory. It had been modified for the Hawaii flight—the longest overwater flight ever attempted anywhere—with a larger wing and extra fuel tanks that gave it a range of just over 2,500 miles. Which was cutting it close, since the distance from Oakland to Hawaii was 2,418 miles.

The USAAC had been planning such a trip since 1919. One of the flight crew, MIT-degreed Lieutenant Albert Hegenberger, was a prime mover in the development of long-distance navigation for the Air Corps and had been in charge of developing the service’s radio navigation instruments and equipment. Hegenberger’s pilot was Lester Maitland, an aide to General Billy Mitchell who had spent much of his Air Service and then Air Corps career setting records and winning air races that accrued publicity for the military. He was unofficially the first American pilot to fly faster than 200 mph, and in October 1923 he set an absolute world speed record of just a bit under 245 mph, flying the Curtiss R-6 biplane racer in which he’d finished second in that year’s Pulitzer Trophy race. 

Hegenberger’s radio skills turned out to be moot, since the Bird of Paradise’s radio compass and directional receiver both failed soon after takeoff, leaving the crew to rely on a whiskey compass, a drift meter and some celestial navigation to dead reckon their course. Had Hegenberger been more than 3.5 degrees off after 2,400 miles, they would have missed Hawaii. The flight was 900 miles shorter than Lindbergh’s, but all 2,400 miles of it was over water; Lindbergh spent about 2,000 miles feet wet from Newfoundland to Ireland.

Unfortunately, few of the actual Dole Derby contestants were as professional or well-prepared as either Lindbergh or this Army crew.

One dismayed spectator at the Army Fokker’s takeoff was civilian airmail pilot Ernest Smith, who had decided to forego Dole’s prize money by flying the Pacific well before the official race and thus make it irrelevant. But Smith hadn’t planned on the Army making him irrelevant. Smith and his navigator, Charles Carter, took off two hours after the Fokker in their single-engine Travel Air, but a metal wind deflector for the navigator’s observation hatch came loose soon after takeoff. Smith returned to Oakland, where Carter decided he’d had enough and quit. During the two weeks that it took to fix the wind deflector, Smith found another navigator, Emory Bronte, and with his help became the first civilian pilot to cross from the U.S. to Hawaii. They had intended to land at Honolulu but went tanks dry over the leper-colony island of Molokai, 50 miles short of their destination. Smith deadsticked the Travel Air down into a grove of long-thorned mesquite trees, more concerned about his belief that the island was entirely populated by lepers than he was by the forced landing. 

Four aviators had successfully made the transpacific flight, and none them had been a Dole Derby contestant.

Their premature accomplishments turned the Derby from a viable attempt to set an important world record into a half-assed dash for money. The racers would, however, still accrue controversial publicity for Hawaii and James Dole at a time when Lindbergh had primed the pump for newspapers to flood the country with news about notable aviation accomplishments. The Dole race also offered the ultimate risk/reward equation: failure meant death. Even though every race plane was required to carry at least a rubber raft, finding floating survivors in the vast Pacific would prove to be fruitless. 

To his credit, James Dole was determined that his race would be overseen by professionals who could weed out unqualified crews and ground airplanes that had no chance of success. He enlisted the help of the new aviation branch of the Department of Commerce, which would eventually become the Federal Aviation Administration. Its inspectors demanded that participants have auxiliary fuel tanks that could carry a 15-percent safety margin, and that they carry life rafts and emergency rations, and they added the proviso that nobody could fly without a certified navigator. (One navigator was disqualified after becoming lost during a local flight over Oakland.)

Unfortunately, the Feds did a lousy job of enforcing their requirements.

In the end, 15 pilots paid the $100 fee to enter the Dole Derby. One didn’t even have access to an airplane. Three crashed before they could reach Oakland. One was unable to get qualified before the race. One withdrew before the start. The day before the race, one more entry, an Air King named City of Peoria, was disqualified for not carrying enough fuel to reach Hawaii. “The owner [of the entry] was furious,” read one account of the race, “but the two men recruited to do the actual flight were reportedly relieved.” You have to wonder what kind of pilots would require a regulatory judgment to keep them from taking off on a death trip.

Dole had hoped Lindbergh would enter the Derby, but the stoic Minnesotan wanted nothing to do with the stunt. He realized that putting the compass on E and heading toward a continent—though his own navigation was vastly more precise—was nothing like leaving a continent behind while aiming for a few islands.

The City of Oakland had been considering construction of an airport as early as 1925, and the announcement of the Dole Derby prodded it into action. In just 21 days, Oakland built a 7,020-foot dirt-and-crushed-oyster-shell runway—the longest in the world at the time—and opened the Bay Farm Island airstrip to traffic. It soon became Oakland Municipal Airport (today Oakland International), but it was as Bay Farm Island that it served as the race’s starting point.

Dole Derby fatalities began before the race even started. Navy Lieutenants George Covell and R.S. Waggener died on August 10 when their Tremaine Hummingbird flew into a fogbank and hit a 400-foot-high coastal cliff at Point Loma, soon after takeoff on their way from San Diego to Oakland. The Covell/Waggener entry was Tremaine’s second (and last) design—a large, remarkably ugly, low-wing monoplane with the dihedral of a pool table. Sunk behind a graceless forward fuselage, its cockpit had only side windows and a periscope. One wonders if it would have collided with Point Loma regardless of fog.

One notable thing about the Tremaine was its name: Spirit of John Rodgers. In 1925 Navy pilot John Rodgers had commanded the very first airplane, a twin-engine Naval Aircraft Factory PN-9 biplane flying boat, to make it (in a fashion) from California to Hawaii. Rodgers and his crew ran out of fuel short of their destination and spent nine days yachting toward Hawaii with a sail made from fabric stripped from a wing. Thirsty, hungry and sunburned, they were finally sighted by a submarine and towed to Kauai.

Angel of Los Angeles was next to go. World War I Royal Flying Corps aviator Arthur Rogers died while parachuting from his Bryant M-1 monoplane while testing it near Los Angeles. It would have been one of the most unusual ships to contest the Derby, with a twin-boom tail and a push-pull twin-engine pod between the booms. 

Pride of Los Angeles was a twin-engine Catron & Fisk CF-10 triplane that landed short of the broad Bay Farm Island runway while arriving for the race start. The prominent Pride ended up half awash in San Francisco Bay, a particular embarrassment for one of its sponsors, cowboy movie star Hoot Gibson, whose name was writ large on the bright orange fuselage. The three-man crew swam ashore safely. The CF-10 had already earned its share of notoriety thanks to its substantial sandwich of wings, which earned it a derisive nickname, “the Incredible Stack o’ Wheats”—a reference to a popular breakfast meal, a pile of shredded wheat cakes. Gibson was not amused.

Things didn’t go much better once the race actually began. A Travel Air 5000 named Oklahoma, piloted by Bennett Griffin and navigated by Al Henley, had to turn back after a half hour due to mechanical problems. Norman Goddard and Kenneth Hawkins in the “Goddard Special” El Encanto crashed on takeoff. Pabco Pacific Flyer, the only Dole entrant to attempt the race solo, was flown by a former 103rd Aero Squadron pilot, Livingston Irving. His Breese-Wilde 5, designed specifically for the race, flew about a mile and a half before settling into a marsh, terminally overloaded. Irving walked away muddy but unhurt.

Dallas Spirit was flown by another World War I veteran, William “Lonestar Bill” Erwin, who had been credited with eight aerial victories as pilot of two-seater reconnaissance airplanes. His pregnant 20-year-old wife, Constance, was originally scheduled to be his navigator—she was skilled in astronavigation and radio use—but was disqualified for not meeting the age-21 criterion. She was replaced by Alvin Eichwaldt, a former Navy seaman. Dallas Spirit, a Swallow Dole Racer built specifically for the event, was forced to return to Oakland after experiencing engine trouble. 

The Lockheed Vega Golden Eagle, flown by Jack Frost with navigator Gordon Scott, was lost at sea, despite having a radio receiver, a variety of safety equipment and flotation gear, thanks to the sponsorship of William Randolph Hearst’s son George and his San Francisco Examiner newspaper. Some optimists said the Vega could float for a month; we’ll never know if it did.

Though Lindbergh shunned the Dole Derby, the race did have its pseudo-Earhart contestant—a 22-year-old fifth-grade teacher from Flint, Michigan, named Mildred Doran. She flew in the Derby as a passenger aboard a Buhl CA-5 Airsedan christened the Miss Doran.

The Buhl was a sesquiplane, a biplane with an atrophied lower wing of less than half the area of the upper wing. Its engine was a reliable nine-cylinder Wright J5 Whirlwind, and the ugly CA-5 had a cabin below and behind an enclosed cockpit. Airsedans would go on to collect an odd bag of distinctions: first airplane to fly a pope (Pius XII); first to make a nonstop round-trip crossing of the continental U.S., using a primitive form of air-to-air refueling; and holder of the record for regularly flying the shortest airline route in the world, across a river in Mexico (the one kilometer flight required two minutes flying time).

The press lost no time in finding Doran more appealing than the male pilots and navigators. She had begun her aviation dalliance under the mentorship of a flamboyant entrepreneur, Bill Malloska, who owned a string of gas stations called Lincoln Oil. Though not a pilot himself, Malloska built an airstrip just outside Flint as publicity for his stations, and Doran became a regular at the field. A flying circus from Nebraska set up shop at the Lincoln Oil runway as their Midwest base and gave $5 rides and put on weekend air shows replete with wing-walking and parachute jumps. Their airplanes all bore the Lincoln Oil logo, and in return they burned free fuel and oil provided by Malloska.

When Doran heard of the cash prizes that James Dole was offering, she urged Malloska to enter the Dole Derby for the publicity assured by making her a passenger. Malloska, ever the entrepreneur, couldn’t resist. He bought the Buhl and turned to two of his air-circus pilots, John August Pedlar and Eyir Sloniger, to decide who would race it to Hawaii. The two pilots flipped a coin to see who got the job and Auggy Pedlar won. He had less than the 200 hours required by the Dole Derby organizers—his function in the Lincoln Oil troupe had been more as wing-walker than pilot—while Sloniger, the putative loser, would go on to become chief pilot of American Airlines and get immortalized in Ernest K. Gann’s memoir Fate Is the Hunter. 

Pedlar took off confidently to start his and Mildred’s race, but Miss Doran’s engine started misfiring badly, so he returned to Oakland within minutes. Apparently even young Mildred realized this was the result of more than just an oiled sparkplug. Her fun flight to Hawaii had suddenly turned deadly serious. It took hours of work to fix the Whirlwind’s problems. By this time, Mildred Doran was an unhappy camper, and she re-embarked “looking ashen and in tears,” according to newspaper reporters. Even navigator Vilas Knope urged her to stay behind. But she was back aboard the Buhl when it took off again, the last of the Derby contestants, far behind everybody else. Doran, Pedlar and Knope were never seen again.

Once word arrived that neither the Golden Eagle nor Miss Doran had arrived in Hawaii, Erwin and Eichwaldt, though out of the race, managed to get the Dallas Spirit’s engine running smoothly and took off west to search for the two airplanes. The last thing heard from the Dallas Spirit was a truncated radio call that said the airplane was in a spin about 650 miles west of Oakland.

The race winner was a Travel Air 5000 named Woolaroc flown by Hollywood movie pilot Art Goebel. His navigator was William V. Davis Jr., a pilot himself who was skilled enough to become a member of the Navy’s first official flight demonstration team, the Three Seahawks. Davis went on to become the second Navy pilot to fly faster than sound, in the Douglas D-558-2 Skyrocket. 

Woolaroc was sponsored by Phillips Petroleum, a company that to this day is known for branding its gasoline, and its gas stations, as “Phillips 66.” Though the Phillips airplane’s name hints of aboriginal Australia, it was actually a construct that stood for woods, lakes and rocks, which company founder Frank Phillips felt characterized his ranch outside Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Woolaroc won the race by finishing three hours ahead of Aloha, the only other entrant to finish.

Aloha, another Breese-Wilde, was the sole Hawaiian entrant. The airplane had three 50-gallon wing and fuselage tanks and carried another 250 gallons loose in the cabin, in 50 five-gallon cans. Navigator Paul Schluter, a merchant marine captain, not only needed to navigate but also had to decant five gallons at a time into the fuselage tank. The airplane started the race thanks to the efforts of pilot Martin Jensen’s wife, who at the last minute had raised $15,000 to pay for the airplane. “God bless that darling wife of mine,” Jensen said. “I’ll make it or die in the attempt.” He and Schluter did make it—but they reached Honolulu with only four gallons of fuel remaining, after a variety of navigation problems en route.

One of Dole’s hopes had been that his Derby would engender air travel to Hawaii, and in 1935, Pan American Airways cautiously started service between San Francisco and Hawaii and onward to Manila, operating big four-engine Sikorsky and Martin flying boats. One of the young airline’s major concerns was whether memories of the Dole race would discourage potential passengers. In fact, two PAA directors quit the board rather than be associated with what they feared would become a debacle, since they felt the Dole affair had thoroughly poisoned the Pacific waters.

Though it never did slow airline traffic, the Dole Derby was one of the last major aviation stunts, flown before the pilot community realized that careful preparation, proven equipment and solid skills are more productive than greed, luck and brass balls.

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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As of late March 2023, the Dakota Territory Air Museum, in Minot, North Dakota, is preparing for the first flight of its impeccably restored Republic P-47D-23 Thunderbolt. It is encouraging to see any P-47 restoration, much less one as compulsively complete and airworthy as this one. The chubby fighter was recovered from Papua New Guinea, where it had been abandoned by the Army Air Forces in September 1944 as worn out and obsolescent. AirCorps Aviation of Bemidji, Minnesota, started the restoration in 2015. The tape-like stripes visible on the airframe in the photo above are the brushed-on evidence of acid wash in preparation for spot welding, a 1940s technique that AirCorps Aviation revived for authenticity. The restorers also reproduced the assembly-line workers’ hidden scribblings inside the structure—none of them important but all of them original. The airplane will eventually be repainted in a color scheme that is yet to be determined. 

When it’s done, this will be the only Republic-built Razorback that still flies. The earliest D models were Razorbacks, but later ones had bubble canopies. The bubble canopies offered better visibility, but the straight dorsal fairing—the “razorback”—behind the cockpit created less drag and provided more longitudinal stability. This would have made the Razorback a slightly better gun platform.

And the P-47 was an effective gun platform. In fact, you can make the case that the Pratt & Whitney propelled Thunderbolt was the most effective fighter, Allied or Axis, of World War II. It had eight guns, carried 65 percent more ammunition than its smaller Merlin-engined mates, and could lift more than a ton of bombs. The P-47N was faster and had a longer range than the North American P-51 Mustang. The Thunderbolt’s feats as a low-level fighter-bomber were never equaled, and at 30,000 feet, with its dishwasher-size turbocharger wailing, there simply was no other 2,000-boosted-horsepower single-engine fighter flying. The P-47 owned the sky.

Back then, there was an adage, “If you want to impress the girls back home, fly a Mustang. If you want to see them again, fly a P-47.” In the words of the warbird website Hush-Kit, “Its biggest asset was its survivability, which meant the most important weapon the Air Force had—its experienced pilots—were kept alive.” Every single P-47 ace survived the war, something that cannot be said of any other fighter, friendly or foreign. Now another P-47 will not only survive but remain flying.

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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The Boeing 247 was the end result of a battle between company management and its engineers. Unfortunately, the engineers lost. Although enshrined today as “the first modern airliner”—and it certainly looked the part—the 247 was actually too small and low-powered to make it as a money-making passenger carrier. It was the wrong airplane at the right time. 

That time was the early 1930s, when a series of events and innovations was transforming air transportation. Until then commercial aviation had been a cold, miserable, noisy, cramped, vibratory and often vomitous experience. Airline passengers flew aboard drafty biplanes, three-engine antiques with fixed landing gear and a shrubbery of struts and rigging. Operators offered no creature comforts, and passengers were little more than an afterthought, since carrying government-subsidized airmail paid the bills. According to Transcontinental and Western Air pilot Daniel W. Tomlinson IV, “Flying in the old Ford [Trimotors] was an ordeal…. The flight was deafening. The metal Ford shook so much that it was an uncomfortable experience. It surprised me that people would pay money to ride in the thing.”

At that time, the Boeing Aircraft Company had no experience designing passenger airplanes. It built biplane pursuits for both the Army and Navy, as well as two mail plane designs and a surprisingly modern bomber for the Army. Boeing’s first passenger airplane was the 1925 Model 40A, a single-engine, fixed-gear biplane with space for just two passengers in a pair of tiny, handsomely wood-trimmed, enclosed cabins, each with its own door, below and ahead of the pilot’s open cockpit. The original plan was that those cabins could be occupied by a riding mechanic and, if necessary, a deadheading pilot. 

Boeing built only one straight Model 40, since it was powered by an oily and obsolete Liberty V-12 engine. The company replaced it with the just-introduced 410-hp Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial. The Wasp was 200 pounds lighter than the World War I Liberty, which meant the new Model 40A could carry 200 pounds more mail. The slightly widened 40C could also accommodate four riders. 

The Model 40s all made extensive use of welded steel tubing for the fuselage structure, since Boeing had pioneered the precise fitting, beveling and electric arc-welding of thin-wall steel tubes. The company initially applied the technique to a 1923 Army contract for 22 de Havilland DH-4s, with welded steel tubing replacing the original spruce-framed fuselage. They were called DH-4Ms, the M standing for “modernized,” not “metal.” (Outmoded as they were, the DH-4Ms made at least a minor amount of history. In 1927, serving as Marine Corps Boeing O2B-1s, several carried out the first dive-bombing attacks ever flown by the U.S., against Nicaraguan rebels.)

Despite the discomfort, passenger demand soon outstripped the Model 40C’s four seats. Most of these airplanes were flying for Boeing Air Transport, which the company had formed in 1927 when it won the lucrative San Francisco-Chicago airmail route. Boeing also realized that it would be convenient to have a captive customer for its civil products. (After a variety of name changes, BAT became what we now know as United Airlines, which is still happy to fly Boeings.)

Boeing realized that it needed a bigger passenger carrier, so it introduced the Model 80, a not particularly attractive 12-passenger trimotor biplane soon lengthened to carry 18. The 80 was Boeing’s first real focus on passengers rather than mail. Boeing considered the airplane to be the Pullman of the skies—a luxurious railway coach with wings, though that was largely a PR fantasy. The 80A did have leather chairs for seats, a small amount of hot and cold running water in a tiny lavatory and a heated cabin. The 80A was also the airliner that finally convinced pilots they didn’t have to sit in open cockpits so they could feel the wind on their cheeks and keep the airplane trimmed and coordinated like human yaw strings. They also didn’t have to squint through rain and snow at the engine nacelles to read the pressure and temperature instruments. In the Boeing, those instruments were on the flight-deck panel.

The Model 80A also introduced to aviation what would quickly become an airline necessity: the flight attendant, then called a stewardess. Boeing Air Transport hired registered nurses to fly aboard its Model 80As, supposedly to cater to the possible medical needs of passengers. In fact, their presence was a goad to potential businessman passengers who still distrusted aviation. “Afraid to fly? Well, here’s a young lady braver than you.” 

Boeing had been lining its mail plane cargo compartments with an aluminum alloy called Duralumin to keep metal fittings on mailbags from tearing through the fuselage fabric. Duralumin was the first metal light enough to be carried aloft en masse by the engines of the time, and Boeing chief engineer Claire Egtvedt mused that perhaps an entire stressed-skin, semi-monocoque fuselage could be formed of Duralumin. (Jack Northrop had already figured that out with the Northrop Alpha, so Boeing bought Northrop’s company, Avion.) That was a challenge to Boeing’s conservative approach, as well as the industry’s. Until then, the Ford and Fokker technique was to use corrugation to provide structural strength for metal, but it turned out that the drag of the corrugations, even though they were in line with the assumed airflow, was greater than anticipated. Egtvedt called those airplanes “flying washboards” and he intuited that a rounded fuselage would create less drag than the boxy style of the time.

Egtvedt had moved on to Boeing’s executive ranks by the time the company’s pioneering Model 200/221 Monomail emerged under the stern gaze of engineer Charles “Monty” Monteith in 1930. (Monteith was so conservative he insisted that his staff draw up just-in-case alternative biplane configurations for every Boeing design, even the 247.) The Monomail was an all-metal, semi-monocoque, retractable-gear design with a neatly cowled radial engine. The Model 200 was a pure mail plane, the 221 a six-passenger transport soon to be stretched to accommodate eight. Both variants set new standards for low-drag aerodynamic efficiency—so much so that the Model 200/221 outflew its powerplant. With a prop pitched for a reasonable takeoff, the airplane cruised too fast to make use of that blade angle. The airplane needed a variable-pitch propeller, which hadn’t yet been developed.

Much of what made the Monomail special was carried over to an imaginative Boeing Army bomber contender, the YB-9. Though Boeing built only seven YB-9s—it was trumped by Martin’s faster and more modern B-10—the B-9 did have one new feature that became commonplace for multi-engine aircraft. Its engines were not carried in draggy, free-standing, strutted nacelles but were faired into the leading edges of the wing. This created better prop efficiency and smoother airflow over the wings.

On March 31, 1931, a pug-nosed TWA Fokker F-10 trimotor crashed outside Bazaar, Kansas, killing the much-admired Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne. The accident happened because the Fokker’s wooden wing spar had rotted and failed, moving the Department of Commerce essentially to ban trees for airliner construction. Both Boeing and Douglas Aircraft immediately embarked upon the design of all-metal airliners.

The Northrop Alpha, the Boeing Monomail and B-9, the Knute Rockne crash, the adoption of stressed-skin semi-monocoque construction, cantilever wings, retractable landing gear, drag reduction through streamlining…once all this came together, the time had come for Boeing to create the 247.

Initially, Boeing management wanted to build a new metal airliner the size of the 18-passenger Model 80A, but cautious Monty Monteith felt that building a fast airplane of that size would be “like flying a barn door in a Kansas windstorm.” He advocated for a smaller design. Those initial 247 proposals included a biplane trimotor and a high-wing monoplane twin before Boeing finalized the low-wing configuration.

By 1929, Boeing had acquired a number of aviation-industry companies, including Stearman, Chance Vought, Sikorsky, Pratt & Whitney and, in 1930, Jack Northrop’s Avion. It now called itself the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, so there were a number of cooks stirring the broth that became the Boeing 247. Two of the most knowledgeable chefs were Frederick Rentschler, founder and president of Pratt & Whitney, and his chief engineer, George Mead. (Mead designed many of P&W’s most powerful radials, including the ubiquitous R-2800.) But the pilots who flew for Boeing’s United Air Transport stuck their spoons in the design discussion as well.

