U.S. Navy Aircraft History

One of the many interesting presentations at the Joint Fighter Conference held at NAS Patuxent River, MD in October 1944 concerned the Navy’s upcoming transition from the .50-calibre machine gun to the 20 mm cannon for fighter armament. It was given by Commander J.P. Monroe, head of the armament branch of the Bureau of Aeronautics.

A dive-bomber, the SB2C Helldiver, was the first U.S. Navy carrier based airplane to become operational with cannon, two replacing the four .50-caliber machine guns.

There were teething problems but none were serious relative to the perceived benefits of the larger round and firing mechanism. The Navy was also procuring the F4U-1C with four 20 mm cannon (the “C” suffix probably did not stand for cannon armament per se but was simply the next designation change letter; see http://thanlont.blogspot.com/2013/06/navy-aircraft-designation-suffixes.html).

Commander Monroe noted that, from a gun “horsepower” standpoint, one 20 mm cannon was equivalent to three .50-caliber machine guns. “The 20 will go through .75 inch of armor at 500 yards, while the .50 cal will go through only .43.” He also noted that the cannon barrel was not as susceptible to being damaged with long bursts like the machine gun’s.

There were disadvantages, of course. He noted that the time of flight of the 20 mm shell was longer, .75 second for 500 yards as compared to .62 second for a .50 caliber bullet. The 20 mm installation was also heavier, “one half as much ammunition for the same weight.” The standard of 400 rounds of ammunition for each gun (30 seconds) could therefore not be maintained so only 200 rounds of 20 mm ammunition could be provided per gun. Nevertheless, “The 20 is lethal enough to get far more results out of that 200 rounds than the .50 ever will get out of the 400 rounds.”

Only 200 F4U-1Cs were bought and the F4U-4 retained the six .50-caliber armament configuration, primarily due to ongoing reliability problems with the original Hispano-Suiza cannon. However, the problems were corrected so a handful of F4U-4s were produced with cannon as the F4U-4B (the suffix now designating an armament change, not built for the British) and cannon were standard on the F4U-5.

The Navy’s last propeller-driven fighter, the F8F Bearcat, was initially produced with only four .50-caliber machine guns. However, during production of the -1s, the armament was changed to four 20-mm cannon. The change was externally evident by the longer barrels and the bulges required over the chambers. The cannon were standard on the F8F-2 so no B suffix was required.

The Navy’s first jet, the McDonnell FH-1 Phantom, was produced with four .50-caliber machine guns. The North American FJ-1 Fury was delivered with six. However, the Navy's third jet fighter, the Vought F6U Pirate was armed with four 20 mm cannon, as were all subsequent Navy fighters up through the Vought F8U Crusader.

When the Navy procured the North American F-86 Sabre as a carrier-based fighter, it required the substitution of 20 mm cannon in addition to the changes required for operation to and from aircraft carriers. The armament change was evaluated in the one-off XFJ-2B BuNo 133756, the B suffix again denoting an armament change.

Note that the airplane had nothing in common with the two XFJ-2s other than F-86 parts. It was basically an F-86 with four 20 mm cannon, a Navy gun sight, and a modified windscreen.

The Air Force somewhat belatedly realized the need to transition to 20 mm, a change accelerated by combat experience during the Korean War.

Once upon a time, when I was a preteen, I lived with my mother and stepfather in the Philippine Islands. He was assigned as the Assistant Public Works Officer at Naval Air Station Sangley Point, which was on a small peninsula located on the south side of Manila Bay adjacent to the town of Cavite. The runway had been built in early 1945, following the retaking of the area from the Japanese in World War II. It wasn't a very big air station, with almost 50% being the runway, taxiway, and parking areas...

Cdr T.L. Bigley USNR-TAR

In addition to having a runway, Sangley provided a base for Navy seaplanes that patrolled the area.

Cdr T.L. Bigley USNR-TAR

Sangley provided tow-target services to ships and airplanes of the Seventh Fleet operating near Manila Bay.

T.H.Thomason

Another valuable service was providing temporary parking at Sangley's west end for the air group of a carrier when it visited Manila Bay for R&R. This freed up the carrier's deck and hangar for maintenance and cleaning, in addition to providing more room for maintenance on the airplanes themselves, albeit al fresco in most cases.

Cdr G.W. Gregory Jr.