Pratt had two engines that could power the 247: the 1,860-cubic-inch Hornet radial and the 1,340-cubic-inch Wasp. Using the Hornet would have resulted in a 16,000-pound airplane. To quote Henry Holden’s book The Boeing 247: the First Modern Commercial Airplane, “The pilots flatly refused to accept the Hornet engines, stating that a 16,000-pound airplane was too heavy and too powerful to land safely at some smaller airports.” Their demand for a 12,000-pound Wasp-powered airplane, which became the 247, was a fatal mistake. It meant the 247 would be an unprofitable 10-passenger transport at a time when 14 passengers was typical and Douglas’s DC-3 would have seats for 21. Even the Ford Trimotor held 11.

But a smaller airplane meant the two Wasps would produce a cruise speed of up to 165 mph, making the 247 briefly the fastest multi-engine airliner in the world. Cruise speed would go up to 180 mph with the 247D version, allowing United to advertise it as the “3-Mile-a-Minute Airliner.” The 247D had uprated 550-hp Wasp engines, two-blade variable-pitch props, a full set of deicing boots, efficient NACA engine cowls and other detail improvements, eventually increasing the 247’s top speed to 200 mph, cruise from 161 to 189, range from 485 miles to 750, service ceiling from 18,400 feet to 25,400 and single-engine ceiling from a paltry 2,000 feet to 11,500. (The 247 was the first twin-engine airplane able to fly on one engine.) There were other upgrades in radio and navigation gear, many of which would also find their way aboard earlier 247 models.

The D was the only 247 production variant. The 247B was to be a flying post office with a small staff of mail clerks doing in-flight mail sorting. The 247F was planned as a 12-passenger, Hornet-engine model. And the 247S would have had Besler steam engines, a possibility that Boeing briefly pursued because Beslers, though heavy, were near-instantly reversible, which would have permitted very short landings. (Only one Besler ever flew, in a Travel Air 2000. The engine put out about 150 hp but weighed a quarter of a ton.)

The first 247 took to the sky on February 8, 1933. By the time it stopped producing them later that year, Boeing had built only 75, and it reserved 60 of them for its in-house airline, Boeing Air Transport. The United Aircraft Corporation bought 10 and the rest went to Luft Hansa and a buyer in China. Trans World Airlines president Jack Frye wanted to buy 247s but was rebuffed, so he immediately turned to Douglas Aircraft, which happened to be prototyping what became the DC-1. TWA funded the program and became its launch customer. (Douglas built only one DC-1; TWA actually got DC-2s, and soon thereafter DC-3s.) The DC-3 would end up putting the little Boeing out to pasture in less than three years of mainline service. Douglas ended up manufacturing some 16,000 DC-3s and its C-47 military variant. Boeing never sold another 247. So if nothing else, the 247 can take some credit for the ascension of the DC-3.

In certain ways, though, the 247 indeed was the first modern airliner, despite its overall failings. One of its innovations was pneumatic deicing boots on the wing and tail leading edges, which had been invented by one Thorp Hiscock, William Boeing’s brother-in-law. Hiscock saw an iced-over flag shed its coating when the wind made it move, and he realized that if he could make the leading edge of a wing move by periodically pumping air through a rubber bladder, it too would shed ice. Monteith had resisted their installation, complaining that they added too much weight. He also feared (wrongly) that they would trap moisture and corrode the aluminum underneath them. The boots were initially fitted to the 247D, but were soon retrofitted to most earlier 247s, and Hiscock’s approach near-universally prevailed until turbojet airliners showed up with an abundance of hot air, some of which could be pumped through the leading edges of their wings, tails and engine nacelles to melt ice.

The 247 also had control-surface trim tabs that were movable in flight. Until then, trim tabs were adjustable only on the ground. United operated a 247 as a flying laboratory, and it exposed the need for conductive trailing-edge wicks to dispel the static electricity that had been interfering with radio communication in metal aircraft, so static wicks were another 247 innovation, as was a heated pitot tube.

Perhaps most important, the 247D had hydraulic controllable-pitch propellers, which had just been developed by the French company Ratier and licensed in the U. S. by Thomas Hamilton, founder of the Hamilton Standard propeller company. The all-important hydraulic mechanism had been developed by Ham Standard engineer Frank W. Caldwell. In practice, the 247D’s props had two positions: fine pitch for takeoff and climb, coarse pitch for cruise. Though Monteith inevitably thought the props were too heavy to adopt, they turned out to substantially improve the 247’s takeoff performance and cruise speed.

Boeing was so weight-conscious about the 247 that it even eliminated the simple cutoff switches that shut off the retraction motors when the landing gear reached the full-up position. This resulted in a slew of burnt-out motors when busy pilots forgot to monitor the gear-retraction process. Boeing had even planned to forego painting its 247s in order to save 50 pounds of Duco enamel. Instead, they anodized the Duralumin to give the airplane a distinctive gray-green mien. The anodizing process was uneven, however, producing a patchwork of differently shaded panels that made passengers worry they were boarding an airliner that had been repaired after an accident. United eventually painted its 247s battleship gray.

The 247’s characteristic visual feature was its backward-sloping windshield, a beetle-browed configuration that Boeing adopted from various Fokker airliners because conventional windscreens reflected the instrument lights back into the cockpit at night. Unfortunately, all that Boeing accomplished with the backward-slanting glass was to reflect ground lights at night, which was especially bothersome during landings. Boeing engineers finally solved the problem by inventing the glareshield. Virtually all 247s were then fitted with conventional windscreens, which turned out to have a bit less drag.

The 1934 MacRobertson International Air Race, from London to Melbourne, Australia, was intended to be the 247’s moment of glory. Race ace Roscoe Turner leased a 247D from United and entered the contest with Clyde Pangborn as his copilot. Turner filled the airplane’s cabin with eight “Turner tanks” of extra gasoline to cut down on refueling stops. Of the 20 other entrants, De Havilland entered several of its achingly beautiful pure racers, the twin-engine Comet, and KLM came to the starting line with a bone-stock Douglas DC-2 filled with three paying passengers riding its normal route to Australia, which included 14 en-route stops.

To nobody’s surprise, a de Havilland Comet was the ultimate winner. To everybody’s surprise, the KLM Douglas and its passengers finished second. The race-prepped Boeing 247D came in third— an awkward also-ran, just as it was in its airline life.

Fortunately for Boeing, the race had two categories: a flat-out, winner-take-all run and a second handicap category based on the entrant’s gross weight, horsepower, wing area, payload and other factors. United chose to enter its 247 in the handicap race, which gave it second place behind the DH Comet race plane, since the KLM DC-2 was entered in the unhandicapped category.

One smart PR move that Boeing and United did make was to underwrite a contest, sponsored by Popular Aviation magazine, to build flying models of the new 247. Some 4,500 sets of free plans were sent to young modelers, some of whom doubtless became future airline pilots. Boeing also cast small metal models of the 247 for employees to buy for $9.15 ($10.45 with working landing gear). Considering that it was the depth of the Great Depression and that those price tags were equivalent to over $200 today, we can safely assume they sat only on executive desks.

Boeing apologists often blame the 247’s failure as a viable airliner on the fact that its wing spar stretched across the cabin, creating a shin-banging obstacle for passengers. In fact, the wing’s main spar formed a low barrier between the passenger cabin and the flight deck, so its obtrusiveness would only have been apparent to the captain and first officer, who were paid to step over spars. The smaller secondary spar, which ran under the fourth row of passenger seats with a step to aid passage, would have been a minor inconvenience. Though perhaps not to the stewardesses who feared tripping on it while carrying a tray of coffee. But stewardesses didn’t doom airliner designs. A more likely theory? It’s a convenient myth.

United began phasing out its 247s in 1934, as TWA DC-2s stole much of its traffic. Many went to smaller airlines that served as feeders for United’s main routes. Some served in the U.S. Army Air Forces and the Royal Canadian Air Force as C-73 multi-engine trainers and transports. One went to the Royal Air Force for use as a radar and electronics testbed, and in January 1945, it established the final entry on the 247’s making-history page by flying the first ever fully automatic blind landing.

One of the last passenger-carrying 247s was the “Reno Champagne Cruiser,” a pink-painted party bus that for two years in the mid-1950s flew the 65 miles between Washington, D.C., and Colonial Beach, Virginia, typically carrying legislators and their girlfriends to the semi-legal casinos in the Virginia town. 

What a way to go.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Aviation History.

Not counting bombers, transports and more specialized types, the United States produced just over 100,000 fighter aircraft of 11 different types for use in World War II. Only 674 of them were Northrop P-61 Black Widows (with another 32 delivered after war’s end). Yet the brutish twin-engine night fighter has achieved a mythic status that belies its small production run and short career—just a single year of combat at the end of the conflict. 

Does the infamous Black Widow deserve such a reputation? Good question, and the answers will be all over the map depending on whether you consider the Black Widow “too cool” or subscribe to the “too slow, too low” school.

The British invented aerial night combat during World War I, when specially modified Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.2cs were first used to blunt the German Zeppelin night-bombing campaign. The spindly biplanes were fitted with fixed Lewis machine guns that fired upward at a 45-degree angle, so the airplane needed only to fly within range under the huge, notoriously flammable airships and blaze away. The Luftwaffe borrowed that idea for the venomously efficient Junkers Ju-88G and several other night fighters during the next war, calling it Schräge Musik (jazz music). The various Ju-88 marks had more European theater night victories than did all Allied night fighters combined.

The U.S., however, initially had no use for night fighters. The Army Air Corps was confident Americans were safe from attack night and day between two impossibly wide oceans, and offensive doctrine was built around daylight bombing. Unlike the RAF, the U.S. had no need to desperately search the night skies for intruders over its capital city or, later, escort its own bombers in the dark.

The 1940 Battles of France and Britain, and the London Blitz, showed that this new war was going to be different, and lessons learned by Fairey Battles, Bolton-Paul Defiants, Spitfires and Hurricanes were shared by RAF airmen with their American counter-parts. With London still in flames and Heinkels muttering overhead nightly, the British approached Jack Northrop, with whom they already were doing business (Northrop was license-building Vultee Vengeance dive bombers for the RAF), about designing and building a night fighter capable of using a new device called radar.

Within a month, the British informed the U.S. War Department of their newest developments—the cavity magnetron and centimeter-wave radar—and American military planners decided they needed a night fighter to utilize these devices. Earlier, less-sophisticated radar broadcast and received signals that could be measured in meters, which meant that antenna components had to be separated and spread piecemeal all around an airframe—on the nose, wings and fuselage. It was what gave German night fighters, especially, their characteristic appearance, flying around with bedsprings, stag’s horns and clown mustaches on their noses. Some of these drag-inducing antenna farms slowed their carriers by as much as 25 mph. 

Centimeter-wave radar was lighter—albeit still heavy—and far more compact, utilizing a parabolic antenna small enough in diameter to be carried in what would become a P-61’s Jimmy Durante nose. Housing a radar dish right up front required relocation of any nose-mounted guns, of course, which was a good thing: They could be slung under the belly, in a pod or fairing like the P-61’s, virtually eliminating night vision–destroying muzzle flash. Any night-fighter pilot firing wing-or nose-mounted guns got one shot at a target and then spent the next five or 10 minutes groping around like an old man with a white cane.

In October 1940, the Air Corps, aware of Northrop’s work for the British, asked the company to design a dedicated night fighter. Jack Northrop quickly submitted the initial proposal for a heavily armed, twin-engine, twin-boom, tricycle-gear, three-man aircraft that his engineers had been drawing up for the British, and in January 1941 a contract for two prototype XP-61s was awarded to the small California company.

The P-61’s SCR-720 radar became its stock in trade. It was sometimes troublesome, sometimes unreliable, sometimes couldn’t be repaired due to lack of replacement parts, but it was an effective unit that allowed the Black Widow to become the world’s very first purpose-built night fighter. After all, if a night fighter can’t find its prey, what does it matter how fast, powerful or well-armed it is?

Unfortunately, the P-61 wasn’t particularly fast, and it turned out that did matter. All the P-61A and -B Black Widows that saw combat had supercharged but unturbocharged Pratt & Whitney R-2800 engines. When the airplane was designed, the thinking was that a night fighter would loiter at altitude and await its prey for a ground-controlled intercept, but that’s not always how it worked in practice. Night fighters had to be able to climb hard and climb high, and then stern-chase fast to overhaul a bogey. The Black Widow didn’t have a particularly good rate of climb—only 500 feet per minute at 20,000 feet, which is roughly the climb rate of a small, single-engine lightplane—and it rapidly ran out of grunt at 20K as the superchargers reached their limit. (Admittedly, there were also concerns about the reliability and throttle response of early R-2800 turbos.) At war-emergency power, a P-61 could accelerate to about 370 mph; for such power output, it had a 24-gallon water tank good for perhaps 15 minutes of water injection. 

The biggest knock against the Black Widow is that it simply wasn’t fast enough to do the job for which it was designed, an opinion held by a number of influential colonels and generals. Colonel Winston Kranz, director of USAAF night-fighter training, said: “The P-61 was not a superior night fighter. It was not a poor night fighter, it was a good night fighter, but it did not have enough speed.” In July 1944, just as the first P-61s were arriving in the ETO, Lt. Gen. Carl Spaatz insisted upon the “great night-fighter flyoff,” between a Black Widow and a de Havilland Mosquito NF Mk. XVII. The Mosquito was an early version of what, as the NF Mk. XXX, would become by far the best Allied night fighter of the war, and Spaatz wondered if maybe the USAAF should be flying them in place of the ponderous Northrop.

Controversial ever since, the contest saw the P-61 apparently handily outfly the British wooden wonder. Longtime National Air and Space Museum researcher and aviation historian Dana Bell is convinced that “the results were rigged to give the American crews more faith in the P-61s they were about to take into combat.” Bell points out that the American P-61 crew was stoked, competitively selected and up for a fight, while the RAF pilot wasn’t even aware that it was a contest; that the P-61’s engines had been tweaked and tuned by Pratt & Whitney factory representatives, while the Mosquito, a 1942-vintage machine with single-stage Merlins, had simply been taken off an operational flight line; and that the tests were never flown at altitudes higher than 20,000 feet, the level of the P-61’s maximum efficiency.

“The final report was never shown to one of the two American evaluators,” Bell reveals. “Forty years later, he still thought the Mosquito had won and was surprised to see a report recommending the P-61—a report onto which his signature had been forged.”

Ultimately, the British had no interest in winning the flyoff. A clean victory would only have meant they’d have been required to hand over too many of their priceless Mk. XXX Mosquitos to their ally. And the Americans loved their Northrop behemoth in spite of it all. One ETO night-fighter squadron was scheduled to revert to Douglas P-70s—the night-fighter version of the elderly A-20—but the squadron’s pilots reportedly threatened to hand in their wings if that happened.

In the Pacific, the P-61s suffered an embarrassment, however, when Far East Air Force Lt. Gen. George Kenney found their performance so lacking during the Battle of Leyte Gulf that he requisitioned a squadron of radar-equipped Marine Grumman F6F-5Ns to replace them. The Black Widows were sent to a backwater island airstrip.

It was also in the Philippines that one of the strangest yet most productive uses of a P-61 occurred. On January 30, 1945, the  Japanese prison camp at Cabanatuan was to be attacked by Army Rangers and Filipino irregulars, for the U.S. knew that the Japanese were within hours of executing their contingent of American and British prisoners as MacArthur’s troops advanced. As part of the raid, a Black Widow was scheduled to do a low-altitude flyover of the prison to distract the guards while the raiders crept as close as possible to the camp fencing. The P-61 pilot did orbits while shoving the mixtures to full rich to pump out black exhaust smoke, and flipping mag switches to produce backfires. The Japanese guards were totally distracted by what they figured was about to be a fiery crash into the jungle, and the Cabanatuan raid overwhelmed them.

Among the Cabanatuan prisoners were Brits left behind at the fall of Singapore, in the earliest days of the Pacific War. When they saw the unearthly black shape of the P-61 close overhead, some of them became convinced that the Germans had won the war, for they felt that nobody but the Luftwaffe could have fielded such a malevolent machine.

In late October 1944, the U.S. Navy hosted a “joint fighter conference” at its new Patuxent River test center in Maryland, with aircraft from not only the Navy but also the Army, the RAF and the RCAF, all of them to be flown and assessed by active-duty pilots from all four air arms. A P-61 was one of the airplanes evaluated, and among the 11 U.S. fighter types represented, it did not fare well. (Much of the information that follows is from Francis H. Dean’s outstanding book America’s Hundred Thousand: U.S. Production Fighters of World War Two, which should be part of every serious aviation enthusiast’s library.)

Of course the P-61 was by far the heaviest of all U.S. WWII fighters—more than twice as heavy, at a baseline gross weight of 31,100 pounds, as a P-47. Even with a double helping of 2,000-hp R-2800 engines, this gave it the highest power loading of all fighters as well, which was not helped by its highest-in-category flat-plate drag area. The double-cockpit crew nacelle, with a second windscreen for the gunner seated behind and above the pilot, was a draggy arrangement. General Hap Arnold, upon first viewing a fully equipped P-61 parked on a flight line, turned to procurement chief Maj. Gen. Oliver Echols and asked, “Who is responsible for this assortment of built-in headwinds?” He had a point. The result was a speed deficit, which had from the outset been the P-61’s bad rap. A Black Widow cruised at roughly 225 mph—B-25 performance—and could summon about 365 mph flat out at 20,000 to 24,000 feet.

The P-61 was heavy for a reason: It needed to carry a crew of three (sometimes reduced to two—pilot and radar/radio operator—when no gunner was needed), four heavy cannons and ammunition, sometimes a four-gun top turret, adequate fuel and a huge number of heavy vacuum-tube radio and radar boxes. A casual count shows at least two dozen, some the size of orange crates, scattered throughout the crew nacelle. 

The best available radio gear was needed because P-61s were often ground-controlled during the initial stage of intercepts. A controller using ground radar would vector the Black Widow toward a bogey until the airplane’s own radar, which had a range of between five and 16 miles depending on atmospheric conditions, picked up the target. The P-61’s radar operator would then take over guidance, with the pilot soon able to pick up the blip on a tiny panel-mounted display. (Most pilots didn’t bother, instead allowing the RO to continue with verbal vectors.) The final stage of such a pursuit required the pilot to swing into place a pair of hands-free night-vision binoculars to make a visual ID of the target and confirm that it was a bandit and not a friendly.

This was not a trivial pursuit. P-61s in the ETO shot down several Allied aircraft, including at least one Mosquito and an A-20. Official records show that no Black Widow was ever shot down by an enemy fighter, though some claim an Fw-190 downed one.

A P-61 also required a relatively long runway for takeoff at such weights, but it lifted off at a gentle 100-110 mph indicated. And Vmc—the minimum speed at which the airplane could be controlled if one engine failed—was only 120 mph, or 140 mph when heavily loaded. This meant that the dangerous window between liftoff and single-engine controllability was brief. (While climbing out within that window, a pilot’s only choice if an engine failed was to close the throttle on the good engine and land—or more likely crash—straight ahead.)

There have been published reports of the Black Widow’s “remarkable short-field capability,” perhaps in some cases an assumption based on its nearly full-span slotted flaps. But if short takeoffs were achieved, they must have been done with lightly loaded examples or using nonstandard techniques that would considerably extend the time needed to achieve Vmc, for the Pax River conference placed the P-61’s ground roll 19th among 20 different fighter variants tested, exceeded in distance only by a heavily loaded P-47D.

Most of a Black Widow’s handling qualities seemed to be excellent, other than the need for extreme yoke deflection to achieve roll effectiveness at slower speeds, which made flying in turbulence challenging. Stalls were benign and straight ahead, pilots all agreed, and it was surprisingly maneuverable for an airplane with heavy engines and tail booms well outboard of the centerline. Still, one pilot at the 1944 fighter conference adjudged the P-61 to be “cumbersome as a night fighter, hopeless as a day fighter.” Its most surprising talent was the ability to turn very tightly, especially at slow speeds. The Black Widow gobbled up Corsairs and handily out-turned the vaunted P-51 Mustang. Unfortunately, this was a quality of little use to a night fighter, which typically attacked in straight and level flight from dead astern. 

But rolling into that turn was another matter. A P-61 could roll at 50 degrees per second at 330 mph, with lesser roll rates at slower speeds, meaning it took a Black Widow more than seven seconds to do a full aileron roll. A P-51 could do almost twice that laterally.

Actually, a Black Widow had almost no ailerons. For roll control, P-61s had 10-foot-long panels that rose out of the upper surface of each wing, near the trailing edge. These “spoiled” the lift to drop a wing when the airplane’s schoolbus-size control yoke was deflected in its direction. There were very small “ailerons” near the tip of each wing, but they had no effect on roll rate; their purpose was to provide aerodynamic feedback to the pilot, since the spoilers couldn’t be felt through the yoke.

Why spoilers? So that nearly the entire trailing edge could be devoted to flaps, which not only lowered landing speed but helped the Black Widow to decelerate rapidly once it had overhauled its quarry and was approaching from dead astern to a position to fire its guns. A 15-ton airplane is hard to slow. Imagine driving a car and taking your foot off the accelerator with the transmission in neutral—freewheeling. Deceleration is almost imperceptible. So a night fighter needs to be able to quickly drop very effective flaps (or some other aerodynamic device) or it will sail past its target. Wartime P-61s had no dedicated speed brakes other than their flaps.

The XP-61 prototype had an unusual form of flaps called Zap flaps, after inventor Edward Zaparka, an engineer who worked on the P-61. (He had, however, patented the flaps before joining Northrop.) Zap flaps were unslotted split flaps that moved aft as they dropped from under the upper surface of the wing, thus lengthening the apparent chord line of the wing and increasing lift while simultaneously providing drag. The manufacturing tolerances necessary for them to trundle smoothly along their tracks proved un-attainable, however, so all Black Widows built after the first proto-type had conventional single-slotted flaps.

Another design hangup was buffeting caused by disturbed airflow over the horizontal stabilizer and elevator whenever the P-61’s top turret was traversed. The four .50-caliber barrels poking into the slipstream when they pointed anywhere but straight ahead were in a direct line with the horizontal tail, and their effect was strongly felt. That problem was never satisfactorily solved, so the top turrets were either deleted or locked in a straight-ahead position.

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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Well over half of all P-61s were delivered to their squadrons without top turrets. This allowed the gunner to stay on the ground, since now the upper guns and the belly-pod cannons could be fired by the pilot. Some Black Widow units field-modified their airplanes to seat the radar operator in the gunner’s chair right behind the pilot, which must have been more pleasant than working from the lonely aft compartment, often facing backward like a kid in an old station wagon’s way-back, sealed off from the rest of the crew.

Not that a P-61 cockpit was a particularly friendly space. Most pilots at the Pax River fighter conference rated it as “cluttered,” “badly designed” and “too complex,” with “lousy visibility” to boot, despite all the glass area. Much of what was behind the pilot was obscured by the gunner and his station, and the latticework of green—-house structure didn’t help. The multifaceted canopy also led to glare and reflection problems during night attacks. Of all U.S. fighter types, only the P-38L Lightning was voted to have a worse cockpit that the Black Widow. Perhaps fighters with steering-wheel yokes rather than joysticks bore an automatic deficit in fighter-jock minds.

Some warbird enthusiasts have assumed that it was remarkable for a twin-engine airplane as large as the P-61 to have a single pilot, but in fact two-man crews were a particularly American obsession. Virtually all British and German twins, and even the four-engine Avro Lancaster, had single-pilot cockpits. Even if there were two men up front, as in the Lancaster and the Mosquito, only the one on the left had flight controls.

The ultimate P-61, the 430-mph C model, never made it into combat. Taking into account the basic failings of the P-61A and B—unspectacular climb and speed, and limited range—the P-61C was fitted with turbosupercharged R-2800s, the top turret was permanently deleted and a big fuel tank was installed in the now-available space in the center of the crew nacelle. Internal fuel capacity went from 646 gallons to 1,158, with new underwing hard points available to carry yet another 1,248 gallons max, at gross weight making the P-61C a 20-ton fighter. (A loaded P-47D typically weighed 7 tons.) The C also had “fighter brakes”—large perforated panels that rotated out of the wing upper and lower surfaces to rapidly slow the airplane.

But it was too late. The Black Widow’s web was about to be broomed away by several new night-fighter jets, first among them Northrop’s own F-89 Scorpion, plus the Lockheed F-94 Starfire. (The P-61’s immediate and direct replacement, just in time for the Korean War, was the North American F-82 Twin Mustang.) The Black Widow airframe’s final form was the F-15 Reporter, a small batch of bubble-canopied reconnaissance versions with a name as nerdy as the P-61’s was arrogant. If “Black Widow” was the war’s most aggressive nom de guerre, “Reporter” was its blandest.

Some of the P-61’s most valuable work was done after WWII. A number were assigned to weather reconnaissance duty, and they compiled invaluable meteorological data in those pre-satellite days. Thirteen P-61Cs and F-15s flew as part of the Weather Bureau/NACA Thunderstorm Project, from 1946 through 1949, providing a foundation for a real understanding of how thunderstorms are generated, what tremendous powers lie within them and how radar can be used to avoid the worst weather . 

A P-61B flew as part of the development of the first U.S. ejection seat, and a brave AAF volunteer was successfully ejected from it in April 1946. NACA (predecessor of NASA) used two P-61Cs to drop-test drones to collect valuable data on sweptwing flight.

No P-61s flew in the Korean War. The last operational Black Widow in the Pacific left Japan in May 1950, bound for the boneyard a month before the North Korean invasion of South Korea, but photomapping of the Korean Peninsula by P-61s during the late 1940s proved invaluable.

Despite its brief wartime service and low shoot-down count (a total of 127 enemy airplanes, 18 V-1 buzz bombs and one B-29 flying on autopilot after the surviving crew had bailed out over Iwo Jima), it can’t be said that the P-61 was a failure. Black Widow air combat victories were necessarily one at a time, the result of lengthy solo pursuits rather than swirling 60-second dogfights. 

The P-61 was in fact a remarkable response to the mission set for it, but that mission had already changed before it got into combat. Northrop, a small manufacturer that rose to meet a challenge, did an amazing job of building a sophisticated, new-technology airplane that had no precedent. They didn’t adapt an earlier design to become a night fighter or base the P-61 on anything that already existed. They started with a clean sheet of paper and invented the first all-weather, day/night interceptor. In that sense it was the beginning of today’s anytime/anywhere/24-hour U.S. Air Force.

 It was the start of something else big, too. Oddball specialty airframer Northrop Aircraft, once small enough that it could be given the night-fighter assignment without disturbing the work of such long-gone industry giants as Republic and North American, is today, as the Northrop Grumman Corporation, the fifth largest defense contractor in the world.  

For further reading, contributing editor Stephan Wilkinson suggests: Northrop P-61 Black Widow: The Complete History and Combat Record, by Garry R. Pape; Northrop’s Night Hunter P-61 Black Widow, by Jeff Koln; and Queen of the Midnight Skies: The Story of America’s Air Force Night Fighters, by Garry R. Pape and Ronald C. Harrison.

You probably use one of William P. Lear’s inventions every day. No, not a Learjet—unless you’re richer than we reckon—but the practical, affordable, compact car radio. 

It all started with Bill Lear’s prototype of an AM radio receiver small enough to fit into a 1920s automobile, which ultimately led to the development of a mega-billion-dollar corporation called Motorola. Lear, as was his wont, moved on to more challenging problems while Motorola was still a garage-size shop, and he continued through a lifetime of peaks and valleys to increase his patent tally—127 of them, some for major inventions, some for pointless trifles—by the time he died in 1978.

Bill Lear is popularly assumed to have been the designer of the Learjet, but he could no more have designed an airplane than an itinerant aviation writer could knock out a lightweight autopilot. (Such an autopilot was one of Lear’s greatest achievements.) Lear simply decided that the world needed a small, light and comparatively inexpensive business jet, and he hired good engineers to do the heavy lifting. The resulting Learjet became popular shorthand for any business aircraft. “Saying Learjet is like saying Kleenex even if the business aircraft on the ramp, like the tissue paper on the counter, is a different brand,” wrote Walter Boyne and Philip Handleman in The 25 Most Influential Aircraft of All Time. Owning a Learjet also became a winged symbol of success. Frank Sinatra bought one and enjoyed loaning it to his famous friends; golfer Arnold Palmer had one; Carly Simon mentioned the Learjet in her hit song “You’re So Vain.”

But Lear’s forte was electronics, not airplane design. It was once said that the great Lockheed aerodynamicist Kelly Johnson could “see” air, and perhaps Lear could see electricity. He designed lightweight avionics for general aviation, and he was the first to make light planes true traveling machines, able to fly long distances through bad weather and good, with navigation radios to help pilots find their way. Until Bill Lear came along, only airliners and some military aircraft carried radios.

Lear may not have been an aeronautical engineer, but he was many other things: an entrepreneur and visionary, a salesman who could sell a stereo to a deaf Inuit, a serial philanderer, charmer and best friend of everyone he met, particularly the journalists who watered at his trough. His formal education ended after eighth grade, but as one engineer friend said, “Bill didn’t have the limitations of an education. He didn’t know what couldn’t be done.”

George C. Larson, editor emeritus of Air & Space/Smithsonian magazine, was one journalist who covered Lear. “Bill’s overwhelming talent was that he knew how to charm people,” says Larson. “He never met a stranger. He was totally gregarious and always assumed that you loved him. And it stood him in good stead in front of the press, though one of his problems was that sometimes he believed his own press.”

Lear also had a colorful personal life. He was never classically handsome and became increasingly pudgy as he aged, but he often had lots of money and always had lots of charisma. Both attracted women. He never lacked for mistresses. His fourth wife, Moya, once made him a needlepoint adorned with the names of 13 of his girlfriends—not a complete list, just the ones she knew about. The marriage worked well because Moya’s rule was that her husband could have all the lovers he wanted as long as he didn’t talk about them.

Moya was the daughter of vaudeville comedian John “Ole” Olsen, of the duo Olsen and Johnson. It has long been assumed that Bill Lear was the wit who named one of his daughters Shanda, thus condemning her to a life of being introduced as Shanda Lear, but the name was in fact grandpa Ole’s idea.

It couldn’t have been easy to be one of Lear’s children (and he had seven). Lear’s son John once crashed a Bücker Jungmann biplane while he was showing off with aerobatics above his Swiss prep school. Bill had to pay for the airplane. He never forgave John and left him $1 in his will, “which, incidentally, I never got,” John Lear recalls. John once asked his father for airfare to fly John’s girlfriend from Geneva to Los Angeles. In his excellent biography Stormy Genius, Richard Rashke reports that Bill said that if he paid for her trip, he and not John would be the one to sleep with her.

William Powell Lear was born on June 26, 1902, in Hannibal, Missouri, and later moved to Chicago with his mother after she divorced. He developed a love for airplanes, even though his first flight, when he was 17, ended in a minor crash. His second ride was to be aboard a Goodyear blimp, but he was bumped by a photographer at the last minute. The blimp crashed and the cameraman died.

Lear was undeterred. Following a stint in the Navy, he learned how to fly while working at a Chicago airport. After selling his interest in Motorola, in 1931 he bought a fast Monocoupe, which he flew from Chicago to Miami, trying to follow the crude Department of Commerce radio beacon system. He ran into bad weather and was fortunate to survive. Chastened, Lear called a friend to pick him up and hired a pilot to fly the Monocoupe back to Chicago. (Lear once said that if you try to fly through no-visibility weather without knowing how, “You’ll be instrument flying for the rest of your life…about a minute and a half.”) Lear immediately began working on a light, practical radio direction finder that could home in on commercial broadcast stations. He marketed it as the Learoscope but couldn’t afford a patent attorney, so his development went unprotected from competitors such as Bendix. But Lear undoubtedly contributed more to the development of the radio direction finder than any other inventor.

Above all, Lear loved a challenge. He left the mundanities of producing and marketing his inventions to others while he chased new opportunities. The greatest of these, in his mind, was the development of an airplane, and he ultimately left behind the gadgets, as he called them, to pursue that dream.

In the early 1950s the U.S. Air Force lent Lear an elderly Lockheed Lodestar transport to use for testing an autopilot and approach coupler for automated instrument landings that Lear was developing for military aircraft. Lear called the airplane the Green Weeniebut liked it enough to purchase it for pennies on the dollar. He did some drag-reduction work on the airframe and created a posh executive interior, ending up with one of the nicest corporate airplanes of the time. He sold the Green Weenie for $200,000 and bought two more surplus Lodestars for $70,000. Lear gave them the same executive facelift and realized he had the makings of an airframe business. 

At the time, however, Lear’s company had a board of directors, and those directors were interested in making money, not airplanes. They told their CEO to drop the Lodestar project. Instead, Lear went behind their backs and formed the Lear Aircraft Engineering Division. Little did the directors know that Bill was also privately buying run-out Lodestars and then reselling them to his own airplane subsidiary at a handsome profit.

Lear was not an airplane designer, and he knew it. He hired some of the best-known aeronautical engineers in the business—Gordon Israel, Ed Swearingen and Benny Howard—to turn the Lodestar into the Learstar via a redesigned wing and other modifications. With a cruise speed of 300 mph and a range of 3,800 miles, the Learstar briefly was the fastest and longest-range twin-engine piston airplane in the world. Finally, Bill had found his true calling—building airplanes.

In 1955, Bill and Moya moved to Switzerland. He intended to set up a European subsidiary to sell his products internationally, but he had also bought into the legend that Swiss engineers were superb. Perhaps they could help him build his next airplane, whatever it might be. His relocation was probably hastened by the fact that his board of directors had learned about the Aircraft Engineering Division and were planning to shut it down. It didn’t help that the Learstar was losing money, a fact that Lear never admitted publicly. Nor did Lear’s general aviation compact avionics ever make much of a dent in a market dominated by Narco, Collins, Bendix and King. 

In Switzerland Lear became intrigued by a new Swiss fighter-bomber, the Flug-und Fahrzeugwerke Altenrhein AG (FFA) P-16, that was intended to replace the Swiss Air Force’s aging British de Havilland Vampire first-generation jets. The P-16, however, never made it past the prototype stage. Four were built, and two ended up at the bottom of Lake Constance when their test pilots ejected after experiencing systems failures. The Swiss press began referring to the P-16 as “the Swiss Submarine,” but Lear liked its thin, fast, multi-spar, low-aspect-ratio wing.

So, Bill hired the P-16’s chief engineer, Hans Studer, to design a small business jet for the company Lear had already established in Switzerland and called the Swiss American Aviation Corporation—SAAC. He named his new airplane the SAAC-23.

There has been a long-running battle between those who claim the resulting Lear 23 was directly derived from the FFA P-16 and those who insist that the Learjet was an entirely new design with just a few features inspired by the Swiss jet. As recently as 2007, Lear’s son William P. Lear Jr. was moved to rebut an article in Aviation International News that ran “complete with references to the well-worn tale of the Swiss fighter connection.” Lear Jr., a former Air Force and Air National Guard fighter pilot, had flown the P-16 to evaluate it at FFA’s request, and claims that he was the source of his father’s interest in the design.

His rebuttal is not entirely convincing, for his five main points contain three clangers. First, Lear Jr. said the Lear 23 and the P-16 had “similar but not the same” airfoils. In fact, the first Learjet did utilize the P-16’s airfoil, although its leading edge was modified after a test pilot found that it had some squirrely handling and stall characteristics.

 “The P-16 wing sweep was zero, while the Learjet’s was 13 degrees,” said Lear Jr. Not true; both aircraft had identical 13-degree leading-edge sweeps and straight trailing edges.

He also said, “The P-16 had a cruciform tail and the Learjet a T tail.” True of the prototype and production airplanes, but the scale model of the first Lear 23 proposal, as designed by Gordon Israel, had a cruciform tail like the P-16’s. It was changed to a T tail when the airplane turned out to be faster than expected and needed a horizontal stabilizer well out of the wing’s turbulent wake. (Lear famously called the revised design “the best-looking piece of tail I ever saw.”)

Whatever the case, engineer Israel, responsible for much of the Learjet’s design, did draft an entirely new internal structure for the wing, though he retained the Swiss multiple-spar concept. Both airplanes also included the distinctive wingtip fuel tanks. 

Israel became involved after Lear summarily snatched SAAC out of Switzerland, renamed it Learjet Inc. and moved it to Wichita, Kansas, in 1962. As his son Bill Jr. recalls, “We bailed out of Switzerland [because] labor was half the price, but it took four times as long to get anything done.” Swiss engineers and technicians turned out to be better suited to creating wristwatches than airplanes. Israel was eventually fired, and the Model 23 design was completed by former Cessna engineer Henry Waring, who had been responsible for the Cessna T-37 Air Force primary trainer known as the Tweet, as well as the handsome Cessna 310 light twin.

True to his all-or-nothing character, Lear took a major gamble with the Learjet 23. He didn’t build a prototype, a hand-built unit that could be tested for flaws and modified as necessary, with the changes then carried to the production line. Instead, he built his very first airplane using production tooling and jigs, and changing any of them would have been very expensive. (The wing’s leading edge was reprofiled, but that was a simple sheet metal modification.) “With this approach,” he said, “you’re either very right or very wrong.”

The first Learjet made its initial flight on October 7, 1963. On June 4, 1964, the FAA pilot flying it during certification testing forgot to retract the landing spoilers during a touch-and-go takeoff and the airplane ended up on its belly in a cornfield. There was little damage, but a fuel line broke and started a fire that reduced the airplane to cinders. “We just sold our first Learjet,” Bill said as he pocketed the insurance check. The FAA was embarrassed enough by the crash that it smoothed the path to certification as much as possible, and Lear had his jet approved that July 31, less than two months after the accident. Even more important, it received certification four months ahead of Lear’s biggest competition, the Aero Commander 1121 Jet Commander. The Lear 23 project cost Bill the equivalent of $112 million in today’s dollars. Never before had a single individual conceived, driven, produced and financed an aviation project of such magnitude. (During the certification process, Lear got a ride in a Lincoln Continental that had been outfitted with a Muntz Autostereo four-track tape deck. Never one to miss an opportunity, he immediately became a Muntz distributor, and within a year Lear had invented the first eight-track stereo deck, after being told it couldn’t be done.)

Soon after the Model 23 and a couple of follow-on versions flew, Lear became bored and sold his company to the Gates Rubber Company. (The resulting Gates Learjet Corporation compressed the original Lear Jet name into one word.) Lear moved on to other projects. None would ever achieve success in his hands. 

His agreement with Gates forbade him from designing or building aircraft for five years, so Lear decided to solve the world’s air pollution problem by designing a steam-powered automobile. However, Lear’s grasp of automotive technology was mired in the 1940s. He considered research to be a trip to Harrah’s Las Vegas vintage-car museum and seemed to believe that all atmospheric contamination was caused by vehicles. “I want to be the man who eradicated air pollution,” he said. He intended the car’s engine, a steam turbine, to be powered by a closed-cycle superheated liquid he called Learium. (Lear named virtually everything he invented after himself.) The liquid was supposed to be denser than water so it would hold more heat, but Lear finally was forced to use plain distilled water.
He continued to call it Learium, though everybody knew it was a joke; he privately referred to it as Delearium.

The steam-car project failed miserably, appearing very briefly in prototype form as a clunky and impractical steam-powered bus, but Lear shouldered the blame. He reportedly said that if he had only read a physics textbook, he would have known that it would never work.

The aging entrepreneur still had a couple of airplanes up his sleeve, though by the time the first one flew, it bore virtually none of his DNA. He called it the Learstar 600, repurposing the name he’d used for his modified Lodestar. It was to be a spacious twinjet with a fast, efficient, supercritical wing and newly developed turbofan engines but it never advanced beyond a very preliminary paper concept limned by an outside consultant. By 1975, Lear had spent most of his fortune and couldn’t afford to do any more than dream about Learstar jets, but he managed to sell the dream to the Canadian company Canadair, which figured that it was buying not so much an airplane as Lear’s name.

Canadair inflated the already-rotund fuselage to mini-airliner size—the company called it a walk-around cabin and Lear referred to it as “Fat Albert”—and renamed the airplane the Challenger 600. Challengers are being built to this day, in three different sizes, as is a line of regional airliners based on the stretched Challenger and called CRJs. Canadair sidelined Bill Lear in 1977 and he had no involvement with either line of airplanes.

Bill Lear’s last airplane, the Lear Fan 2100, hadn’t flown by the time he died. Only three were built, and none were sold. They were manufactured almost entirely under the direction of Moya Lear and were riddled with structural and powerplant problems.

Yet it could have been one of the most important airplanes of its time, for the Lear Fan was made entirely of composites—carbon-reinforced plastics. Hard lessons learned during the prototyping of the Lear Fan are today reflected in a wide variety of composite-crafted aircraft from fighters to airliners.

The Lear Fan was also a pusher, with its propeller at the tail end of the fuselage. That configuration allows an airplane’s fuselage, and some of its wing, to fly through undisturbed air, thus decreasing drag and increasing airspeed, range and efficiency. The Lear Fan’s single prop was driven by two turboshaft engines, through a troublesome gearbox that sought to combine their power.

The FAA had never certificated an all-composite aircraft, and some people involved with the Lear Fan project claim that the government’s demands for increased structural strength were two and three times greater—and heavier—than necessary. Throughout the process, the Lear Fan’s weight grew and performance shrank. The Lear Fan never came close to its initial performance predictions, the FAA ultimately refused to certify it and the Irish company formed to build it declared bankruptcy.

By then Bill Lear was gone, having died of leukemia in May 1978 at the age of 75. He may not have designed the business jet that bore his name, but he had certainly made an impact on aviation. Lear’s oft-stated mantra was, “Don’t nibble at a problem, take a big bite of it,” and he lived by those words. He did his best work well before people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk made rogue entrepreneurship part of the mainstream, but they would have understood.  

Stephan Wilkinson is Aviation History’s contributing editor. For further reading he recommends Stormy Genius: The Rags to Riches Life of Bill Lear by Richard Rashke; They Said It Couldn’t Be Done: The Incredible Story of Bill Lear by Victor Boesen; and Fly Fast…Sin Boldly: Flying, Spying and Surviving by William P. Lear Jr.

The Last Learjet

On March 28, 2022, Bombardier Aerospace, which had purchased the Learjet Corporation in 1990, delivered the last Learjet, a model 75. “There’s no doubt that today is an emotional day for many of us as it marks the end of the production era of Learjet,” said Bombardier’s vice president for Learjet operations, Tonya Sudduth. Since the first Learjet 23 flew in 1963, more than 3,000 airplanes with the name Learjet had been produced; around 2,000 are still flying. The line had gone through many changes and upgrades over its nearly six decades. Winglets replaced the original wingtip fuel tanks, fuselages became stretched and engines received upgrades. With the introduction of the Learjet 45 in 1998, Bombardier essentially parted ways with the original jet and began producing a wholly new airplane—but kept the iconic name. Bombardier announced plans to introduce an all-composite Learjet 85 but cancelled the project in 2015, making the Model 75 the end of the line. We will see no more airplanes bearing the name Learjet, but Bill Lear’s vision will remain the symbol of luxury private air travel for many.

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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At half past noon on July 21, 1948, a Boeing B-29 descended onto the surface of Lake Mead, the Nevada reservoir behind Hoover Dam. In a gentle descent at just above its 220-mph cruise speed, the Superfortress skipped once for about 200 yards, hit again, tore off three of its four engines, and began its slow descent to the lake bottom. The five-man crew boarded two life rafts and was soon rescued, the sole injury a crewman’s broken arm.

The Air Force sanitized the crash by concluding that it was caused by an improperly set altimeter, but since this took place in daylight over a lake surrounded by desert bluffs, the pilot was obviously flat-hatting, just another airman trying to set the absolute record for the lowest flight ever.

These days, Lake Mead is emptying as the American Southwest undergoes an extended drought. The retreating waters have revealed cars, boats and even bodies entombed in oil drums, and eventually the B-29 will also surface. As of this writing, it rests under 60 feet of water and is expected to emerge in about a year, if the drought continues.

What then? The National Park Service is the wreck’s official custodian and it will have to guard it from looters. It’s doubtful that any private warbird salvor/restorer will offer to take on the project. The NPS has nominated the site as a National Historic Landmark, and if that is approved, the Lake Mead B-29 will become untouchable.

Outspoken underwater-recovery expert Taras Lyssenko, who has exhumed World War II Navy aircraft from Lake Michigan, is dismayed. “If a historic aircraft is allowed to stay in a water environment, it will deteriorate and crumble to nothing,” he told Aviation History. “The people who manage national parks are the wrong people to manage this project if they can’t understand that. That aircraft should be recovered and stabilized and put on public display. I wish our government cared more about its history, but they don’t seem to, and I don’t know if there’s anybody else out there who does.” 

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The spy satellite photos created panic in the Pentagon. They showed an enormous Soviet airplane, probably an interceptor, with engine intakes the size of small cars. The wings were huge, too, hinting at maneuverability far beyond anything America’s first-rank McDonnell F-4 Phantom II could achieve.

These were prototypes of what would become the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 Foxbat. After the airplane appeared in public for the first time in July 1967 and went on a record-setting spree, it appeared the Soviets had a wonder weapon that could match the best in the West — the Mach 3.2 Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird spyplane. The lightened MiG-25 prototypes, designated YE-155R (reconnaissance) and YE-155P (interceptor), set 29 speed, altitude and time-to-climb records, some of which still stand. For pure speed, they notched 1,852 mph. They could climb to 98,425 feet in four minutes and 3.86 seconds and ultimately reached an absolute altitude record of 123,520 feet.