(When we first arrived at Sangley, there were many French Corsairs parked in the west end, having been ferried in from Vietnam following the fall of Dien Bien Phu in early 1954. A French aircraft carrier eventually showed up to take them away.)

Navy aircraft carriers would also offload airplanes at Sangley that were too badly damaged for repair aboard. These would come in by lighter for temporary storage until a ship came by that was headed back to the states.

I spent many happy hours watching the Cougars, Skyraiders, Banshees, etc. taking off and landing since the runway was only a few hundred feet from our house and no one seemed to care if I sat in the grass 50 feet or so off the taxiway. One memorable occasion was when Princeton parked many of its VS-21 S2Fs at Sangley in early 1956 for a week.

I made friends with one of the pilots and got to sit in an S2F with my mother.

Equally memorable was that I got to fly an S2F, a Turbo Firecat conversion with turboprop engines, almost 40 years later courtesy of the great folks at Conair. (See http://www.cascadeaerospace.com/products/Turbo%20Firecat/)

You probably haven't heard of NAS Sangley Point. While my stepfather was stationed there, NAS Cubi Point at Subic Bay was established and Sangley became a Naval Station in accordance with a treaty with the Philippines that stipulated there would only be one Naval Air Station, per se. It continued to be an active and important U.S. Navy base until it was turned over to the Philippine government in 1971.

Although I had been enamored with airplanes since I could remember, the two years at NAS Sangley between 1954 and 1956 (and one of the great airplane movies, The Bridges at Toko-Ri) convinced me that I wanted to be a Naval aviator, even if it did mean dying in a ditch in Korea. That, alas, was not to be because of my poor eyesight but I did the best I could under the circumstances.

One of the discrepancies that I couldn't resolve before my F7U-1 monograph went to press was the frequently reported first flight date of 29 September 1948 versus a contemporaneous mention of a short flight on 27 September. In my F7U-1 monograph, I wrote "For some reason, (the XF7U-1's first flight on 27 September) only lasted six minutes." In the September 2013 issue of the Smithsonian Air&Space magazine, a letter by a Navy civilian flight test engineer Martin A. Snyder described the flight: "As soon as it lifted off the ground, it started to violently pitch nose up and down. We all were sure that the airplane couldn't fly. However, Baker managed to maintain a semblance of control, came around, and successfully landed. The airplane was towed to the hangar for inspection. We later found out that the longitudinal instability had nothing to do with the aerodynamics. The pitch trim control was a conventional thumb-operated slide switch on top of the control stick, and the switch had been wired backward: When the pilot wanted nose-up trim he got nose-down and vice versa."

I just talked to Martin on the phone and he sounds really sharp, not even allowing for his being 87 years old. I'm sending him a copy of my monograph in hopes that he can provide more information on the early flight test of the Cutlass.

One of the problems with basing jet airplanes on aircraft carriers was their lack of endurance. Roughly speaking, compared to a propeller-driven airplane a jet launched carrying more than twice as much fuel and yet had only half the endurance. As a result, carrier operations assumed that when jet airplanes were launched, they were going to be back in less than two hours. If the weather turned bad or the deck became fouled, things got awkward for jet pilots pretty quickly. If there had been any jets aloft in September 1953 during a joint exercise between the U.S. and Royal Canadian Navy's when the carriers involved were beset by fog, they would have all wound up having to ditch. The ability of a propeller-driven airplane to sip fuel eventually resulted in all the airplanes being recovered. For one account, click here.

Inflight refueling was developed primarily to extend the range of bombers but it was soon obvious that it could be used to extend the endurance of a jet airplane if required. Douglas developed a "buddy" store that could be carried on a standard pylon. Its Model D-704 was based on the 400-gallon version of the bomb and tank shape it had developed for low drag. In addition to 300 gallons of fuel, it contained fuel transfer and hydraulic pumps driven by a nose-mounted propeller and a reel that could stream about 40 feet of hose with a drogue on the end. Fuel could be transferred at the rate of 200 gallons per minute.

This is an illustration of the very similar Sargeant-Fletcher refueling pod which replaced the D-704.

The popularity of the AJ Savage, the Navy's first nuclear bomber that could be landed aboard the carrier, increased significantly for Pacific carrier deployments when it was equipped with an inflight refueling capability.

However, the big AJ was still awkward to have on the ship and somewhat of an overkill for the purpose of providing one or two thousand pounds of fuel in extenuating circumstances around the boat. An airplane already in the air group was preferred. At the time, jets were not good candidates for the mission since they couldn't carry much more fuel than they needed for a standard deck cycle.