In truth, the MiG-25 turned out to be a Potemkin Village of an airplane. The same kind of surveillance failure behind the so-called “missile gap” that John F. Kennedy exploited during the 1960 presidential campaign was also responsible for “Foxbat hysteria.” The Foxbat interceptor did achieve its mission in one way, though. It kept the SR-71 out of Soviet airspace for several years while the West pondered the big MiG’s true capabilities. And big it was. The Foxbat was the size of a World War II heavy bomber — 9 feet longer than an Avro Lancaster, two and a half feet taller than a Consolidated B-24 and with a gross weight almost 27,000 pounds heavier than a Boeing B-17. Photographs of MiG-25s looming over its swarms of technicians and ground crews suggested that the airplane was maintained by toddlers.

Unobtainium

The Soviets were short on titanium technology, however, and titanium is a key ingredient of high-speed flight. The heat generated by skin friction at supersonic speeds softens and weakens aluminum, making titanium the best answer for flying extremely fast. But titanium is expensive and difficult to machine and shape. In the 1960s, the Russians lacked the cutting tools and the experience to work with the exotic metal.

Instead of titanium, the Soviets turned to stainless steel, even though steel weighs three times as much as the correspondingly strong aluminum. Fueled but without any ordnance, a steel MiG-25 weighed 64,000 pounds. A composites-and-titanium Lockheed-Martin F-35A, the Air Force’s heaviest fighter, grosses just under 50,000 pounds.

Aft of the cockpit, the Foxbat’s entire fuselage consisted of a single welded-steel fuel tank. (In the MiG-25R reconnaissance version, fuel was also carried inside the two big vertical tails.) Soviet aerospace workers had little experience with steel and hand-welding, though, and the Foxbat revealed that. Workmanship was crude enough that some Western observers thought they saw rough repair patches when they were actually looking at factory-fresh skinning. “Those repairs looked like a country tinker had gone to work patching up a pot,” said one British engineer, but they weren’t “repairs” at all.

The SR-71’s strength was that it could expose much of the strategic deception the Soviets had spent decades creating, to keep the West thinking they were more powerful than the facts warranted. They wanted to keep the Blackbird from revealing there was no Soviet Wizard behind the Iron Curtain. They were also worried about the potential of Strategic Air Command’s supreme Cold War bombers — the Convair B-58 Hustler and the under-development North American B-70 Valkyrie — and the MiG-25 had been created specifically to target them at altitude. Launch, climb, shoot, come home. Virtually all of it, including missile launch, was under ground control, as was the USSR’s wont. Soviet pilots were paid to take off and take orders.

But almost as soon as the Foxbat went operational, the U.S. revised its battle plan. A new generation of surface-to-air missiles made unbidden entry into Soviet airspace a fool’s errand. Any bomber heading toward Moscow high, wide and handsome was dead meat. SAC decided it needed to arrive low, fast and stealthy. It retired the B-58 Hustler and canceled the B-70.

Plane Without a Purpose

That made the Foxbat a machine without a mission. The airplane had powerful pulse doppler radar, weighing over half a ton and full of delicate vacuum tubes, yet that radar had a range of barely 56 miles. One pilot noted that it would kill a rabbit at 300 yards, if the unlucky bunny got in the way while a MiG-25 was taxiing — but the radar was designed to search up into an open sky and burn through any bomber’s jamming tech from below. Countering a Northrop Grumman B-2 Stealth Bomber jinking through valleys and riverbeds demanded look-down/shoot-down radar that the Foxbat didn’t have. In fact, the Soviets wouldn’t develop look-down/shoot-down radar until the 1980s, and the Foxbat’s radar was blind below 500 meters (1,650 feet) above the ground.

The West learned this because of a man named Viktor Belenko. A 29-year-old Foxbat pilot, Belenko was crushed by a wife who was divorcing him and a Communist society that left him yearning for the West’s full supermarket shelves, so on September 6, 1976, he peeled off from his unit’s training sortie and headed for Japan — not a long flight, since he was based in Vladivostok. He failed to find the Japanese military airbase he’d selected as his destination and instead landed at the civil airport at Hakodate, where he overran the 6,000-foot runway and shut down with only 30 seconds of fuel remaining.

Belenko had delivered to the West its misunderstood bogeyman, a nearly new Foxbat. He even brought along a copy of the airplane’s training manual. Had the U.S. been allowed to place an export order at the MiG factory, they couldn’t have spec’d out a better Foxbat to buy.

For some reason, no Western pilot ever flew Belenko’s Foxbat. Perhaps the Japanese forbade it — it was temporarily their airplane, after all — or cooler heads sensed the political consequences. But Japanese and American technicians did spend two months completely disassembling the airplane. The tear-down revealed that the braggart was a toothless phony, too heavy to be maneuverable at low altitudes, limited in what it could accomplish up high, and with little range and no midair refueling capability. When later compared to the U.S. teen-series fighters, the F-15, -16 and -18, it was powerless, particularly because the Foxbat had a max-G rating of 4.5, and just 2.2 with full fuel. Excess Gs would rip its half-ton air-to-air missiles from their underwing hardpoints, since the airplane was intended to go fast but in a straight line. The Foxbat was a one-trick pony, and nobody was betting on that horse anymore.

The Soviets gave the MiG-25 a service ceiling of 89,000 feet but it actually could sustain an altitude of slightly less than 79,000 feet for two minutes, while carrying just two of its four missiles. (Foxbats had no guns.) Belenko admitted during his debriefing that the max altitude for a fully loaded Foxbat was 68,900 feet. Swedish radar frequently tracked MiG-25s trying to intercept SR-71s over the Baltic Sea, but the Soviets never got closer than 10,000 feet below the Lockheeds and quickly fell astern. After their initial caution, SR-71 pilots no longer considered the Foxbat a threat.

UnSophisticated Engine

The MiG-25 was built around its engines, but the big Tumansky R-15 wasn’t up to the job. It was an unsophisticated single-shaft design that had lousy fuel specifics during transonic, non-afterburning flight, but thanks to its three-ring afterburner fuel nozzles, the engine was surprisingly efficient in sustained supersonic flight. (If you use twice as much fuel with the burners lit but go three times as fast, that’s a net gain.) At speed, the engine functioned as a ramjet. Much of the intake air circumvented the low-pressure compressor section and fed the enormous afterburner.

A jet engine can swallow only so much air. At Mach 2.0+, it’s drinking from a firehose. The intake air must be restricted. Lockheed accomplished that on the SR-71 with a movable cone in each engine’s intake. The faster the airplane went, the farther inward the cones moved to choke off the excessive inflow. MiG tried doing that with movable ramps on the Foxbat, but they apparently were ineffective at the airplane’s highest speeds. The influx of air demanded so much fuel flow that the engines turned into out-of-control blast furnaces.

But the R-15 was the best engine that Soviet metallurgy could create at the time. Engines intended for Mach 3+ flight needed exotic metallurgy just as much as did the airframe they powered, and it turned out that the Foxbat’s two supersized engines began to come apart at speeds over Mach 2.83, which was the airplane’s “operational top speed.” Any attempt to actually take them up to the MiG-25’s mythical top speed, Mach 3.2, literally blew them apart, sucking the cores straight out the tailpipe. Foxbats cruised at Mach 2.35 using partial afterburner and advancing the power levers any more had to be done with caution.

Toothless Weapons

The interceptor version’s only armament was four massive AA-6 missiles, the radar-guided versions more than 20 feet long, a foot in diameter and weighing just over half a ton, including the huge 220-pound warhead. The AA-6, code-named Acrid by the West, was the largest air-to-air missile ever produced, and it was designed specifically to shoot down B-70 bombers, airplanes that existed as only two prototypes before being canceled. The AA-6 came in two versions, one guided by the launching airplane’s own radar and the other homing in on its target’s infrared heat signature. Foxbats carried a mix of both kinds and a kill shot was intended to be a salvo of two AA-6s; first a heat-seeking missile and then the radar-guided version, to avoid the possibility of the heat-seeker homing on the radar missile’s exhaust. 

The Acrid had a limited range of between 30 and 50 miles, and its speed coasted down to Mach 2.2 after the solid-fuel rocket motor burned out. It had virtually no chance of catching an SR-71 from behind and a beak-to-beak attack would have meant that, with a closing speed of Mach 6, an AA-6’s guidance system had no time to lock onto a Blackbird from beyond a maximum of just 50 miles out. (No Soviet aircraft ever fired an AA-6 in combat, but an Iraqi MiG-25 downed Lt. Cdr. Scott Speicher’s F/A-18 with an Acrid during the first night of the 1991 Persian Gulf war.)

The U.S. set out to develop a new generation of air-to-air missiles specifically to counter the MiG-25. They were radar-guided Mach 3.5 rockets with a range of more than 90 miles, to be called AIM-97 Seekbats, but the program was discontinued in 1976 when Viktor Belenko revealed the Foxbat to be a paper tiger.

Returning the Foxbat to Russia

After 67 days of study, Belenko’s Foxbat was shipped back to the Soviet Union in pieces. The Russians claimed some parts were missing and billed the Japanese $20 million for them. The Japanese more civilly counterclaimed $40,000 for shipping fees and runway repairs at Hakodate. No money ever changed hands, and Belenko, after two months of debriefing, became an American citizen, married a music teacher from North Dakota, fathered a son and found work as an aero engineering consultant to the USAF and various manufacturers. He never bothered to finalize his Russian divorce.

Fortunately for the Russians, the Foxbat had originally been envisioned as a superfast, superhigh, unarmed reconnaissance platform, which would turn out to be the airplane’s forte when its failings as an interceptor became apparent. The MiG-25 was designer Mikhail Gurevich’s swan song, though he retired before the project was fully formed. But it was thanks to him that recon became an important part of the plan. (Serious consideration was also given to developing a bizjet version of the Foxbat, with a plush six-seat cabin and a conventional cockpit replacing the military fuselage forward of the air inlets. It would have been solely for Soviet elites, not the Western market, but the Soviet Union’s immensity and the MiG’s limited range made the project a nonstarter. Moscow to Vladivostok would have been an embarrassing two-stop trip, and the Russians would have been better off buying Gulfstreams.)

Viktor Belenko’s defection had removed the Foxbat from top-dollar super plane status, but that made it affordable enough that tinpot dictators from Libya, Syria, Algeria and Iraq were delighted to buy the world’s fastest fighter, if only for bragging rights. 

It was in the Mideast and northern Africa, not the Soviet Union, that the MiG-25 made its bones. The airplane was far more effective at reconnaissance than as a fighter, for F-14 Tomcats and F-15 Eagles in the employ of U.S. forces and client nations such as Israel dined on Foxbat interceptors pretty much at will.

Foxbat as Diplomatic Gift

The MiG-25 was introduced to foreign affairs in 1971, when the Soviets sent a package of four Foxbats — two fighters and two recon aircraft plus seven top pilots and a retinue of ground-support personnel — to Egypt as a response to Israeli penetrations, one of which had culminated in an attack on a generator station that blacked out all of Cairo. The Soviets retained total control of the Egyptian unit, and their Foxbats would suddenly launch from the Cairo West Egyptian air base at will, ignoring air-traffic controllers. The Foxbats cruised through Israeli airspace untouched and they provided Egypt with priceless intelligence.

The first Foxbats to see actual combat were operated by Syria, which had bought two dozen MiG-25 interceptors and recon platforms. The debut did not go well. An Israeli F-15 downed a Syrian MiG-25 over Lebanon in February 1981 and repeated the feat in July — the first times Foxbats had fallen to enemy fire. (Syria may still have one or two Foxbats, though nothing that remains flyable.)

In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, and Syria’s MiG-25s began flying recon over Beirut. They were untouchable, since the lightened MiG-25R was lighter and faster than the -25P. The IAF set up a complex ambush mission, however, and netted its third Foxbat kill.

During the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq operated Foxbats and claimed to have shot down some 15 Iranian aircraft, but it was a list that included several C-130 Hercules, a Fokker F-27 and a Gulfstream III. Iraq’s leading Foxbat ace, Mohammed Rayyan, claimed 10 victories before he was himself shot down by Iranian F-14s in 1986. Iran claimed to have downed nine recon MiG-15Rs and one MiG-15P interceptor, though Iraq insists that it lost only three Foxbats. A clue to the reliability of Rayyan’s claims: some reports suggest that he never actually existed but was a bogus propaganda myth invented to boost morale.

Foxbats in Desert Storm

The Iraqi Air Force was particularly noted for having tried to protect its Foxbats from the invading Americans during Desert Storm by burying them in the Arabian Desert sand. U.S. forces found one of them, minus its wings, and it is now under restoration at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. It is the only Foxbat in the United States. (The museum is looking for a set of wings, if you happen to have any.)

India also bought six MiG-25RBK reconnaissance versions, plus two trainers, for surveillance of its mountainous borders with Pakistan and China. Flying high and fast, the Indian Foxbats were still only 30,000 feet above the highest Himalayan ground, so their photo intel was particularly crisp, revealing details of Chinese and Pakistani trenches, redoubts and other defensive structures. The excellent aviation blog Hush-Kit published an interview with Indian Air Marshal Sumit Mukerji, who had commanded a Foxbat reconnaissance unit. His words reveal some of the MiG-25’s strengths and weaknesses.

“A 20-ton aircraft that carries 20 tons of fuel, flies in the stratosphere and cruises at Mach 2.5 in minimum after-burner with ease … it was an awesome airplane,” Mukerji said. He explained that the remarkably accurate first-generation inertial navigation system automated much of the Foxbat’s operation. “The MiG-25 would execute the complete mission, photography included, and return to base, descending to a height of 50 meters, when the pilot needed to take control and flare for the landing. All the pilot was required to do through the entire mission was manipulate the throttles.

“Sure, you can call it an archaic, unsophisticated machine, but there was no ‘sophisticated’ aircraft to match its performance or shoot it down,” said Mukerji, who had apparently never met an F-15. “With a navigation accuracy of a maximum of 10 kilometers off track over a 1,000-kilometer run, with a lateral photo swath of 90 kilometers … targets were never missed.”

Twenty tons of fuel, however, was barely adequate. “We operated on the fringe …. We always returned for landing with 200 to 400 kg of fuel remaining, [and] 200 to 250 kg was required to execute one circuit and landing. The runway had to be kept clear — no other flying permitted for fear of runway blockage — once the MiG commenced its descent.

“The Foxbat was a bullock cart, we would joke. She was heavy but responsive. There was a lot of inertia, requiring anticipation [on the controls]. The aircraft would wallow on approach, if pilot anticipation and control inputs were not timely. The greatest joy was to be able to throw a fighter around in the sky with abandon, which you missed when you flew the MiG-25. We missed the G [forces].”

How the FoxBat Led to the F-15

However, the Foxbat did the United States one big favor. The Air Force was in the midst of a competition to create the next-generation air-superiority fighter, initially tagged the F-X. The F-X program was driven in large part by dismaying losses to fast, maneuverable and simple Soviet MiG-21 day-fighters over Vietnam. Fear of the MiG-25 set the bar substantially higher, however, and engineers at McDonnell Douglas ramped up their efforts to design what became the F-15 Eagle.

Thanks to the Foxbat, the airplane intended to outfly it became the most successful air superiority fighter ever fielded. So far, F-15s have notched 104 shoot-downs without losing a dogfight. Without the phony threat of the Foxbat, that might never have happened.

Despite all its faults, the Foxbat had one feature that made it popular with the Russians who maintained it — an unusual and not particularly effective air-conditioning system that relied upon the evaporation of a mixture of distilled water and 240 liters of near-pure grain alcohol. MiG-25s often returned from missions with a small portion of the brew still in its tank, but the airborne vodka quickly disappeared into mechanics’ canteens. It also helped that the small bowsers used to refill the system had convenient spigots to tap the keg. No wonder the Foxbat was often referred to as the Flying Restaurant. Na zdorovye!   

Contributing editor Stephan Wilkinson suggests for further reading “MiGs” by Bill Sweetman, “MiG Pilot: The Final Escape of Lt. Belenko” by John Barron and “Foxbat Tales: The MiG-25 in Combat” by Mike Guardia.

A Model MiG

Almost as soon as Soviet air force pilot Viktor Belenko touched down at Hakodate, Japan, in September 1976, intelligence personnel from Japan and the U.S. began to pore over his “mysterious” MiG-25P fighter. Some say that engineers from the Hasegawa Corporation, a well-known Japanese model company, were included in that group.

Clearly, Hasegawa’s model makers took full advantage of firsthand observations and photographs of Belenko’s Foxbat. According to rumors, company representatives were present while the jet was being disassembled for transport back to the Soviet Union. With accurate dimensions and details of the jet, Hasegawa gained a scoop in the world of plastic modeling. In the model’s instruction sheet the company even boasted about how it went from zero to manufacturing complete kits in only 100 days. 

The result became headline news in the modeling world. The box art even duplicated a news photo of Belenko’s jet on the ground in Japan, partially covered with a tarp. Hasegawa had produced the first accurate kit of the MiG-25 Foxbat, one that quickly appeared on workbenches all over the world. A simple, straightforward kit by today’s standards, the Hasegawa Foxbat is still in production.  — Guy Aceto

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Mike Fithian approached his re-creation of a 1912 Etrich Taube with compulsive workmanship and attention to detail. That’s because he wanted to build a faithful representation of the airplane his grandfather had flown in World War I.

He succeeded.

Robert Eyb was a pilot in the tiny Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Air Service during the run-up to World War I. When his maternal grandson sought a building venture, Fithian recalled a photograph he had seen of Grandpa Eyb and his airplane.

The original Taube was not designed as a warbird, for it first flew in 1910. When it did go to war, it achieved notoriety as the world’s first bomber, after an Italian Army Taube in 1911 dropped several grapefruit-size grenades on Bedouin troops in Libya who were allied with Turkey during the brief Italo-Turkish War. (See “The Father of Aerial Bombardment,” May 2022.) Just days earlier, on October 23, Captain Mario Piazza reconnoitered the enemy for about an hour in a French Blériot XI, making that history’s first heavier-than-air “warbird.”

Since Taube is German for “dove,” many assume that the airplane’s bird-like planform indicates the designer’s inspiration. In fact, the wings are patterned after the seeds of the Javan cucumber tree, which burst from pods high in the trees and propagate after gliding for long distances. Austrian engineer Ignaz Etrich applied the principal to his primitive, wing-warping design.

Some think of this airplane as a Rumpler Taube, because another Austrian, Edmund Rumpler, made some minor changes to the design—such as replacing the castering four-wheel crosswind landing gear with a pair of conventional wheels—and named the result after himself. Easygoing Etrich didn’t bother to defend his patent; before long, his unlicensed design was being cranked out by 14 different companies, including Rumpler’s.

Fithian’s Taube is currently based at Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome, the famous upstate New York vintage-airplanes site, where it will occasionally take to the air on gentle-weather days for the amazement of summer-weekend visitors.

This article appeared in the Autumn 2022 issue of Aviation History. Click here to subscribe.

Generations of Blue Angels and Thunderbirds owe their ability to stroll airshow ramps in smart, sexy flight suits to a wealthy, irascible Australian World War I pilot named Sidney Cotton. For Sid Cotton invented the flight suit in 1917. He named it the Sidcot, and it soon became standard for British Royal Flying Corps and Naval Air Service pilots. It’s said that “Red Baron” Manfred von Richthofen was wearing a Sidcot when he was shot down, though there’s no word on whether he bought it or copped it from a Brit victim.

Cotton’s flight suit was quite different than the modern-day military pilot’s tight jumpers, but it was a considerable advance over the standard aviator’s garb of the day, which was simply whatever overcoat or leather jacket was at hand, thrown over one’s uniform. Cotton designed a warm, single-piece coverall lined with fur under a layer of silk. It had pockets on the thighs for maps and papers, and eventually lots more pockets, lots more zippers. If you wanted people to know you were a pilot, you wore a Sidcot.

But Cotton’s real contribution to military aviation was that he also developed modern aerial photoreconnaissance, although the Royal Air Force couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. Cotton was outspoken, had little regard for rank, and was rich and smart—everything a military officer loathed. 

During the 1920s and ’30s, Cotton speculated in stocks and real estate, made headlines by air-rescuing a team of explorers stranded on the Greenland ice sheet and flew missions following migrating seals for Newfoundland fisheries. He also got involved in aerial photomapping in Newfoundland and learned of a new color film called Dufaycolor, marketed to the motion-picture industry by a British company. Cotton became a Dufaycolor sales manager and flew throughout Europe pitching the film.

In 1938 Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service became aware that businessman Cotton was flying daily over German sites the RAF wished it could visit. So Cotton quietly joined the SIS and got the agency to buy a Lockheed 12A Electra Junior—big enough to carry several cameras but ordinary enough to not attract attention. Starting in February 1939, Cotton flew “business trips” over France’s Maginot Line and nearby German positions.

French military intelligence controlled the flights and supplied the cameras. Flying with French cameras over the hither-and-yon patterns the French specified resulted in poor photos. Cotton came up with new flight paths and installed better RAF cameras, one pointing down and two shooting obliquely, but the French nixed the idea. Cotton quit the project, saying, “If worthwhile results were to be obtained, I must have my own aircraft and operate in my own way.”

Sid went back to Germany with his Electra, again posing as a Dufaycolor salesman. During the last weeks before the war began, he shot thousands of photos of everything from the Siegfried Line to the German fleet at Wilhelmshaven. He cut it close: His Electra was the last civilian aircraft to leave Germany before the Wehrmacht invaded Poland.

Cotton fabricated two simple innovations that benefitted aerial photography. He ducted hot air from an engine exhaust muff to warm the camera lenses, keeping them free of condensation. And he created cockpit side windows with big blisters, so the pilot no longer had to bank to identify what he needed to photograph directly below. 

Cotton’s real contribution, however, was a total rethink of aerial photography methodology. When he returned to England, the RAF was using Bristol Blenheims and Westland Lysanders for photo flights, the theory being that one wanted to get reasonably close to the area being photographed—10,000 feet was optimal—and to fly over it slowly enough that the film could capture high-resolution images. The Lysanders were at least maneuverable enough to get away from Messerschmitts, but the outmoded Blenheims suffered dreadful losses.

To the dismay of many entrenched RAF officers, Cotton formed what came to be known as Sid Cotton’s Air Force. Sid flew photorecon using the fastest aircraft available at the time—gunless Supermarine Spitfires lightened to fly at 30,000 feet, where they would survive on speed. But the RAF said the details in his images were too small to be of any help to photo interpreters. 

Cotton consulted a friend from his Newfoundland photomapping days, Harold Hemming, who had formed the Aircraft Operating Company, a pioneer in photomapping for oil- and mineral-prospecting operations during the 1930s. AOC had a stereoscopic photo-viewing system—a multi-ton Swiss machine called a stereo plotter—that extracted considerably greater detail from Cotton’s six-mile-high photos. It became the heart of the process called photogrammetry, which allowed photo interpreters to see details down to the size of barbed wire fortifications.

In May 1940, a Spitfire from Cotton’s unit photographed from 30,000 feet 400 German tanks parked under trees and other camouflage, preparing to break west through the Ardennes forest. The RAF ignored the warning signs. The Germans invaded the Low Countries and France only days later with those very same tanks.