The tanker of choice in the late 1950s was therefore the AD Skyraider. It was just fast enough to refuel the jets (200 knots indicated was recommended but the AD could go as fast as 300 knots in a descent if necessary) and could carry plenty of jet fuel in addition to its internal bag of aviation gasoline that was enough for a two-hour cycle time.

The disparity of speed performance isn't as apparent in the picture above because the F8U Crusader pilot could raise his wing for low speed flight. However, this F3H Demon pilot is hanging in there with only the slats out.

The AD had to be modified for the mission if more than the 300 gallons in the buddy pod were to be transferred. AD-6 BuNo 139744 and subsequent and all AD-7s were delivered from Douglas with the full tanker capability. Some earlier AD-6s and a few AD-4Bs (the nuclear-capable Skyraiders) were retrofitted with it. Two different configurations would be utilized, "basic" (near ship) and extended range. Both involved the use of 400-gallon drop tanks (the AD normally carried 150 or 300-gallon external tanks) that were modified with a fuel boost-pump kit.

In the basic configuration, jet fuel was carried in both 400-gallon drop tanks and the 300-gallon capacity refueling store, for a total of almost 7,500 lbs of giveaway fuel. The AD pilot would remain at a 145-nm station for 30 minutes using only its 380 gallons of internal fuel. (With the maximum amount of jet fuel on board, the AD was just under its maximum gross weight.)

In the extended range configuration, the left drop tank contained jet fuel and the right, aviation gasoline. The additional gasoline allowed the AD pilot to fly considerably farther out and for longer. However, one or the other configuration had to be selected prior to flight and care taken to insure that the proper fuel was loaded in each tank. While jets could burn just about anything in a pinch (the first jet engines burned aviation gasoline), a piston engine would stop running completely if fed jet fuel, which was basically kerosene.

Thanks to Ed Barthlemes, my go-to guy for Skyraider stuff, for much of the above.

Although much maligned, the F7U Cutlass racked up a number of firsts or close seconds for Navy jet fighter airplanes. If Westinghouse had delivered engines with the thrust and fuel consumption that Vought and the Navy were expecting, its reputation might not have suffered so badly. Of course, the Navy would also have had to institute a more formal checkout program (NATOPS) and introduce the angled deck and descending carrier approach sooner. For more, see my monograph on the F7U-1 and my book on the development of U.S. Navy jet fighters.

The F7U-3 was so late to the fleet and disappointing that the Navy made it a one-tour airplane, which meant that few went through a repair and overhaul depot after their initial operational use. Vought also incorporated some light but not very durable structure in the design, such as "metallite", a sandwich of balsa wood between thin sheets of aluminum, and magnesium skins/fittings. Both were prone to deterioration.

So it's somewhat surprising that there are any survivors on display or being refurbished for display. A few, of course, succumbed over time. There are fond memories of gate guards at NAS New Orleans and NAS Jacksonville (the designated repair and overhaul facility for the F7U-3) and playgrounds at the Wheaton Regional Park in Maryland and Holiday Park in Fort Lauderdale (BuNos 129722 and 129582 respectively, the latter last seen at Fort Lauderdale's Executive Airport). However, all these were eventually scrapped.

There are, however, still a handful, a few of which are likely to avoid becoming aluminum cans for many more years.

BuNo 128451: The very first F7U-3, it was rescued from a Navy dump at Socorro, New Mexico for display at the Fred E. Weisbroad Aviation Museum in Pueblo, Colorado. Never restored and in poor condition, the airframe was transferred to the USS Midway Museum in San Diego, California for prospective use in their rebuild of BuNo 129565. However, because it was the prototype, very little of the structure was of use and it has been returned to the Navy for disposition.

BuNo 129554: It ended its Navy career at Geiger Field in Spokane, Washington (now Spokane's International Airport) as a maintenance trainer. It was purchased in May 1958 by Len Berryman and displayed outside the Berryman War Memorial Park in Bridgeport, Washington until mid 1992 when it was sold to Tom Cathcart, who intended to restore it to flying condition. It was in restoration at the Museum of Flight in Everett, Washington for several years and looked to be in very good if incomplete condition when it was offered for sale on eBay in late 2011.