Cotton’s little squadron—four Spitfires and the faithful Electra—was originally based at a civilian airfield, Heston, and was considered to be an experimental unit free of the RAF’s formal structure. It was called Heston Flight and Cotton was given the acting rank of wing commander. 

During the first four months of the war, the RAF had photographed 2,500 square miles of Europe at the cost of 40 airplanes, many of them Blenheims. Heston Flight’s high-altitude Spitfires had surveyed 5,000 square miles without a single loss. Cotton’s air force briefly operated from France, but the speed of the German advance sent Heston Flight fleeing back to England. When he landed back at Heston in the Electra, Cotton was informed that his unit was now a full-blown part of the RAF and his services were no longer required.

In his excellent book Spies in the Sky, Taylor Downing wrote that “Cotton laid the foundations for…photo reconnaissance and photo interpretation. This was a huge achievement. But he was absolutely not the right person to lead a military unit in war. The eccentricities that enabled him to rattle the cage of the RAF during the phony war were the very characteristics that made him unsuitable to command….The Air Ministry had been absolutely right to dump him after the Battle of France.”  

This feature originally appeared in the March 2022 issue of Aviation History. Don’t miss an issue, subscribe!

In 1943 it took just 143 days for Lockheed designer Clarence“Kelly” Johnson and his elite team of 128 Skunk Works engineers and fabricators to create the P-80 Shooting Star. But had it not been for the British, all they would have displayed on rollout day was the world’s fastest glider. It would have had no engine. The United States had so thoroughly forsworn jet engine development that it lagged behind even Italy, to say nothing of Germany and Britain.

It was not for lack of trying. In the late 1930s, Lockheed had started work on an axial-flow turbojet called the L-1000. It was designed by Nathan Price, a creative Lockheed engineer who, not surprisingly, would go on to contribute heavily (and anonymously) to the P-80 design. Price had already invented a cabin-pressure regulator for the Boeing 307 that made airliner pressurization practical, and he was credited with making the Lockheed P-38’s turbocharging system a success.

British designer Frank Whittle had invented the jet engine (in parallel with the German Hans von Ohain), and by the time the P-80 was envisioned, the only Allied turbojets in limited production were the Whittle W.1 and de Havilland’s Halford H-1, a cleaned-up version of the W.1. In the fall of 1940, in the midst of the Battle of Britain, the British sent to the U.S. all of its jet engine, radar and proximity-fuze research, as part of the Tizard Mission, named for British radar pioneer Henry Tizard. The ostensible purpose was to persuade the neutral U.S. to turn its production capability toward manufacturing this emerging technology. But an unspoken motivation was that after Dunkirk the British feared they might well lose the war and if that happened they wanted the U.S. to inherit their weapons technology.

In April 1941, General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold learned of the Whittle-powered Gloster E.28/39 prototype, the first Allied jet to fly, during a secret tour of the British aircraft industry. He was stunned, though he was already aware of the German jet genesis. That September, a U.S. Army Air Corps officer with a briefcase of Whittle W.1 blueprints handcuffed to his wrist flew from England to Lynn, Mass., where the General Electric Com­pany, already well-versed in turbine technology through its turbochargers, set to work building what would ultimately be called the J33 turbojet engine. In its early form, two of them would power America’s very first jet, the Bell XP-59.

Lockheed had been lobbying hard for the contract to build that airplane. After all, the company had already created, at least on paper, the earliest American jet fighter, to be powered by the L-1000 engine. Lockheed’s L-133, again designed largely by Nathan Price, was an exotic blended-wing/body canard with slotted flaps and low-drag twin engines mounted inside the fuselage.

Yet the War Department told Lockheed to lay off pursuing jet technology any further and to put its effort into building and improving the P-38 Lightning. The company could play with jets after the war. But in the spring of 1943 U.S. intelligence revealed that Messerschmitt was preparing an airplane that would become the only jet to see air-to-air combat during World War II: the Me-262. (The Gloster Meteor did shoot down V-1 buzz bombs but never a manned aircraft.) The U.S. needed a fighter with another 100 mph of airspeed—and quickly.

So why did Bell initially get the nod to come up with a jet? Some say it was because of the company’s reputation for creating outside-the-box designs such as the twin-engine pusher YFM-1 Airacuda and the tri-gear, mid-engine P-39 Airacobra (with the company’s pioneering helicopter work yet to come). Others suggest that Bell was less encumbered than other airframers with work building critical fighters, bombers and transports.

The P-59 was a why-bother design, even though it was in a sense a proof-of-concept project never seriously intended to be a fighter. It turned out to be 50 mph slower than the P-40 and 75 mph slower than early P-47s and P-51s. That didn’t stop Bell chief test pilot Jack Woolams from frequently working his favorite prank: pulling alongside cruising P-38s and the like with his propless mystery plane while wearing a gorilla mask and a derby, smoking a cigar.

When the need for an Me-262 beater became obvious, Bell was ordered to supply all of its P-59 documentation to Lockheed, especially the work done in preparation for the XP-59B. Not to be confused with the production P-59B, the XP-59B was intended to be a much-improved single-engine version of the P-59. To this day there are Bell fans who insist the P-80 was just a cleaned-up version of the XP-59B, a claim that one suspects would have had Kelly Johnson doing lomcováks in his grave.

The very first XP-80 prototype, informally called Lulu Belle, was powered by a de Havilland Goblin engine provided by the British. In fact, the Brits gave Lockheed two Goblins, both originally intended for the de Havilland Spider Crab, which would become the Vampire. They were at the time Britain’s only functioning Goblins. Lockheed needed the second Goblin because it had ignored de Havilland’s warning that the intake ducts had to be strongly built due to a powerful low-pressure area inside each duct. During a ground run, Lockheed’s too-thin ductwork imploded, sending debris through the engine and ruining it.

Lulu Belle had been built under a used circus tent ringed by a bunch of battered wooden pallets. Lockheed was busy with production programs ranging from Army Air Forces fighters to Navy patrol bombers, and it had no room to spare for an off-brand experimental program. The tent quickly came to be called the Skunk Works, and since it was far from all other Lockheed buildings, Johnson could operate it under his own rules.

The XP-80 first flew in January 1944, from Muroc Army Airfield. Within five minutes, test pilot Milo Burcham was back on the ground, spooked by the sensitivity of the controls. “You’ve got a 15-to-1 [aileron] boost and a hot ship that’s naturally sensitive,” Johnson told him. “Maybe you were overcontrolling.” Mollified, Burcham tried again and on his second flight had Lulu Belle up to an unprecedented 490 mph. Lulu Belle would soon notch a speed of 502 mph, making it the first U.S. aircraft to exceed 500 in level flight.

The second prototype, the XP-80A, was a quite different airplane—almost two feet longer and wider in wingspan, 25 percent heavier and with 1,000 pounds of additional thrust from its Whittle-based GE engine. That GE I-40 would become the J33, the engine that in various versions powered every P/F-80, T-33 and even early F-94 Starfire ever manufactured. 

Lockheed put a rudimentary back seat into the cockpit for Johnson. From it he solved the problem of “duct rumble,” the noise produced by warring airflow deep inside the engine intakes. Johnson deduced that it was caused by a turbulent boundary layer of air interfering with a smooth flow into the engine. The solution was the louver-like, boundary-layer-eating air scoop that can be seen just inside the intakes of every production airframe thereafter.

With no engine or prop up front and the four .50-caliber guns removed, the P-80’s nose bay afforded room for a second pilot. This opportunity was exploited for tests of a prone-pilot position to reduce the effects of high-G maneuvers. With a canopy and flight controls installed, the test pilot was able to demonstrate at least some resistance to G forces. He was also able to demonstrate how quickly he became nauseated and how difficult it was to fly the airplane while lying down. Another problem: He could fly maneuvers that overstressed his safety pilot, sitting upright in the cockpit behind him.

Another unsuccessful P-80 experiment involved motorizing the machine guns so they could be cranked into a full-upright firing position, a concept likely borrowed from the fixed but semi-upright guns the Germans called Schräge Musik. As it was with the Luftwaffe, the intent was to fly under invading bombers and fire upward into their bellies. But the hammering recoil of four .50s drove the P-80’s nose down, making it impossible to aim the guns.

One unmistakable Shooting Star component was the airplane’s shapely, tapered wingtip fuel tanks. The XP-80A was the first of the line to carry tip tanks and the first airplane in the world to be fitted with them. Johnson invented the tip tank and in May 1944 patented the idea. His patent application cagily shows an airplane with a P-80 planview, but with a propeller and without the jet intakes or exhaust.

Johnson’s tip tanks slightly reduced the P-80’s total drag since they acted as wingtip endplates and reduced tip vortices. They also improved roll response and helped with spanwise loading of the wing. The only thing they didn’t do, with a capacity of just 165 gallons each, was substantially increase range. 

Early P-80s had an abysmal accident record—not necessarily through any fault of the airplane but often because of the inability of propeller-trained pilots to operate them properly. Even the most experienced fell to the needy P-80’s demands. Milo Burcham died in the third production proto­type when its engine flamed out on takeoff in Octo­ber 1944. Another killed American ace of aces Richard Bong on the day the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. (Bong had only himself to blame. In an age that largely skipped checklists, Bong, with only four hours and 15 minutes of P-80 time logged, forgot to turn on his P-80’s auxiliary fuel pump for takeoff.)

There was an ace-of-the-base mentality among many returning WWII combat pilots, who were used to the near-instant responsiveness of piston engines and the controllable drag of huge propellers that could be shifted in and out of flat pitch. They didn’t need anybody to teach them how to fly a new airplane, but the P-80 offered no such flexibility. New Shooting Star pilots would find themselves approaching a landing far too fast in their slippery ship and would pull off all the power. Bad idea. It took as long as 14 seconds for a J33 engine to spool back up and provide useful thrust, and often that was too late.

Another bad idea was that new jet pilots would frantically firewall the power lever when they found themselves on the back side of the power curve with an unresponsive engine. Early J33s couldn’t take the rush of fuel and either flooded or caught fire.

It was also a time before the concept of density altitude was fully understood—that air got thinner and less supportive the hotter and higher it became. Many a P-80 ran out of runway before its wings were ready to lift. By the time the P-80 was little over 2½ years old and still in limited production, 61 of them had been involved in accidents. 

Lockheed realized that it needed a jet trainer, which it created by lengthening a standard P-80 airframe by 4 feet 6 inches, making room for a back-seat instructor pilot. Thus was born Lockheed’s most successful jet of all time, the T-33 “T-bird.” Lockheed built well over three times as may T-birds as it did Shooting Stars, and they went on to train, according to some estimates, a quarter million new jet pilots.

Some Lockheed fans insist the P-80 served in World War II. One well-regarded aviation historian maintains that 30-odd P-80As were sent to the Philippines in the summer of 1945 to fly in the invasion of Japan but were grounded for a month because somebody forgot to include their batteries and tip tanks. The anecdote is true except for the fact that it happened in 1946, a year after the war ended. Others have claimed that four P-80s were seen on Saipan during the final weeks of the war, though there is no evidence of this.

What did happen, however, is that two P-80s were sent to England and two to Italy during the final weeks of the war in Europe. The former two were quickly lost to accidents and there is little evidence of the airplanes in Italy having flown any combat missions, despite much theorizing that the two often went steaming off in search of Me-262s. Some say they were sent to Italy specifically to shoot down marauding Arado Ar-234 high-altitude reconnaissance jets. In fact, the deployment was a simple test of the USAAF’s capability to maintain and operate the jets under combat conditions, and they were never put in harm’s way.

The P-80 may not have contributed to WWII, but it quickly became an effective PR tool soon thereafter. A flight of three made a record-breaking transcontinental crossing in January 1946—the first-ever in jets—and in August of that year Shooting Stars won the Bendix Trophy, jet-class Thompson Trophy and Weatherhead Jet Speed Dash Trophy at the National Air Races. In 1947 the Bendix and jet Thompson trophies again went to P-80s.

That year also saw a modified P-80R called Racey set a world absolute speed record of 623.7 mph. (It lasted only two months, until a Douglas D-558-1 Skystreak upped the top speed to almost 641 mph.)

In 1950 the F-80C made its bones when it went to war in Korea. By that time, the 900 Shooting Stars in the Air Force inventory constituted roughly half of America’s fighter force, and many WWII piston-engine fighters had been relegated to National Guard and Reserve squadrons. 

War-weary P-51Ds had to be hastily recalled to service, however, when F-80Cs turned out to be too fast to maneuver with the piston-engine Soviet Lavochkins and Yaks the North Koreans were flying. Still, F-80s on the second day of the war shot down four Ilyushin Il-10s—single-engine ground-attack aircraft that were improved versions of the WWII Il-2 Sturmovik—in what were the USAF’s first jet victories.

Four months later, on January 1, 1950, F-80Cs from the 51st Fighter Interceptor Wing engaged three Soviet-flown MiG-15s in the world’s first jet-versus-jet combat. Lieutenant Semyon Kho­minich claimed one of the F-80s, killing 1st Lt. Frank Van Sickle Jr., but the Air Force insisted his Shooting Star had been hit by flak, not a MiG. A week later F-80C pilot 1st Lt. Russell Brown scored hits on a MiG-15 and claimed a victory, though years later it was determined that the Soviet MiG pilot had made it back to base.

In any case, the MiG was almost 100 mph faster than the Lockheed. Largely because of this, the F-80 was relegated to a ground-attack role, leaving MiG-bashing to the newly arrived North American F-86 Sabre.

Four F-80C fighter groups were based in Japan and the commute to Korea left them with little fuel to fly useful missions. The solution was “Misawa tanks,” which were essentially faired barrels welded up by technicians at Misawa Air Base, in northern Japan. The largest Misawa tanks held 265 gallons. Early ones, however, lacked internal anti-slosh baffles. During steep run-ins against ground targets, partial fuel in a Misawa tank would flow forward and on the pullout would slosh rapidly aft. This caused at least one fatal accident when the overstressed tank tore off an F-80C’s wingtip and then took out a horizontal stabilizer. 

Another try at lengthening the F-80’s short legs was the world’s first in-combat aerial refueling, on July 6, 1951, when three RF-80As gassed up from a Boeing KB-29 tanker over the Sea of Japan. This effectively doubled the reconnaissance planes’ range. The receiving probes for the tanker’s drogue protruded from the nose of each tip tank, however, and the refueling procedure proved too lengthy and cumbersome to adopt operationally.

F-80s flew almost 100,000 sorties during the Korean War and were credited with shooting down 37 North Korean aircraft. But in return 14 Shooting Stars were lost to aerial combat, 113 to anti-aircraft fire, 150 to accidents and 16 to unknown causes. Total losses were equal to 35 percent of all the F-80Cs manufactured. This was well over double the loss rate during the Vietnam War for F-4 Phantoms, then the most vulnerable fixed-wing aircraft of any combatant nation.

By the mid-1950s, Shooting Stars were antiquated enough that they were being sent to South America as part of the Military Assistance Program for members of the Organization of American States. F-80Cs went to Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay to replace P-47s. Only Peru ever used one in anger, to make low next-time-I’ll-shoot passes over a local garrison that had mutinied.

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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Some of the last active F-80s were the six used by the FAA, with civil registration numbers, for high-altitude navaid inspections during the 1960s. Today, not a single P/F-80 remains flyable, even among a warbird community that has shown the tenacity to restore some of the oddest and most complex of military airplanes to flight.

I have my own tiny place in Shooting Star history. In July 1948, my grandfather took me to the opening-day airshow at New York’s new Idlewild Airport, which would eventually become JFK. President Harry Truman also attended, to give the opening address, and he was accompanied by a three-ship of F-80s in his flight from Baltimore aboard the Air Force One of the day, a DC-6 that he’d named The Independence. Before his speech the next day, the F-80s flew a low pass over the VIP bleachers—low enough that they blew off Truman’s trademark fedora. It made the front page of many a newspaper.

Lost in the crowd, I didn’t see it happen. But like Forrest Gump, I was there.  

Contributing editor Stephan Wilkinson suggests for further reading: Shooting Star, T-Bird & Starfire: A Famous Lockheed Family, by Lt. Col. Rhodes Arnold; Lockheed P-80/F-80 Shooting Star: A Photo Chronicle, by David R. McLaren; and F-80 Shooting Star Units Over Korea, by Warren Thompson.

This feature originally appeared in the January 2022 issue of Aviation History. Don’t miss an issue, subscribe today!

Ready to add an early P-80A to your collection of early jet fighters? Check out our exclusive online modeling column!

Like the barrage balloon and the assault glider, the torpedo bomber is a weapon we will never see again. Its fate had been sealed nearly four decades earlier, but the brief 1982 Falklands War showed that ship-killing missiles such as the Exocet could achieve more than an entire air wing of World War II torpedo bombers. And they could accomplish their mission at near-supersonic speeds from stand-off range. Today, nobody needs airplanes launching submersible motorboats while flying at the speed of a fast car.

The ultimate torpedo bomber

The torpedo bomber’s glory days, when Ger­man capital ships and entire Italian fleets were being torpedoed in the European theater while the Japanese lost their precious aircraft carriers in the Pacific, lasted from 1940 to late ’42. Yet the Grumman TBF Avenger, the finest torpedo bomber to fly in any war, lived on far beyond its star turn. As surface ship targets disappeared, Aven­gers began dropping more bombs than torpedoes, and the airplane developed new roles as WWII progressed: anti-submarine hunter-killer, convoy guardian, close air support attack aircraft, radar platform, airborne early-warning sentry, long-range reconnaissance patroller and ultimately that most utilitarian of roles, carrier onboard delivery truck. The big Grumman had the substantial bomb bay, unusually spacious interior, multiple seats and excellent performance to get away with it.

Though it may not be obvious, this beast of an airplane was a supersized version of the F4F Wildcat. Both were midwing, barrel-bodied, hell for stout warplanes with surprising performance even though they were often characterized as underpowered. The Avenger introduced carrier aviation to Grumman’s remarkable Sto-Wing system, enabling an airplane to fold its wings alongside its body like a bird. Sto-Wings were quickly fitted on the Wildcat as well, beginning with the F4F-4 version. On the Avenger they narrowed the wingspan from 54 feet 2 inches to just over 18 feet and eliminated the need for extra overhead room on a carrier’s hangar deck.

Folding wings and paper clips

Leroy Grumman came up with the Sto-Wing by fiddling with a draftsman’s eraser to represent a fuselage and paper clips stuck into it as wings. He hit on what’s called a skewed axis—a fixed pivot point on the wing root that allowed the Avenger’s wings to simultaneously rotate and fold. The Sto-Wing remained a feature of many Grumman aircraft right up to the E-2 Hawkeye.

Though it’s clear who invented the Sto-Wing, naming the designer of the Avenger is more difficult. Some say it was Roy Grumman, others vote for company cofounder and chief engineer William Schwendler. But the man in the trenches seems to have been engineer Robert Hall, a former air racer and designer of several of the Granville Brothers Gee Bees. An all-rounder, Hall also made the Avenger’s first flight on August 7, 1941. 

With a maximum takeoff weight of 17,893 pounds, the Avenger was the biggest single-engine airplane produced during WWII by any combatant. It outlifted the heaviest P-47 Thunderbolt by just shy of 400 pounds. The Avenger’s bomb-bay load was a neat ton: a 2,000-pound torpedo or four 500-pound bombs.

Among pilots, the corny joke about the Avenger was that it was so heavy it could fall faster than it could fly. Certainly during takeoffs from escort carriers this often felt true. Bombed-up Avengers had to be catapulted, but an escort carrier’s catapult was only 45 feet long and the best the ship could do into the wind was 19 knots. “We would come off the catapult at 90 knots—barely flying speed,” recalled turret gunner James Gander. “We would dip down when we left the deck until we got our speed up.” The airplane’s ponderous performance in comparison to the Wildcat led escort carrier crews to nickname it the “Turkey.”

The Avenger had no underwing ordnance hardpoints, but it did soon get launch rails for HVARs—high-velocity aircraft rockets, four under each wing. They were potent missiles, providing the airplane with the firepower of a destroyer’s broadside. In fact the rockets often had heavy, solid-metal warheads, designed to punch through a submarine’s hull simply with the power of inertia. Despite the rockets being unguided, Avenger pilots quickly became adept at drilling explosive HVARs deep into Japanese caves. 

The most common myth about the Avenger is that it made its first public appearance on December 7, 1941, and was that day immediately given its retaliatory name. In fact the airplane had been named in early October, two months before anybody planned on avenging Pearl Harbor. The first production Avenger came off the line on January 3, 1942—the first new Amer­ican aircraft design to enter the war.

Baptism by fire … and disaster

Its combat debut was a disaster. Six TBF-1s of torpedo squadron VT-8, relayed from the carrier Hornet to Midway Atoll, attacked the Japanese fleet on June 4, 1942. Only one returned, shot to pieces, its turret gunner dead and radioman wounded. The Navy began having second thoughts about its new torpedo plane.

But the big Avenger recovered quickly as its pilots gained experience. Three months later, in the Battles of the Eastern Solomon Islands and Guadalcanal, Avengers sank the light carrier Ryujo and the battleship Hiei. Ultimately, Avengers were involved in the sinking of 12 carriers, six battleships (including the superships Yamato and Musashi), 19 cruisers, 25 destroyers and 30 submarines in the Pacific and Atlantic.

Most Avengers were manufactured by General Motors, not Grumman. GM had established a division called Eastern Aircraft using five empty car factories in the Northeast. It took over Avenger production when Grumman found itself overwhelmed by the need to crank out the new F6F Hellcat. Grumman built almost 3,000 TBFs; GM’s 7,500-some were designated TBMs. (Think M for Motors and you’ll never confuse the two.)

“What followed was the clash of two worlds,” wrote David Doyle in his book TBF/TBM Avenger. “GM started out with the idea that it would show…Grumman how to mass produce airplanes. Grumman started out with the idea that GM would be lucky if it managed to produce one airplane. GM was more wrong than right. Grumman was more right than wrong.” 

Automobiles and airplanes are both complex machines, but they have vastly different production requirements. Cars could be churned out by the thousands on ceaseless production lines, while airplanes were produced through a stop-and-go method. Weight didn’t matter much with pre-EPA cars but was crucial for airplanes. Aircraft tolerances were tight, cars could deal with quarter-inch panel gaps. Modifications during production were common with airplanes, rare with cars.

Grumman facilitated the process by delivering to East­ern the “P-K airplane”—a TBF assembled entirely with sheet-metal screws made by the Parker-Kalon Corpora­tion, so the airplane could be disassembled and reassembled until GM’s operators got it right.

The Avenger was unique in having an electrically operated gun turret designed by Grumman rather than one bought from Sperry, Bendix, Erco or other specialists. Such turrets were mechanically or hydraulically operated and were less than precise in movement. The Grumman turret was designed by the company’s sole electrical engineer, Oscar Olsen, who came up with the idea of using amplidynes—electromechanical amplifiers commonly used to rotate huge naval gun turrets. Miniaturized by GE at Olsen’s request, amplidynes turned out to be excellent at providing rapid and consistent movement for the Avenger’s big “goldfish bowl,” as gunners called it. When Olsen told Bill Schwendler of his idea, Schwendler said he hoped it worked, since they would otherwise have a four-foot hole in the airplane with nothing to fit into it.

An Avenger turret gunner didn’t hammer away at the enemy behind a set of spade grips, comic-book style. He sat alongside his .50-caliber machine gun, its breech next to his left ear, controlling the turret’s motion and the gun’s firing with a pistol-grip handle. 

Actor Paul Newman, who joined the Navy intending to be a pilot but flunked the preflight physical because of color blindness, ended up as a radioman and gunner in Avengers. How Newman later achieved international fame as an automobile racer, in a sport that depends heavily on colored signal lights and flags, is a question that flight surgeons have never answered. Though often described as a turret gunner, Newman controlled the single ventral .30-caliber stinger mount from his station in the rear fuselage.

It has been variously written that the stinger gunner fired from a standing position, or while kneeling or laying prone. We asked the curator of Long Island’s Cradle of Aviation Museum, 10 minutes’ drive from the site of the original TBF factory, to climb into the museum’s restored Avenger and see what he thought. “The gunner would have sat with his legs straddling the gun, or possibly kneeling,” replied Joshua Stoff. “He definitely couldn’t have stood, and if lying down, I don’t see how he could have elevated and depressed the gun. Either way, visibility for the gunner was poor—only down and to the rear. But the belly is pretty roomy for one person, even with all the radio equipment installed.”

Roomy indeed. Some Avengers were used as squadron hacks, often flown between naval air stations and nearby party towns. A “designated driver” named Wellington Smith holds the record for cramming 17 pilots, plus himself, into a TBM for a flight from Holtville, Calif., back to nearby Naval Air Facility El Centro.

Late in the war, as Avengers increasingly attacked ground targets, radiomen/gunners were dropped from flight crews. Trapped in the unarmored belly, they were vulnerable to even rifle fire from the ground, and the death and injury rate for radiomen soared. 

The turret was entered from below, the gunner climbing up into the fishbowl from the radioman’s compartment while facing forward, then squirming around to face aft in the seat while maneuvering a heavy plate of armor. Bailing out meant reversing the process, the gunner then finding his parachute in the compartment below and clipping it onto his harness, forcing the big entry door open against the slipstream and, along with the radioman, jumping out. Neither crewman had the space to otherwise wear a chute, though the pilot did. Not surprisingly, pilots usually survived a bailout while crewmen went down with the ship. Many Avenger crewmen say they have never heard of a turret gunner successfully bailing out. 

Early Avengers had a seat between the cockpit and the turret, a few of them fitted with basic flight controls, but it was rarely occupied in combat unless a photographer or observer was along for the ride. The seat was soon gone, the space taken up by bulky 1940s radios and radar electronics, though most restored Avengers have reverted to the third seat for passengers.

A Presidential connection

History’s most famous Avenger pilot was future president George H.W. Bush. Barely 18 and a high school graduate (he would attend Yale only after the war), the 6-foot-2 Bush was one of the tallest pilots in the Navy and for a long time assumed to be its youngest aviator, an honor that actually accrued to one Charles Downey.

Bush was by all accounts an excellent pilot. He logged 1,228 hours of Avenger time, flew 58 combat missions and made 126 traps, all of them successful, aboard the short-decked light carrier San Jacinto. WWII carriers all had straight decks, so once an Avenger pilot committed to landing he either caught a wire—there were only three on San Jacinto—or ran into the crash barrier near the bow. Relying on that heavy-duty net often involved crashing into aircraft parked just beyond it. There was no such thing as a bolter, or go-around, as there is aboard a modern, angled-deck carrier.

On small carriers, picking up the no. 2 wire—the safest procedure—banged an Avenger down atop the aft elevator, which, according to author Barrett Tillman, “tilted the elevator forward and resulted in a four- or five-inch ‘curb’ for the wheels to hit.” The result often was a blown tire or two.

Bush went through three TBMs: Barbara, Barbara II and Barbara III. He safely ditched the first one after losing oil pressure during a catapult launch and being denied permission to re-land by a landing signal officer busy retrieving other Avengers. On September 2, 1944, while bombing a well-defended radio installation on the tiny island of Chichi Jima, he bailed out after Barbara II’s engine was hit and caught fire. This time he lost his crew, a fact that tortured him the rest of his life. 

The British enthusiastically adopted the Aven­ger for its Fleet Air Arm early in 1943, giving legendary Royal Navy test pilot Eric “Winkle” Brown the opportunity to fly it frequently. Brown found that the Avenger’s one aeronautical failing was that it spun rapidly and dangerously if anti-spin controls weren’t immediately exerted. (The airplane was placarded against intentional spins.)

Bombing with an Avenger required a steep glide-bomb approach. Brown noted the pullout was “a two-handed, somewhat frenetic affair, one hand pulling [the stick] with all its strength and the other retrimming frantically.” But the Avenger “stabilized almost immediately, a characteristic that was crucially important if a clean and accurate drop was to be achieved.” Brown also considered carrier landings out of a very stable 78-knot approach, with good visibility over the nose, “extremely easy…about as easy as that difficult art is ever likely to be.”

Many Avengers carried Norden bombsights, which were soon found to be useless. The Norden was intended for high-altitude, level bombing and it couldn’t handle the slant ranges it was being asked to compute. Bureaucracy and inertia led the Navy to continue supplying Avengers with dead-weight Nordens, and ultimately three-quarters of Norden’s production went to the sea service. The bombsights were linked to an autopilot system called Stabilized Bombing Approach Equipment that Avenger pilots found they could at least use on long flights, bypassing the unpleasantly heavy flight controls.

An Avenger’s multitasking radioman/ventral gunner was also intended to be the airplane’s bombardier. At the forward end of his cramped compartment was a small, slanted window that peered into the dark bomb bay. When the bay doors opened, the window provided a view down and ahead, between the racks of bombs. If a torpedo was in place, there was nothing to see but the top of the tin fish. So torpedo drops were controlled by the pilot, eyeballing his heading, airspeed, altitude and distance to the target, aided by a “tor­pedo director”—a reflector gunsight—atop the instrument panel.

Only the pilot could control torpedo release, though the crewman in the belly compartment had inflight access to the bomb bay and could change the torpedo’s depth setting. Either the pilot or the bombardier could open the bomb-bay doors, electrically or manually. The torpedo’s release switch was atop the pilot’s joystick. There was also a manual T-handle emergency release.

Bombing, however, was supposed to be in the hands and eyes of the bombardier and his magical Norden, sighting through that aslant window. The bombardier was also responsible for arming the bombs before the drop and for setting the intervalometer—a device that controlled the timing of the four bombs’ release. They could all be dropped at once, but releasing them as a spaced-out stick gave better coverage and a greater chance of at least one bomb hitting a small target.

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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The Avenger’s most media-worthy moment was the epic of Flight 19, five TBMs that departed on a basic bombing and navigation training flight over the Atlantic on December 5, 1945. The exercise couldn’t have been simpler: take off from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale, fly straight east and drop some practice bombs, turn north and fly awhile, turn due west until you hit the U.S. coast, go south and land back at Fort Lauderdale. Three left turns with all of Florida to hit.

The Grummans found themselves over the Bahamas, as they should have been, but for unknown reasons the pilots decided the islands were the Florida Keys. It didn’t help that they were flying a very basic time-speed-distance exercise yet the clocks had been removed from every one of Flight 19’s Avengers—a not uncommon bit of pilferage by people who had access to cockpits, since eight-day aircraft clocks were quickly removable and made nifty souvenirs.

Flight 19 ended up flying northwest from what they thought were the Keys. Five airplanes and 14 crewmen soon disappeared forever into the Atlantic, as did the 13-man crew of a Martin PBM-5 Mariner sent out to search for them. A tanker steaming in the area reported a huge explosion in the distance, so it was assumed the gas-heavy PBM had suffered the consequences of a fuel leak. The cause of the Avengers’ disappearance has never been definitively determined, though they undoubtedly ran out of fuel.

A 1952 Florida magazine article about the loss of Flight 19 suggested they had fallen prey to a mysterious airplane-eating, ship-sinking stretch of ocean that the author dubbed the Bermuda Tri­angle. Thus the Avenger came to play its part among the world’s more popular conspiracy theories, alien-abduction plots and tinfoil-hat ruminations.

The Navy’s last torpedo bomber was the Doug­las A-1 Skyraider—the immortal Spad of Vietnam War fame. On May 2, 1951, early in the Korean War, eight Skyraiders made the world’s last-ever surface torpedo attack, against the Hwacheon Dam. Eight Mark 13 torpedoes were dropped, seven hit the dam and six exploded, crippling the structure for the rest of the war.

It was truly the end of an era.  

For further reading, contributing editor Stephan Wilkinson recommends: Avenger at War, by Barrett Tillman; TBF/TBM Avenger, by David Doyle; Flight of the Avenger: George Bush at War, by Joe Hyams; and Looking Backward: Don Banks – One TBF Turret Gunner’s Story, by Stephen A. Banks.

This feature originally appeared in the September 2021 issue of Aviation History. Don’t miss an issue subscribe!

Ready to add this iconic bit of aviation history to your collection? Check out our exclusive modeling column and build your own!

Aviation history is littered with examples of siamesed, twin-fuselage airplanes, from the 1915 Black­burn TB double-floatplane Zep­pelin attacker to today’s White Knight Two and Strato­launcher spacecraft carriers. In the early years, it was an easy way to double horsepower without designing an all-new twin. Later, it became a means of conveniently increasing crew, fuel or cargo capacity. The most successful of them was the North American F-82 Twin Mustang, but the World War II Heinkel He-111Z­—a five-engine, two-fuselage kludge in-tended to tow the bloated Messerschmitt Me-321 troop-carrying glider—had its day in the sun as well.

An audacious new mirror-image mutant recently joined their ranks when a free-thinking team of airshow pilots mated two Yakovlev Yak-55 radial-engine, single-seat aerobatic aircraft to create what has inevitably been renumbered as a “Yak-110.” It required a carefully engineered and fabricated center section joining the two fu­selages, plus mating of the horizontal stabilizers and trimming of the outboard horizontal tails. Both cockpits are fully operational, and the Yak-110 has been extensively test-flown, including a full range of conventional aerobatic maneuvers.

Now builder Dell Coller, of Dell Aero Speed, in Caldwell, Idaho, is adding a 3,000-pound-thrust GE CJ610 turbojet to the airplane, slung under the center section. Essentially a Lear 25 engine, it will provide the equivalent of roughly four times more horsepower than the Yak-110’s two nine-cylinder, 360-hp Vedeneyev radials already generate.

The first airshow performer to team a CJ610 with a piston engine was Jim Franklin, who in 1996 began flying his Jet Waco UPF-7. That airplane, and Franklin, were lost in an airshow midair in 2005. In 2014 Coller’s Screamin’ Sasquatch Jet Waco, a 1929 Taperwing with a CJ610, was introduced, and has since become a fixture at airshows. 

The Yak-110 recently appeared at this summer’s EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisc. Like the F-15, F-16 and several other superfighters, it has a thrust-to-weight ratio greater than 1-to-1, which provided for some decidedly unconventional aerobatics.

The Soviets have traditionally held primacy as aviation’s gigantism specialists. Igor Sikorsky’s Ilya Muromets, a vast stork of an airplane famously photographed with two crewmen strolling atop its fuselage, first flew in 1913. It was followed by a succession of Russian giants, including the Tupolev ANT-20 Maxim Gorky, TB-3 bomber and Kalinin K-7. Even today, the world’s heaviest airplane is the Antonov An-225 Mriya, with a maximum takeoff weight of 705 tons.

But there was one interruption amid the steady stream of Soviet behemoths and it flew at a time when the United States’ archest enemy was that evil empire. When America needed a club with which to threaten the Russians, Convair produced the six-engine—eventually 10—B-36 long-range heavy bomber. It was the largest and heaviest piston-engine airplane ever to go into production. 

The B-36 was nicknamed the Peacemaker, with a nod to the infamous Colt six-shooter. Some religious organizations objected, saying the only true Peacemaker was Jesus. That scared off the Air Force, which never called the airplane anything but B-36.

Many assume the B-36 was designed as a nuclear bomber, but the airplane’s origins predate the possibility of any such mission. When first conceived during World War II, the big bomber was originally intended to reach Germany from the U.S. in the event that Britain fell. During its development, the B-36 was also touted for its potential ability to bomb Japan from Hawaii or Alaska.

When B-36s were slated to become nuclear-capable in the late 1940s, atomic weapons were controlled by the civilian Atomic Energy Com­mission and transferring them to the military was a cumbersome process. Pre-strike bases had to be set up where a B-36 would land, refuel and pick up its bomb, the fissionable core of which presumably had been flown in by the AEC. Hardly a quick-reaction strike force. 

These bases were all in remote northern locations, where technicians worked outdoors in bitter cold to assemble and load the bombs. Some B-36s were actually equipped with studded snow tires. In 1951 control of nuclear weapons was turned over to Strategic Air Command, but SAC’s B-36s were still intended to stage and refuel through bases in Greenland, Canada and Alaska.

The first XB-36 prototype had single-wheel main landing gear fitted with the largest aircraft tires ever manufactured—9 feet 2 inches in diameter. The configuration was chosen so it could easily retract into the wings. The extreme pressure of the tires’ footprint, however, meant that only three runways in the world—at Carswell, Eglin and Fairfield (later Travis) Air Force bases—could bear the weight of the prototype. The single tires also meant that a blowout could wreck the bomber. Four-wheel bogies on each side of the airplane were quickly engineered to spread the load.

One challenging part of duty aboard an early B-36 was that, before landing, crewmen had to enter each wing—they were 7½ feet thick at the root—and clamber out to the gaping wheel well to confirm that the landing-gear downlocks were correctly configured. “My first time, I was very scared,” admitted ex-crewman Dick Graf. “I could look back and see that prop turning and knew that if I slipped I would be hamburger.”

“If the gear didn’t appear locked, we were supposed to hold on, stretch down between aircraft and oblivion and kick the [drag link] knuckle until a down lock was indicated,” said retired Captain Reginald Beuttel Jr. “Talk about an exhilarating experience.” Microswitches with cockpit indicators for the up and down locks were soon added.

The walk-in wings also made it possible to do some minor accessory-section work on the inboard engines. “Between the walkaround air bottle, the fresh-air rush, fuel and oil fumes, and the roar of the engines, doing the actual repair was simple, though it was always a memorable experience,” recalled Staff Sgt. Bill Holding.

At some point early in the manufacturing process, Convair decided it needed to sweep the wings back a further three degrees to solve a center of gravity problem. The nacelles were already in place, with the engine centerlines established. Rather than reengineer everything, the nacelles and mounts were left alone, so the B-36 flew with the propellers of its six pusher engines pointing three degrees inboard.

The B-36 was originally intended to be a carpet bomber, spreading the largest number of iron bombs over the widest area. In a 1956 demonstration for congressmen and senators at Eglin AFB, a B-36 dropped a stick of 132 500-pound bombs in a line 2½ miles long—a conflagration that wouldn’t be seen again until the advent of the B-52D “Big Bellies” over Vietnam. The 66,000-pound load was far from the B-36’s max capacity—87,200 pounds for later models—and way beyond even a B-52’s capability.

After a long, contentious and problematic development phase, the XB-36 made its first flight on August 8, 1946. Until the arrival of the B-36D in 1951, however, the airplane was not considered fit for combat. Its deeply buried Pratt & Whitney R-4360 pusher engines were difficult to cool, for the bitter-cold air at cruising altitude was too thin to get the job done. Carburetors would literally ice over, causing uncontained fuel spillage and fires. (One advantage of the pusher engines was that the crew could simply shut off the fuel feeding an engine fire and wait for it to blow out, with no damage to the wing’s primary structure.) There were also constant propeller-vibration problems, and throughout the B-36’s career some pilots would shut down the two inboard engines to prevent the hammering of propwash against the fuselage and the huge horizontal stabilizer. 

“Keeping the B-36 in commission and battle-ready was a nightmare,” recalled retired Staff Sgt. Manfred Wiest. “It would return from missions with pages of write-ups. It is questionable how serviceable it would have been in a combat situation.”

The airplane’s complex, radar-guided remote guns—a scaled-up B-29 system—were useless. The guns froze at altitude, their electronics interfered with every radio on the airplane and rarely could any gun fire a single belt of ammunition without a malfunction. Convair boasted that it was the most extensive defensive armament ever fitted to a warplane, though they failed to mention that it didn’t work. Soon, B-36s were stripped of all but their tail guns.

Actually, the bomber’s designers didn’t intend the B-36 to defend itself with 20mm cannons. The plan was for the airplane to slowly labor to altitude—initially 40,000 feet, later 45,000 feet—where its thick wing continued to give it good handling qualities. Fighter opposition would struggle to match its climb, if not its moderate 250-mph cruise speed, and once bomber and interceptor engaged, all the B-36 had to do was turn away from the fighter, which would be unable to follow the maneuver.

“We could evade them just by making a slight turn,” recalled former B-36 pilot David Flaming. “They could barely maneuver at those altitudes, and we could fly at 40, 45,000 feet pretty easily. You just alter your direction a little bit and they couldn’t compensate.”

When Chuck Yeager flew an F-86 in a test intercept against a B-36, he scored a few gun-camera hits but admitted that it was hard to hold a Sabre steady enough for accurate firing at 40,000 feet. Stripped and lightened late-model B-36s called Featherweights were able to cruise as high as 50,000 feet, and rumor has it that one special B-36 made it to 59,000.

Things would change by the mid-1950s with the arrival of the MiG-17 and then the MiG-19, and the first ground-to-air missiles. The B-36’s useful operational life was barely four years long.

The R-4360 Wasp Major was the B-36’s dedicated engine, an unreasonably heavy, 28-cylinder radial with four rows of cylinders, leading to the nickname Corncob. Despite its 3,000 horsepower—climbing to 3,800 hp in its most sophisticated, fuel-injected version, introduced in the B-36H—even six of them left the airplane underpowered. Convair wanted to pursue development of a more powerful engine, perhaps even a turboprop, but the Air Force’s budget wouldn’t allow it. 

So Convair added four General Electric J47 turbojets to the B-36D’s power-plant array. They were B-47 engines, affixed to B-36s still in their original two-engine Stratojet pods, and they burned avgas, not jet fuel. The jets were used to aid takeoff, but their real purpose was to augment dash speed over a Soviet target, which they did by 60 to 75 mph. Get in, get out and go home were the bywords for a bombing run, supposedly leaving fighters and anti-aircraft guns as little time as possible to identify and track an attacking B-36. Fire up the jets, two-block all 10 throttles and use the airplane’s substantial top speed—which, at 435 mph, was remarkable for a big bomber—to evade interception. Military planners seem to have ignored the fact that Soviet radar would have painted the lumbering bomber somewhere between the North Pole and the Barents Sea.

In 1966 the New York Central Railroad mounted a surplus B-36 dual-engine pod upside-down atop a Buddliner self-propelled diesel car and set an American rail speed record—183.68 mph—that stands to this day.

The Peacemaker lived its decade-long career largely as a PR tool. Even when the only B-36s flying were still in beta test, the Air Force sent them on low-altitude flights that would expose every large city in the country to their droning formations. Soviet spies were welcome to peek at the airplane on airshow ramps, since that was the point of the whole exercise: making sure Stalin knew that we had what Teddy Roosevelt called a “big stick.”

Certainly the Soviets quickly learned of the airplane’s many deficiencies as well. In the late 1940s, when just 40 B-36s were in squadron service, only five to eight were ever actually flyable. Still, the Soviets never came up with their own B-36 counterpart. The best they could do was the four-turbojet Myasishchev M-4 Bison strategic bomber, which had the range to reach the U.S. but not to return home. (When the Bison’s designer told Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev that the bomber could land in Mexico, Khrush­chev responded: “Do you think Mexico is our mother-in-law? You think we can go calling any time we want?”)

And yes, B-36s did drone. During my teenage years in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., I would hear a B-36’s baritone as contrails etched the path of a tiny silver cross seven miles overhead. Nobody has ever authoritatively identified the source of the low-frequency, felt-as-well-as-heard growl, but the best guesses seem to be that it was caused by the hum of the near-supersonic prop tips, or that it was the sound of 18 prop blades cutting through the wash of air over the wings, or perhaps slicing through the engine exhausts. 

Since no fighter had the range to escort a B-36 and aerial refueling was still under development, the B-36 was the focus of several parasite-fighter experiments. The best-known was the football-shaped McDonnell XF-85 Goblin, intended to be carried in one of the B-36’s bomb bays, to be launched from and retrieved by a hooklike trapeze. No B-36 ever carried a Goblin, but it was tested—unsuccessfully—using a B-29. Had the XF-85 ever gone into production, the best that could have been hoped was that MiG pilots would have died laughing.

Other experiments involved fighters towed along while attached to a B-36’s wingtips, an idea that foundered when wingtip turbulence caused two Republic F-84s and their B-29 towplane to crash in a ball of aluminum, killing all the participants. The most successful parasite utilized a full-size RF-84 snugged up against a B-36’s belly. It was released not to wage combat but to do high-speed recon while its mother ship loitered on the safe side of the Soviet border. RB-36/RF-84 FICON (Fighter Conveyor) combos actually briefly became operational.

When the B-36 was designed, the engineers were well aware that it would be flying 30- to 40-hour missions, so they put extra effort into making crew accommodations as comfortable as possible: well-padded seats with armrests, carpeting, extensive soundproofing and insulation, built-in ashtrays, facilities for heating food, washbasins, beds, food-storage units and other luxuries never before seen on a bomber. In 1954, when the lightened B-36 Featherweights began to come online, these fripperies were the first to go. The Featherweights were developed to add enough range to eliminate the need for the Arctic staging bases. They also increased the B-36’s bombing altitude as well as its speed over the target.

The Air Force had asked Convair to engineer space for the 43,600-pound T-12 “bunker-buster” bomb, which was just over 30 feet long and 4½ feet in diameter. By doing so, they guaranteed that the B-36 would be able to carry the largest postwar atomic and hydrogen weapons. During its time in service, the Peacemaker was the only SAC bomber capable of carrying every bomb—conventional and nuclear—in the country’s arsenal.

B-36s occasionally carried nuclear weapons, usually deactivated, and between 1952 and 1957 a group of them participated in a series of nuclear tests. Most of the experiments were in part directed toward assessing the effects of large ground or low-altitude explosions on the aircraft at altitude, the concern being that B-36s were too slow to escape serious shock-wave damage unless the nuclear weapon was parachute-retarded. In 1955, during Operation Teapot, B-36s performed three successful drops of low-yield 1.5- and 3.5-megaton weapons over a Nevada test range.