BuNo 129565: It was on display for many years at Olathe, Kansas. It was then transferred to the USS Hornet (CV-12) Museum at the former NAS Alameda in California for restoration. However, before that could be accomplished, it was transferred to the USS Midway (CV-41) Museum in San Diego, California. Some work was accomplished before it was moved to Grand Prairie, Texas in December 2011 for the Vought Heritage Foundation to complete the restoration as they have done for other historic Vought aircraft like the V-173 and F6U. This F7U-3 is expected to be back in San Diego for display aboard Midway in mid 2014.

BuNo 129622: So far, it has survived the fate of both playground duty and post-playground duty dissection. It ended its Navy career at NAS Glenview, Illinois and was transferred to the Northbrook East Civic Association. After children at Oaklane Elementary School played on it for some years, the forward fuselage became part of Earl Reinart's Victory Air Museum in Mundelein, Illinois while the rest of the airframe (apparently still having the engines installed!) went to J-46 engine dragster builder Fred Sibley in Elkhart, Indiana. The airframe components were subsequently reunited in the collection of noted F7U historian Al Casby in Phoenix, Arizona.

BuNo 129642: It was flown to NAS Willow Grove in May 1957 by VA-12 for static display at an airshow and stricken there to be a maintenance trainer. It is still on display there at the Wings of Freedom Aviation Museum.

BuNo 129655: It was rescued after several years of outdoor display at the Travel Town Museum at Griffith Park, Los Angeles, California and restored to seemingly like-new condition at the National Museum of Naval Aviation at NAS Pensacola, Florida.

Don Hinton Photo

BuNo 129685: Walter Soplata bought this F7U-3 from NART South Weymouth, Massachusetts for his collection at Newbury, Ohio. Like many of the airplanes on his famous farm, it appears complete although suffering from exposure to the elements.

More later...

Kim Simmelink left a comment on my original Texaco post (http://thanlont.blogspot.com/2013/10/texaco.html) asking about a McDonnell refueling pod. As it turns out, that was a Beech pod but more about that later.

The original post didn't delve much into the Navy's development of inflight refueling of jets. One of the first inflight evaluations involved the North American AJ Savage, with an XAJ-1 being modified to replace the jet engine in the aft fuselage with a refueling reel, hose, and drogue.

North American apparently proposed an AJ-2 in this configuration but it would appear that the extra speed provided by the jet engine was considered to be of more benefit than reducing the available volume in the bomb bay.

Note that the drogue was still a rigid, all-metal cone.

This was soon replaced by the collapsible and presumably lighter shuttlecock-type drogue that was probably more stable in trail than the all-metal cone.

As reported in the original Texaco post, Douglas developed the grandfather of what is now the standard externally mounted refueling store but there were alternatives. McDonnell developed a pod for the F3H that the Navy didn't buy.

Vought also proposed one for the F7U/A2U program but it probably failed to even reach the hardware stage as a result of the Navy's loss of enthusiasm for the Cutlass. Only North American's design was deployed on the tanker buddy of its FJ-4B alternative to the A4D Skyhawk for nuclear weapon delivery. (Either the North American version was fielded as a backup up to the Douglas D-704 store, consistent with the Navy's belt and suspenders approach to aircraft development at the time, or the low-wing configuration of the FJ-4 precluded the use of the Douglas store.)

Note that the right external store contained the drogue. The matching left-hand store was also equipped with an air-driven pump to transfer its fuel to the right-hand store.

Attempts were made to increase the vertical separation between the tanker and the receiver with booms. The A3D was evaluated with one. It proved unsatisfactory.

External stores with this feature were also developed. This one being considered by the Air Force, here hung on an F-84F, was evaluated by NATC in 1958, only a year or so after the Douglas buddy pod was introduced in the fleet.

Beech also developed a similar pod beginning circa 1960, leasing a civil-register Douglas A-26 as the tanker. It was evaluated by the Navy in 1961, here with an A3J*.

NATC also hung the Beech pod under an F4H, presumably to evaluate it at higher speeds than achievable by the A-26, with the following picture prompting Kim's question.

None of these boom-type solutions proved to be superior overall to the simpler original concept of simply trailing the drogue out the back of a pylon-mounted pod that is still the standard today, almost 60 years after its introduction.