Nearly all of a B-36’s fuselage was devoted to its two huge bomb bays, with a small pressurized flight deck and crew compartment at the nose and a second one for gunners and spotters far aft, connected by a pressurized central tunnel. The pressurized portions of the fuselage are apparent because they are shiny aluminum, while the rest of the hull is dull magnesium, which doesn’t take to the skin flexing of pressurization. The B-36 represents the largest use ever of magnesium in an airplane or spacecraft.

The Convair’s long nose was flexible, and in turbulence it hunted from side to side enough to make the ride uncomfortable. “It could get rather violent at times,” said Colonel Richard George. “I got calluses on my butt from the sideways motion.” This also affected the forward guns, which could become misaligned with their sighting stations, and the accuracy of the bombsight. “They were never a lot of fun to fly,” said ex-B-36 pilot Lt. Gen. James Edmundson. “It was like sitting on your front porch flying your house around.” 

One important variant, the RB-36 reconnaissance version, was largely intended to do follow-up photography of a just-struck target. The RB-36 served as a platform for a variety of cameras, the most sophisticated of which was the sole K-42 “Boston camera,” so named because it was designed at Harvard and built by Boston University. The largest aerial camera ever made, with a 20-foot focal length, the Boston camera could photograph a golf ball from 45,000 feet. A photo displayed alongside the camera in the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force proves it, and an oblique shot of Manhattan taken from a distance of 72 miles shows individual New York­ers strolling in Central Park.

In 1956 the first B-52s began replacing B-36s, and the Peacemakers began arriving at the Davis-Monthan AFB boneyard. They were immediately turned into aluminum and magnesium ingots. The last official B-36 mission was flown in Febru­ary 1959, and SAC subsequently became an all-jet bomber force.

Of the 385 manufactured, few B-36s survive. One of the two original prototypes went to the Air Force museum, but they scrapped it. The late avia­tion collector Walter Soplata bought most of the fuselage and cockpit for $760, and he stored it in his Ohio junkyard. It is now in the hands of a company in California that turns old airplanes into engraved metal “planetags” for enthusiasts.

Four Peacemakers are still intact, though none will ever fly again. In Dayton, Ohio, the Air Force museum has a B-36J; the Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson, Ariz., displays a B-36J; the Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum in Ashland, Neb., owns a B-36J; and a B-36H is parked at the Castle Air Museum in Atwater, Calif., east of San Francisco.

Was the B-36 an effective weapon, even though its operational career was short and pacifistic? Or was it yet another defense industry boondoggle, wreathed in controversy and corruption, birthed at the expense of the Navy’s need for supercarriers while the bomber’s performance was exaggerated?

Though the giant Convair was designed to be an offensive weapon, it turned out to be the biggest defense the U.S. offered to an enemy. Because the B-36 existed, the Soviet Union didn’t risk starting a war in Europe during the opening decade of the Cold War. As imperfect as the B-36 was, it still was the first leg of what would become America’s nuclear deterrent triad: very long-range strategic bombers, intercontinental missiles and nuclear-missile-equipped submarines. Legs two and three were yet to come, but the big Convair barred the door in the meantime.

Its message was a simple one—“don’t you dare”—and the Peacemaker spoke effectively.  

For further reading and viewing, contributing editor Stephan Wilkinson recommends: Cold War Peace­maker, by Don Pyeatt and Dennis R. Jenkins; Magnesium Overcast, by Dennis R. Jenkins; and Convair B-36, by Meyers K. Jacobsen. Also the 1955 film Strategic Air Command, starring Jimmy Stewart, a magnificent look at the B-36 in operation.

This feature originally appeared in the July 2021 issue of Aviation History. Don’t miss an issue, subscribe!

Name the most effective American bombers of World War II and you’ll certainly come up with the B-17, B-24 and B-29, maybe the twin-engine B-25, but how many will think to include the little Douglas SBD Dauntless on the list? The Dauntless dive bomber flew almost entirely over the Pacific, and there it did more to win the war than any other bomber type, even including the Superfort’s two atom bomb missions. Yet of the 35 U.S. types that flew major combat in WWII, none was as old-fashioned and low-tech as the SBD. 

Show someone who isn’t an aviation fan photos of a Dauntless and a North American AT-6 trainer, which first flew in 1935, and they won’t be able to tell the difference. The two airplanes are nearly identical in size, shape and detail. With a wingspan half an inch narrower than the AT-6’s, the SBD-5 had exactly twice the trainer’s horsepower and only moderately better performance—40 mph more cruise speed, a 1,300-foot higher ceiling, 500 feet per minute better rate of climb—but the extra grunt gave it the ability to typically carry a 1,200-pound bombload, including a ship-killing half-tonner under the fuselage centerline. 

With those bombs, SBDs sank five of Japan’s eight fleet aircraft carriers and a sixth light carrier. The Dauntless played a major role in reducing Japan’s cadre of world-class navy pilots to a bunch of low-time novices left to fling their airplanes and bodies at American ships as kamikazes.

The SBD started out as a Northrop, not a Douglas. Its designer, Ed Heinemann, worked for Jack Northrop, who had developed the sleek, precedential Alpha, Beta and Gamma mailplanes of the late 1920s and early ’30s. Northrop was already producing for the Air Corps the pre-SBD, Gamma-based A-17A dive bomber. Building on this substantial foundation, Heinemann initially came up with the ill-handling Northrop XBT-1 dive bomber of 1936. By the time Donald Douglas took over the Northrop company, Heinemann had fixed its failings and developed the much-improved XBT-2, the direct forerunner of the Dauntless. 

The XBT-2 got letterbox wing slots—not leading-edge slots but fixed flow-throughs well aft of the leading edge, mid-chord directly ahead of the ailerons. These slots kept the airflow attached and cured the XBT-1’s nasty stall characteristics. They also helped to create the outstanding lateral-control handling qualities that would make the SBD so effective at precisely altering its aim during a near-vertical dive, as well as its docile behavior during carrier landings. One of Heinemann’s most important accomplishments toward perfecting the Dauntless design was its beautifully balanced controls. When properly trimmed, an SBD’s solid and steady dive, responsive to minor adjustments in every direction, made it a remarkably stable and accurate weapons platform.

Heinemann was one of the most effective warplane designers of the 1940s through the 1960s. In addition to the SBD, he was responsible for the Douglas A-20 and A-26 attack bombers, the AD-1 Skyraider, A3D Skywarrior (the “Whale,” to this day the heaviest aircraft ever produced for routine carrier use) and the A-4 Skyhawk. He also oversaw the creation of the F-16 Viper when he ultimately became vice president of engineering at General Dynamics in the early 1960s. 

Heinemann was busy enough with the SBD that he had nothing to do with the clumsy Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo bomber, contemptuously nicknamed the “Torpecker.” Its main contribution to the war was to distract the Japanese during the Battle of Midway with its fruitless low-level attacks while SBDs dove on the carriers from above. During one Midway mission, 41 Devastators attacked the Japanese fleet. Thirty-five were shot down and not one scored a successful torpedo hit. (Admittedly, blame had to be shared with their terrible Mark 13 torpedoes, which rarely ran true or exploded on impact.) Meanwhile, SBDs fatally damaged all four Japanese carriers participating in the June 4-5, 1942, battle.

A problem with early fixed-gear dive bombers had been that centerline bombs tended to bobble around in the airstream and bounce off the landing gear immediately after release. (It might seem that dropping a bomb through the prop disc would be a greater problem, but that would have required a steeper dive than what was then being achieved.) The solution was bomb displacement gear, usually called a bomb crutch or yoke—a simple device that swung the released bomb through a 90-degree arc that put it well away from the fuselage before it was fully dropped. Heinemann fitted the fixed-gear Northrop XBT-1 with a bomb yoke and retained it for the Dauntless, which could actually dive steeply enough to put its bomb through the prop.

Despite its antediluvian appearance and low-tech approach, the SBD was slow to achieve squadron service. The first two versions, the SBD-1 and -2, weren’t even war-worthy, since they had neither armor nor self-sealing fuel tanks. The combat-ready SBD-3, the “Speedy Three,” entered service at roughly the same time as the advanced Lockheed P-38 Lightning.

The SBD started its war in the Pacific right on time—on the morning of December 7, 1941—but it was an inauspicious debut. Seven Dauntlesses were shot down or crashed and more were destroyed on the ground, totaling about two dozen lost. Three days later, however, an SBD from the carrier Enterprise sank the submarine I-70 north of Hawaii, scoring the first Japanese fleet sub of the war.

Another early action in which an SBD played a part was Jimmy Doolittle’s April 1942 Tokyo Raid. In its S-for-scouting role, a Dauntless dis­covered the Japanese picket ship that forced the early launch of Doolittle’s bombers. Though he knew the small boat had spotted him, the SBD pilot was unable to break radio silence and had to fly back to Doolittle’s task force and drop a weighted message on Enterprise’s flight deck.

The SBD-4 gained a 24-volt electrical system, a wider-chord wing with more rounded tips and a Hamilton Standard hydromatic prop. But the SBD-5 became the go-to Dauntless, with 1,200 horsepower rather than the earlier 1,000. An equally important upgrade was a reflector bombsight in place of the previous three-power telescope. The tube-with-an-eyepiece sight was prone to fogging as a Dauntless dove from 15,000 feet through increasingly warm, humid Pacific air, as was the windshield, which in the SBD-5 got a demisting heater. The SBD-6 gained a further 150 hp but was already being replaced by the unloved Curtiss SB2C Helldiver. (One carrier skipper, Captain Joseph “Jocko” Clark of USS Yorktown, refused to allow Helldivers aboard his ship. He demanded SBDs.)

The SBD’s most recognizable feature was its perforated flaps, riddled with 318 precisely tapered and flanged, slightly ovalized three-inch holes. The modification had been suggested by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics when the early XBT-1 prototype revealed serious tail buffeting during dives. The outer horizontal stabilizer reportedly flapped through a two-foot arc, and Heinemann himself, riding as a backseat observer, admitted that it “scared the hell out of me.” The shakes were caused by turbulent vortices tumbling off the flaps, and the holes allowed a carefully calculated amount of air to feed straight aft while the flaps retained the ability to hold the airplane at a safe dive speed.

There were two sets of Dauntless flaps: conventional split flaps that stretched below the wing trailing edge and under the fuselage, and dive flaps, which deployed upward above each wing’s trailing edge. All were perforated. For takeoff and landing, the lower flaps were set. They were also used for diving, but with the additional drag of the upper flaps. The dive flaps were powerful enough that the airplane couldn’t maintain level flight, even under full power, while they were deployed. It was therefore critical that pilots begin retracting the slow-acting hydraulic flaps just before pullout from a dive.

One feature the Dauntless lacked was folding wings, considered indispensable for parking on carriers. But Ed Heinemann wanted the strongest possible wings for an SBD’s typical 5G+ pullouts. No hinges for him. A novel solution to the parking problem was troughs just wide enough for SBD tailwheels, extending out laterally from a carrier’s deck so that a row of Dauntlesses could be parked with their main gear just at the deck’s edge.

The SBD was surprisingly effective in air-to-air combat. During the May 1942 Battle of the Coral Sea, Dauntlesses shot down more Japanese aircraft—35—than did the accompanying Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters. Throughout the Pacific campaign, SBDs claimed a total of 138 enemy airplanes while themselves falling fewer than 80 times (record-keeping was inexact) to Japanese fighters.

One SBD pilot, Lieutenant Stanley “Swede” Vejtasa, attacked seven Zeros and shot down three of them in a single mission during the Coral Sea battle; the previous day he had participated in the sinking of the Japanese light carrier Shōhō. Cook Cleland, later famous as a Thompson Trophy racer, also was credited with several SBD victories.

A Dauntless pilot controlled a pair of cowl-mounted .50-caliber guns firing through the prop arc, and the SBD was maneuverable enough to make them an occasional threat. But the most effective guns were the rear-seater’s flexible twin .30s. (Early SBDs had just one tail gun, but it was quickly found to be impotent.) The most notorious Dauntless gunner was Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had been a Marine intelligence officer. McCarthy was savvy enough to understand that a combat record, no matter how bogus, would someday play well with voters, so he cadged the occasional local ride in a Dauntless and later parlayed “Tailgunner Joe” into an effective campaign slogan. Never mentioned was the fact that he had once holed his own airplane’s vertical stabilizer with an unskilled burst.

The gunner was also an SBD’s radio operator, and his seat swiveled so he could do double duty. He also had a set of rudimentary flight controls—airspeed indicator and altimeter, throttle and a control stick that could be unclipped from the left cockpit sidewall and dropped into a socket on the floor. He had no way to put the landing gear or tailhook down, but he could at least take a wounded pilot back to the ship and ditch near it.

The Army got its own version of the SBD, the A-24 Banshee, though it was largely unloved. Besotted with their heavy bombers and grand strategic bombing plans, Army Air Forces leaders had no use for dive bombing. They believed intentionally diving a bomber straight toward anti-aircraft defenses at danger-close range was simply a way to put aircrews in harm’s way. They couldn’t make the A-24 work as a level or glide bomber, so they used it as a trainer and utility aircraft. 

This despite the fact that the AAF was well aware of the Junkers Ju-87 Stuka’s success against ground targets, particularly armor, during the German army’s 1939-40 Blitzkrieg and the ill-advised Soviet campaign. If there was one airplane that seriously challenged the SBD for the title of world’s best dive bomber, it was the Stuka. But the U.S. Army had few tanks itself at the beginning of WWII and little experience in countering them. During the two prewar decades during which the Navy had practiced and perfected dive bombing, the Army had studiously ignored the tactic.

In fact, AAF leader Henry “Hap” Arnold tried to cancel the initial order for 16 A-24s, claiming the Army had already tested the dive-bombing concept and found it lacking, largely due to a dive bomber’s vulnerability to enemy fighters. Arnold was overruled by General George C. Marshall.

Nonetheless, the AAF taught its A-24 pilots to bomb in a 30-degree “dive,” which was actually a steep glide. The maximum the Army would allow was 45 degrees, which was still glide bombing. Some benighted Army pilots had the brass to call the Banshee “a lousy dive bomber.”

How useful might Army dive bombers have been? One example: At the end of the 1943 Battle of Sicily, German and Italian troops fled across the narrow Strait of Messina to the Italian mainland aboard a shooting gallery of ships and boats. Army fighter bombers flew a total of 1,883 sorties and managed to sink just 13 of them.

After the war, the surviving Banshees became part of the Air Force, which redesignated them F-24s. They remained in service until 1950, well after the last SBDs had been retired.

The British Fleet Air Arm considered using SBDs and tested several of them. Their nicknames for them were “Clunk” and “Barge” rather than “Slow But Deadly.” One of the test pilots, Cap­tain Eric “Winkle” Brown, the most experienced carrier pilot of all time, was underwhelmed by the little Douglas.

“The Dauntless was underpowered, painfully slow, short of range, woefully vulnerable to fighters, and uncomfortable and fatiguing to fly for any length of time, being inherently noisy and drafty,” Brown later wrote. “It was a decidedly prewar aeroplane of obsolescent design and certainly overdue for replacement.” Damning with faint praise, he called the SBD-5’s performance “sedate.”

The Dauntless left Brown baffled. Its performance deficits were so obvious that he deemed it “a very mediocre aeroplane.” Yet he knew its Pacific combat record and could only conclude that the SBD “was among that handful of aeroplanes that have achieved outstanding success against all odds.” (He had only to look to his own Royal Navy’s Fairey Swordfish biplane torpedo bomber, the infamous Stringbag, for another example of such an anomaly.)

If the Dauntless had a secret ingredient, it was that “most important, it was an accurate dive bomber.” Brown found it easy to make precise downline corrections in a dive with the “pleasantly light” ailerons. He also admitted that the Dauntless was hell for stout. “Extremely strong but also rather heavy,” which gave it “a loss rate in the Pacific…lower than that experienced by any other U.S. Navy shipboard aeroplane.” In fact, the Dauntless had the lowest loss rate of any Ameri­can combat aircraft of the war.

The SBD began to be replaced in Novem­ber 1943 by the brutish, short-coupled Helldiver—which, in fact, was supposed to have gone into service early enough in the war that the Dauntless would never have been needed. “Events that stick in my memory include every flight I ever made in the SB2C Helldiver,” recalled former Patuxent River test pilot Rear Adm. Paul Holmberg. “We had three to use in testing. Of the three, two had their wings come off.”

The Helldiver’s handling qualities were so bad—much of which could be attributed to the unusually short fuselage—that pilots quickly took to calling it the Beast. The airplane had been intended to trump the SBD in speed, range and weight-carrying ability, yet when it went into service it provided minimal improvements over its predecessor.

The SB2C’s moment of glory came in April 1945, when Helldivers and Grumman Avengers sank the supership Yamato, one of the two heaviest and biggest-gunned battleships ever built. It was the last great dive-bombing feat of any war.

Meanwhile, the SBDs evicted from the fleet continued to fly into 1944 in the hands of the Marine Corps, in support of the island-hopping campaign. They became what Stukas had once been: flying artillery, giving close air support to both Marine and Army troops, particularly in the Philippines. Near-vertical dive bombing was often the only way to bring heavy ordnance to bear against troops in heavily jungled areas. Douglas developed .50-caliber machine gun pods for underwing mounting on SBDs, for dive strafing.

The last SBDs to see action were those of the French navy, flying in 1947 in support of the Indo­china War. The SBD-3 was originally intended for export to France, in 1940, but the French order for 174 aircraft was taken over by the U.S. Navy after the country’s fall. The French eventually got the airplane when some 40-plus A-24 Banshees were delivered to Algeria and Morocco in 1943, plus a further 112 SBD-5s and A-24s in 1944. Some of them operated over France after D-Day.

The French removed their Dauntlesses from combat in late 1949, but they continued flying as trainers through 1953. In the U.S. a few civil SBDs operated as photo-mappers, mosquito sprayers and skywriters—one of the last painted in Pepsi-Cola red, white and blue. An SBD even ended up at MGM Studios in Hollywood for use as a wind generator during filming. 

One of the world’s most concentrated SBD graveyards is the floor of Lake Mich­igan, where 38 Dauntlesses were lost in training crashes. Only a few have been recovered, largely because the Navy insists it still owns them. Many of those still on the bottom are particularly rare because they have substantial combat history. After having gone to war, they were superseded by the Helldiver and then sent back to the U.S. for training use. 

What was once intended to be a stopgap to await the arrival of a real dive bomber ended up flying through the end of WWII and becoming the most effective carrier-based dive bomber of all time, of all maritime nations. “The SBD’s contribution to winning the Pacific War was unexcelled by any other American or Allied aircraft,” wrote Aviation History contributor Barrett Tillman, the world’s leading Dauntless expert and historian.

 As Tillman points out, the Navy got more than its money’s worth. The last SBD-6s cost $29,000 in 1944 dollars (about $425,000 today), less government-supplied equipment such as the engine, instruments, radios and ordnance. Call it a Slow But Deadly bargain.  

For further reading, contributing editor Stephan Wilkin­son recommends: The Dauntless Dive Bomber of World War Two, by Barrett Tillman; SBD Daunt­less: Douglas’s US Navy and Marine Corps Dive-Bomber in World War II, by David Doyle; and Douglas SBD Dauntless, by Peter C. Smith.

This feature originally appeared in the May 2021 issue of Aviation History. Subscribe today!

In 1961, when U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara proposed the General Dynamics F-111 Aardvark as a Swiss army knife suitable for all three major flying services, that included a Navy version, the F-111B. The B turned out to be too complex, underpowered and heavy for carrier ops, however. It was also a bomber, and the Navy needed a fighter. 

In the career-ending words of Vice Adm. Tom Connolly, in response to a senator’s question as to whether more powerful engines might make the F-111B acceptable, “Mister Chairman, all the thrust in Christendom couldn’t make a fighter out of that airplane.” Some claim that the Tomcat’s name is a tribute to Connolly’s falling-on-his-sword honesty. 

The Navy was seeking a replacement for the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom, which no longer had the range or weapons needed to protect carrier battle groups. Soviet advances in bombers and anti-ship cruise missiles required an inter­ceptor that could fly far and fast, with long loiter time, powerful radar and brutish missiles that could strike far beyond the range of Sidewinders and Sparrows.

Grumman, which had worked with General Dynamics on the F-111’s variable-geometry wing, had already begun work on a fighter, the G-303, that became the Tomcat. It utilized the 111’s swing-wing concept as well as its Pratt & Whitney TF30 engines—unique in being the world’s first afterburning fighter turbofans. 

Grumman, a swing-wing pioneer, had built the rotund and underpowered XF10F Jaguar to test the concept of a wing that could be unswept for carrier landings and takeoffs, and swept for inflight speed. Grumman test pilot Corky Meyer was the only person to fly the sole XF10F and he pronounced it fun “because there was so much wrong with it.” His work nonetheless carried over to the F-111 and the F-14. 

The father of the Tomcat, Grumman engineer Mike Pelehach, saw his first MiG-21 at a 1960s Paris Air Show and knew the U.S. would need a fighter that could defeat it. Pelehach paced off the dimensions of the MiG and went back to the company’s Beth­page headquarters to begin work on a MiG-beater. Ultimately, he drew together all the concepts and options that resulted in the Tomcat.

A highly regarded engineer, Pelehach once had dinner with a group of his Chinese counterparts, who asked if it would be possible to modernize their own MiG-21s. Pelehach quickly sketched a design and some details on the tablecloth. At the end of the evening, the Chinese engineers stripped the silverware and took the tablecloth with them.

The variable-geometry wing, however, was not one of Pelehach’s best ideas. In practice the swing wing has been called a major aeronautical engineering blunder. On the Tomcat, it was complex and heavy, and though its movement was automatic and rapid, some Air Force F-15 and F-16 pilots who flew against the F-14 claimed the wings’ position telegraphed the airplane’s energy state as it lost momentum during air combat maneuvers. The main reason for that lost momentum during ACM was the dismal .68-to-1 thrust ratio of the early TF30 engine.

The fuel-efficient engines (plus swing wings that could be unswept at max-loiter airspeeds) allowed the Tomcat to linger longer over the battlefield, with a bigger ordnance load than any fighter in the world, but they had a failing that had already cropped up during the F-111’s career. F-111s weren’t expected to fly as extreme a flight envelope as were Tomcats, so the problem was not a major consideration. But the fact remained that TF30s were never intended to be fighter engines; they were not meant to deal with the constant and rapid throttle movements and high angle-of-attack situations that modern combat involved.

The TF30 was prone to compressor stalls and surges when operated at high angles of attack or yaw if the power levers were moved too aggressively—common during air combat maneuvering. The Tomcat’s engines were mounted about nine feet apart, to allow room between them for missile carriage and to create a large lifting surface. (More than half of an F-14’s total lift comes from what Grumman called the pancake—the surface area between the engine nacelles.) So when one of the engines lost power from a compressor stall, the resultant yaw could be sudden and scary, sometimes resulting in an unrecoverable flat spin. Compressor stalls led to the loss of more than 40 F-14s. Had the early Tomcats ever gone into serious combat, more of them might have been lost to compressor stalls than to enemy action. 

Some Tomcat crews described their mount as “a nice aircraft powered by two pieces of junk.” For the sake of airframe longevity, the Tomcat was in practical terms limited to 6.5 Gs, while an F-15 could pull 9 Gs. (So could a Tomcat, at high enough speeds, but the airplane then had to undergo a complex over-G inspection.) The difference was also attributed to TF30 engine limitations.

The F-14 was a difficult airplane to handle in the final stages of a carrier landing, in part because of its tendency to hunt laterally while trying to achieve a stabilized approach. The fact that the F-14 had spoilers rather than ailerons didn’t help, nor did its high pitch inertia, which made it float during the final stages of an approach. (These problems were ultimately corrected when Tomcats were fitted with digital flight-control systems.)

The TF30 was never intended to be the F-14’s duty engine. It was used simply to get the Tomcat project airborne and into flight test and initial service. The TF30 was to be replaced by an ephemeral Advanced Technology Engine that was being developed for the F-15—the Pratt & Whitney F401. The ATE never materialized, so Tomcats sailored on with the TF30 until near the end of the production run, when a good General Electric engine, the F110, became available and created the F-14D as well as some retrofitted A models that were labeled F-14A+ (later redesignated F-14Bs).

In 1984 Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, a former naval aviator, said the TF30/F-14 combo was “probably the worst engine-airplane mismatch we have had in many years. The TF30 is just a terrible engine….”

The Tomcat was built around an enormous super-missile, the AIM-54A Phoenix, which weighed almost half a ton, was 13 feet long and 15 inches in diameter and cost half a million dollars to fire. At the time it was the most sophisticated and expensive air-to-air missile in the world. The Tomcat could carry six, but since four was the most that could be brought back to the ship, that was the normal loadout. The Phoenix was originally designed for use against slow-moving bombers with huge radar signatures and it wasn’t nearly as much of a threat to fighters with savvy pilots.

The F-14 was the only aircraft ever to use Phoe­nixes operationally. In a carefully orchestrated live-fire test, a Tomcat loosed all of its Phoenixes within 38 seconds at a distant skyful of pilotless airplanes and target drones. One of the missiles failed, but of the five that flew, four scored direct hits and the fifth detonated near enough to its target to be considered a “lethal miss.” Unfortunately, combat is not so carefully orchestrated. In Janu­ary 1999, a pair of Tomcats fired two Phoenixes at Iraqi MiG-25s south of Bagh­dad. Both missed. Eight months later, an F-14 launched a Phoenix at an Iraqi MiG-23. Again, it missed as the target fled. It was the last time the Navy ever fired a Phoenix in anger.

Had the live-fire test been a failure, the Tomcat program might have been aborted, since it was already in trouble from cost overruns, schedule slippage and several test-flight crashes. The most notorious crash took out the first prototype on only its second flight, when a vibratory failure of all three hydraulic systems—main, backup and a limited “combat backup” system—rendered the airplane uncontrollable on short final to Grumman’s Calverton, Long Island, airfield. The crew ejected and came within an ace of parachuting into the Tomcat’s fireball.

The Phoenix followed an eject-launch flight path rather than being rail-launched. “Firing” it meant dropping it like a bomb, since its powerful engine needed to be well below the F-14 before igniting. Once the solid propellant lit off, the Phoenix immediately soared to 80,000 feet and accelerated to Mach 5 toward its target. Above that target and coasting, the Phoenix dove steeply down on it, substituting kinetic energy for the spent force of its motor.

The Phoenix’s maximum range has been quoted as 125 miles, but effectively it was somewhat less. Target acquisition and missile launch assumed that the two aircraft were beak-to-beak at high speed, so the actual impact would take place when the Tomcat’s opponent was substantially closer. An effective Phoenix countermeasure was to simply turn away from the missile and let it expire, assuming an attacker had an accompanying AWACS-type overseer to call out the Phoenix launch.

An essential component of the Phoenix system was the F-14’s planar-array Hughes radar. When the Tomcat went into fleet service, the yard-wide AWG-9 dish was capable of tracking 24 targets simultaneously and directing missiles at six of them. At the time that was unprecedented, but the Hughes radar was still a complex, hard-to-maintain, 1960s analog system. 

The early Tomcat’s avionics, including the radar, badly needed upgrading to include high-speed multiplex digital data busses, multifunction cockpit displays, head-up displays and other state-of-the-art features already common in the Air Force’s fourth-generation fighters, the F-15 and F-16. The Tomcat was increasingly an analog airplane in a digital age. The advent of the F-14B and then the F-14D solved those issues. 

The D model was in fact an all-digital strike fighter. It carried a remarkable new radar “that gave it an enormous increase in effectiveness…against stealthy aircraft,” wrote Rear Adm. Paul T. Gillcrist in his comprehensive book Tomcat!“Its capability against all types of targets in an electronic warfare environment [was] vastly improved.” The F-14D also had IRST (Infrared Search and Track), a passive sensor that was accurate at shorter ranges and almost impossible for opponents to detect. The fighter’s new glass cockpit, digital avionics and greatly enhanced datalink increased the crew’s situational awareness. The F-14D was a true multi-mission aircraft and its proponents believed it was a better strike fighter than the vaunted F-15E Strike Eagle. Unfortunately, the F-14D didn’t reach the fleet until 1990, a year before Tomcat production was defunded, and only 37 units were built.

As it was, the complex F-14 was difficult to service and maintain aboard carriers. Most estimates held that Tomcats required anywhere from 30 to 60 hours of maintenance per hour flown—about three times as much as the F/A-18 Hornets that replaced them. One result was that Grumman, Hughes, Raytheon and other companies sent civilian tech reps to carriers to do the heavy lifting, which gave the Navy’s own sailors too little opportunity for on-the-job training. 

The F-14 was assigned to fleet defense but its main task became establishing air superiority, and it took on the duties of an interceptor and tactical attack fighter with all-weather capability and great range. With excellent visibility (the Tomcat was the first U.S. fighter since the Korean War with a 360-degree-view canopy), 20mm cannon, automatic maneuvering flaps and dogfight radar mode, it was well suited to the task. Recon capability followed as the Navy phased out its Vought RF-8 Crusaders and North American RA-5 Vigilantes. Toms were fitted with big belly pods called TARPS (Tactical Air Reconnaissance Pod System). A TARPS was more than 17 feet long and weighed almost a ton, filled with electronic and photo-snooping gear.

The final iteration of the F-14 was nicknamed the “Bombcat.” It was fitted out as a fighter-bomber intended to serve as a self-escorting ground-attack aircraft. The Bombcat saw more action over the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan against the Taliban and al Qaeda than the F-14 ever did as an air-superiority fighter.

Were it not for the Shah of Iran, there might never have been an F-14. Iran was the only foreign country ever to operate Tomcats, and it does to this day. The Iranians purchased an armada for $2 billion in 1974—at the time the single highest-value sale of military equipment in U.S. history—back when the shah was one of America’s few allies in the Mideast. But he had to make sure Grumman stayed in business in order to get his airplanes.

The company had signed a fixed-price contract with the Navy to produce the fighter, but the early 1970s were an inflationary time, and the price of materials—particularly titanium—rose so rapidly that Grumman was at one point losing a million dollars on each Tomcat it built. Things looked bad for the airframer, until the shah stepped in with a $75 million loan.

The shah wanted the Grumman product, but a flyoff against the F-15 Eagle had to be arranged to at least give the appearance of a competition. The F-15, besides being the darling of the Air Force fighter community, had a higher thrust-to-weight ratio and would have outperformed the Tomcat, all things being equal.

But they weren’t. A coin toss allowed the Air Force crew to fly first, and while they did, the F-14 sat waiting its turn on a distant run-up pad. The pilot had set his power levers as far forward as he dared, and while the Eagle flew its strictly defined 12-minute program, he burned off part of his fuel load and took off a good bit lighter than the demo rules had postulated.

The Grumman crew had also noted during its weather briefing that there was a distinct wind shear at 1,000 feet, with the flow nearly reversing itself from what was happening on the ground. So they flew their demonstration pattern in the opposite direction from what the Air Force had done, and their slow-flight passes abeam the shah’s viewing bleachers appeared far more graceful than the Eagle’s, thanks to the headwind. The shah was sold.

Delivery of the Iranian Tomcats began in 1976, accompanied by 284 Phoenix missiles. The Iranians had far better results from Phoenix launches, shooting down dozens of Iraqi opponents during their 1980s war.

Three years later, the shah was deposed and the F-14s became the property of the Iranian revolutionary air force. Seventy-nine of the 80 purchased, plus the missiles, had been delivered, but most of them soon became unflyable. The U.S. refused to support the complex airplanes and Iran quickly ran out of spare parts. Hangar queens were cannibalized and eventually only a dozen Iranian F-14s remained flyable. 

Beginning in the late 1990s, illicit F-14 parts were finding their way from the U.S. (and Israel) to Iran. In 2007 federal agents seized four intact Tomcats in California. Three were in museums and a fourth was in the hands of the TV series “JAG,” which used the airplane in ground scenes numerous times. The stir ultimately resulted in the destruction of virtually all of the 150-odd retired Tomcats parked at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base boneyard.

Today, however, Iran has put some 40 Tomcats back in the air carrying an improved Iranian version of the Phoenix, thanks to advances in the country’s capabilities and the use of such technologies as 3D printing for the manufacture of spares. They are the only active F-14s in the world. Many are virtually new, having been unflown for decades. But they’d be no match for F-22 Raptors or F-35s, or even Navy F/A-18 Hornets and Super Hornets.

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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For all its faults, no airplane has ever done as much for the Navy as a recruiting tool as did the Tomcat—not even the Blue Angels’ various mounts. The Blues never flew F-14s, which were far too expensive to maintain for a non­com­bat PR team, nor were their swing wings adaptable to close-order formations. In the year after the 1986 Tom Cruise film Top Gun was released, Navy recruitment jumped by 500 percent, and the sea service added an unexpected 16,000 uniformed personnel to its ranks. Every air-minded kid in the country wanted to grow up to fly a Tomcat. 

Like James Bond’s Aston Martin, the Tomcat’s cinematic notoriety considerably exceeded its real-world accomplishments. The program was canceled in 1991 after 712 units had been manufactured, versus 5,195 of its F-4 predecessor and 1,480 of the F/A-18 Hornet successor (both of which have flown in more than one U.S. military branch and multiple foreign services).

The demise of the Tomcat meant the end of Grum­man as an airframer. The company was bought by Northrop in 1994 and found itself in the space and electronics business, leaving the Navy with Boeing, which had merged with McDon­nell Douglas, as its sole-source fighter supplier.

No matter how many Top Gun fans proclaimed that the Tomcat was “so cool,” nothing could save even the much-improved F-14D. Proving once again that coolness is not a mission requirement.  

For further reading, contributing editor Stephan Wilkinson recommends: Grumman F-14 Tomcat Owners’ Workshop Manual, by Tony Holmes; F-14, by Mike Spick; Tomcat! The Grumman F-14 Story, by Rear Admiral Paul T. Gillcrist; and F-14 Tomcat, by David F. Brown.

A team of Tuskegee Airmen took top honors at the 1949 Air Force gunnery meet, only to have their trophy mysteriously disappear for 47 years.

Everybody knows the story of the Tuskegee Airmen—how they blew through the color barrier and became World War II’s only American black pilots and ground crews, how they flew hundreds of successful bomber escort missions with their red-tail P-51s, how they went home at war’s end and found racism in the U.S. still alive and well. End of story.

Actually, it isn’t. One of the least-known aspects of the Tuskegee saga is that their 332nd Fighter Group was reactivated in 1947, and continued to fly until June 1949 with a solid cadre of peacetime African-American pilots, most of whom were combat veterans, and ground support personnel. And most stunningly, that in May 1949 three black pilots from the 332nd took first place, as a team, at the U.S. Air Force’s very first postwar fighter weapons meet. It was called the United States Continental Gunnery Meet, and it would go on to become the famous USAF William Tell competition. The 332nd team was crowned the Air Force’s champion piston-engine gunnery, rocketry and fighter-bomber experts. (There was a separate division for jets—Lockheed F-80s and Republic F-84s in ’49.)

Unfortunately, the Tuskegee team’s trophy went missing, and until 1995 the winner in the propeller-driven division at that prestigious meet was listed in Air Force records as “unknown.” Some say it was a typical military screw-up, no harm intended. Others point to it as an obvious example of still-smoldering racism; the Air Force couldn’t bear to admit that “a bunch of Negroes” had won the competition.

It was stovepipe hot in Las Vegas in May 1949, but “the weather was perfect,” recalled Harry Stewart, a retired engineer and natural gas pipeline company executive from Bloomfield, Mich. Stewart was one of four members of the Tuskegee team. “The missions started very early in the morning—about 6 o’clock, because the thermals in the desert got pretty bad as the day went on, especially if you were doing low-level skip bombing or strafing.”

Stewart, who retired from the Air Force Reserves as a lieutenant colonel, was then a first lieutenant. His teammates were 1st Lt. James Harvey (also alive today) and Captain Alva Temple, plus one alternate in case a substitute pilot was needed, 1st Lt. Halbert Alexander.“There were six events,” said Stewart. “Aerial gunnery at 10,000 and 20,000 feet, skip bombing, rocketry, dive bombing and panel gunnery—strafing a 10-by-10-foot panel on the ground. In the aerial gunnery, we were shooting at a sleeve towed by a Douglas A-20.”

The 332nd’s airplanes were Republic P-47N Thunderbolts (redesignated F-47s), and James Harvey thinks they put the Tuskegee Airmen at a bit of a disadvantage against the North American F-51s, F-82 Twin Mustangs and Northrop F-61 Black Widows the other units flew.“The P-47 was obsolete, period,” said Harvey, of Denver, who had an extensive USAF career that among other high points made him the first black jet pilot to fly combat over Korea. “The Air Force was getting rid of them, going into jets. The Thunderbolts were going to the Air National Guard. When they reactivated the 332nd in ’47, they picked up P-47Ns out of storage in Oklahoma City and brought them to Lockbourne Air Force Base, in Ohio, where we were stationed. My job for a long time was ferrying P-47s.”

Stewart, however, was fond of the old Jug. “It was just as good for what we were doing with it as the P-51,” he said. “The P-47N was the final model. They were designed specifically for the war in the Pacific, with a souped-up engine, fuel tanks in the wings and they even had an autopilot. They had a range of 13 hours and were designed to fly from Okinawa to the Japanese mainland, escorting B-29s. That was probably going to be the 332nd’s next mission, had the war not ended.”

One thing the P-47 was particularly good at was skip bombing, since it had found its métier in Europe as a fighter-bomber. “We had the most fun with the skip bombing,” Harvey said. “We had a perfect score. Three missions, two bombs per plane. No, you didn’t guess at where to skip the bomb to hit the target; we didn’t guess at anything—we were good,” he said, laughing. “We’d come in with our prop tips about a foot off the ground, and the instant the target disappeared under the nose, we’d punch off the bomb. Let it go and pull up.”

Harvey wasn’t kidding about the low altitudes. Each team was allowed to bring four airplanes, in case one of the three team planes experienced a mechanical failure, and the 332nd used their spare. “One of our pilots ran onto a stanchion that held up the skip-bombing target,” said Stewart. “It was an iron pipe, and it ripped a hole in the belly of the P-47. That plane had to be taken out of action.”

Both Stewart and Harvey credited their ground crews as equal winners of the competition.“It was a competition between the support crews as well as the pilots,” Stewart said. “It was up to them to keep those airplanes tuned so we could meet each of our missions. If the ground crews couldn’t keep up, we’d have to default. We came back from our missions about noon, and the ground crews started to work on the airplanes. They worked late into the evening to get those ships ready for us the next morning.” Stewart explained that the guns were “harmonized” after every flight, carefully bore-sighted and aligned to provide the exact bullet pattern that each pilot wanted, in case vibration or recoil had slightly displaced the guns. (The F-47s had eight .50-caliber guns, and since the F-51s and F-82s had only six, two of each Jug’s .50-cals were disarmed to even the odds.)

“Our ground crews were so good that when they broke our fighter group up in ’49 and scattered us to squadrons all over the world, our group commander got more requests for his maintenance people than anybody else,” recalled Harvey. “They were the best in the Air Force.”

Oddly, Harvey and Stewart remember the mood of the meet entirely differently, which perhaps shows that racism can be perceived and imagined, as well as being irrefutably experienced.

“We had no contact with the white pilots,” Harvey said, his voice making it clear that he’s still simmering. “They just ignored us. Nobody talked to us, period. After the weapons meet, they had this big banquet at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. They took our pictures with the trophy, and they told us goodbye. They were having a big to-do for the winners of the meet, but we didn’t get to participate.”

“No, I don’t recall that at all,” said Stewart. “The white pilots were polite, cordial, not condescending. We didn’t do too much socializing with them, though we did with our brother fighter pilots from the Ninth Air Force, the 4th Fighter Group. They were white, flying F-80s in the jet division. We had trained at some of the same fields, so we had an ongoing rapport with one another.” He takes pride in the fact that the 4th Group won the jet class, making it a clean sweep for the Ninth Air Force.

“It wasn’t a coincidence that the two class winners came from the same air force,” Stewart continued. “It was a tactical air force, and we were constantly training. We spent two months twice a year down at Eglin AFB, in Florida, practicing gunnery and ground support. When we competed against the rest of those guys, the extent of our training came through. I don’t think it was any inherent superiority.

“As I remember, we went to the final banquet. As far as on-base activities went, in no way were we excluded from anything.” But Las Vegas itself was not so accommodating; a group of 332nd enlisted personnel had been kicked out of the Flamingo—no blacks allowed—days earlier.

Stewart’s memories are given added weight by his account of the competition’s one tragedy: “We had a double fatality out there, in an F-82, and one of them was one of our crew chiefs, a fellow named Austin. He had asked the F-82 pilot, who was white, if he could take a ride with him in the empty second cockpit. It was the guy’s first dive-bombing attempt, and he failed to pull out in time.” Horrific as the outcome was, a white officer pilot agreeing to take a black enlisted man for a joyride hardly speaks of racial discrimination.

Stewart also pointed out that though the fighter weapons meet was a team competition, the highest-scoring individual pilot was white. “We were outgunned in the strafing category by a P-51,” he admitted. “Our points leader at the time was Captain Alva Temple. He was amassing a tremendous score until panel gunnery came along. Temple was set to be the top gun until this fellow from the 82^nd Fighter Group named [1st Lt. William W.] Crawford came along, and he shot an uncanny score on strafing. To give credit where it’s due, Crawford got the top individual score, and Temple came in second.”

Through the efforts of former Tuskegee Airmen and other enthusiasts, the 1949 U.S. Continental Gunnery Meet trophy was finally unearthed, in 1996, in a storeroom at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force. It is currently on permanent display at the museum. “There’s a story there that we’ll never know,” said Stewart. “Some people attribute it to racial bias, but I don’t feel that way myself. I think it was just a military screw-up.”

After the gunnery meet, Harvey went on to fly F-80s out of Misawa AFB, in Japan, during the Korean War. The story of his arrival at Misawa recalls a classic line from the film In the Heat of the Night, which starred Sidney Poitier as Virgil Tibbs, a Philadelphia police detective caught in the middle of a murder investigation in a small Mississippi town. “So what do they call you up there in Philadelphia?” the redneck sheriff asks Poitier. “They call me Mister Tibbs,” Poitier snarls. When Harvey arrived at his new unit, the wing commander, who had never in his life seen a black pilot, said, “So what should we call you?”

“How about Lieutenant Harvey,” he said.

Even James Harvey might not have believed that during his lifetime there would be a man who could say, “You can call me President Obama.” The Tuskegee Airmen played a substantial part in making sure that would happen.

A Tuskegee Airman Drops in on Loretta Lynn

Thirteen months before the Las Vegas fighter weapons meet, Lieu­tenant Harry Stewart had already established his own small niche in Air Force history. Returning from Shaw AFB in South Carolina to the 332nd Fighter Group’s base in Ohio, VFR on top of solid clouds, Stewart ran into a boomer—a thunderstorm that overwhelmed his ability to fly an F-47 on instruments while dealing with lightning, express-elevator air currents and rain pounding his canopy. Stewart said the hell with it, cranked the canopy back and bailed out. He hit the vertical stabilizer hard, shattering one leg, pulled the D-ring and floated down through the undercast.

“When I came out of the clouds, I saw a couple of hills and a valley, and I tried to steer the chute like I remembered being told you were supposed to do, toward what looked like a good landing spot,” Stewart said. “I nearly collapsed the chute and decided to leave well enough alone. Landed in some pine trees and ended up hanging about two feet above the ground. Got myself down and crawled under a rock overhang. It was still raining hard.”

Stewart had landed in Butcher Hollow, Ky. (Cue Loretta Lynn: “Well, I was born a coal miner’s daughter, in a cabin on a hill in Butcher Holler…”) His empty airplane hit the ground about 100 yards from Lynn’s birthplace.

In 1948, in hardscrabble rural Kentucky, for a black man this wasn’t much different from landing behind enemy lines. In fact, the incredible rumor eventually spread that “a Negro” had stolen a B-52 and was shot down by F-84 Thunderjets while making a bombing run on the town. “It wasn’t long before I heard a voice hallo-ing, and a man showed up on a horse. His daughter had seen my parachute. When he saw me, he took a deep breath, and so did I, and we stared at each other awhile. He took me to his farm on another horse he’d brought along, and his wife was out in the yard washing clothes in a big cauldron.

“She went into the house, came out with a clean white sheet and began tearing it into bandages. It was quite a gesture on her part, since I’m sure they didn’t have any spare sheets. She washed my leg and bandaged it.

“I was in pain at the time, and her husband came out of the house with a glass of what looked like water. I’d given up drinking for Lent—I came down on Palm Sunday—and I put the glass to my nose and smelled the moonshine, gave it back to him and said no thanks. He gave me a hard look and said, ‘You better drink that.’ I didn’t know if it was a threat or because he thought I needed it for the pain, but I wasn’t going to argue with him. I downed it, and I don’t think any quantity of cocaine or morphine could have done better for the hurt.”

Some years ago, Stewart was invited back to Butcher Hollow—the township is actually named Van Lear—as the marshal of the Homecoming Day parade. “I met Loretta Lynn’s family, went out to the home where she was born. They treated me royally.”

For the past two years, Stephan Wilkinson has been a youth mentor for the Maj. Gen. Irene Trowell-Harris Chapter of the Tuskegee Airmen, Inc. He teaches classes in flying, aviation history and writing in the chapter’s Red Tail Youth Flying Program at Stewart Airport, in Newburgh, N.Y. For more on the chapter, which not only operates the flying program with a Cessna 172 but also awards $10,000 annually in tuition-assistance grants to college-bound Hudson Valley high school seniors, go to www.tai-ny.org. James Harvey has an extensive website dealing with the Airmen’s involvement in the gunnery competition, www.tuskegeetopgun.com.

Originally published in the March 2012 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe, click here.