However, the Air Force did introduce a similar arrangement in order to provide drogue-refueling capability from its boom-equipped tankers. As originally implemented on the KC-135, it was referred to, not fondly, as the Iron Maiden. For an illustration and excellent firsthand description of refueling from it, I highly recommend that you read this: http://www.neptunuslex.com/2005/08/13/rhythms-part-xviii/

*The A3J-1 itself served briefly as a tanker, notably on its deployment on Independence.

The refueling store was located in the tunnel which existed to house the nuclear store and jettisonable fuel tanks.

For some reason, I put my post about the successful landing of the X-47B aboard a carrier at sea over on my modeling blog, http://tailspintopics.blogspot.com/2013/07/well-that-was-special.html

My other two posts on this subject were on this blog:

http://thanlont.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-first-launch-of-unmanned-aircraft.html

http://thanlont.blogspot.com/2011/07/look-no-hands.html

One interesting aspect of the control of the X-47B when it is on deck is that there are two guys, the primary and a backup (in this case Northrop Grumman test pilots), with the remote control hardware; they send commands to the X-47 to stop, to, turn, fold/unfold wings, etc. in accordance with the hand signals from the usual plane director in the yellow shirt just as if they were in the cockpit.

The taxi controller:

For some reason, I had missed getting this small book until this past week, perhaps because the title, Crossing the Line: A BlueJacket's Odyssey in World War II, sounded like a seaman's memoir about crossing the equator, almost certainly on a non-aviation ship.

As it turns out, it is a sailor's memoir but one involving significant wartime events in U.S. Navy carrier aviation. The author, Alvin Kernan, joined the Navy in March 1941 at a teenager looking to leave a small ranch in Wyoming. He selected Ordnance as a specialty and eventually shipped out with Torpedo Six aboard Enterprise, just in time to be aboard for its return to a devastated Pearl Harbor on 8 December 1941. He soon got on flight status as a turret gunner on a Grumman TBF and eventually had to abandon the first aircraft carrier to be named Hornet when it was sunk during the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. More heroically, he won a Navy Cross (very unusual for an enlisted man) on the night mission that resulted in the death of Navy Ace Butch O'Hare, in spite of the fact that he might have (but probably didn't) hit O'Hare while firing at a Japanese Betty behind him.

Mustering out after World War II, he used the GI Bill to go to college and a academic career as an Ivy League professor of literature. As a result, he knows how to write about his wartime experience. If you want to read a gritty, well-written, and insightful memoir about Navy carrier aviation from the standpoint of a deckhand and turret gunner, buy this book. Note that there have been at least two editions, with the first published by the Naval Institute in 1994. The one pictured above that I read this week was published in 2007 by Yale and includes a few corrections and new material that came to the attention of the author as a result of comments on the first edition by his former shipmates and knowledgeable readers.

Kernan also wrote The Unknown Battle of Midway, which I did have in my library. It has received mixed reviews for accuracy and ill-informed opinions/statements (see Amazon) but is a pretty good read. (The very best book about the Battle of Midway is probably Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway.)

In late 2011, I wrote about the F-35C's problems with arresting landings as part of a summary history of the practice. See http://thanlont.blogspot.com/2011/12/brief-history-of-tailhook-design.html

The testing in question occurred in early 2011, not "2012" as recently reported in USNI News (http://news.usni.org/2013/12/23/navys-f-35-starts-new-tailhook-tests).

If you read between the lines as I had intended, you would have thought that the fix would not be a big deal. It may not have been, but only now, more than two years later, is the Navy reporting an initial success:

Lockheed Martin Photo

I'm not sure that this was the first arrestment in the recent past, but this one reportedly occurred at Pax River on 19 December 2013. The airplane will now go up to the Naval Air Engineering Station at Lakehurst, New Jersey for an extended evaluation beginning in January.

In an interview published in Defense News in January 2012 (http://www.defensenews.com/article/20120117/DEFREG02/301170010/F-35C-Tailhook-Design-Blamed-Landing-Issues), the Lockheed Martin program manager projected that the Lakehurst testing would take place in the second quarter of 2103, with at-sea trials in the summer of 2013.

I thought his prognostication sounded about right...

I've mentioned composite squadrons and detachments before. See http://thanlont.blogspot.com/2012/12/hellcats-on-cves.html for a summary description of WW II composite squadrons and http://thanlont.blogspot.com/2009/11/air-groups-and-markings-in-transition.html for a brief discussion of detachments from a markings standpoint.

These units arose from the need to properly manage much smaller groups of airplanes and people than assigned to the existing squadrons in a carrier air group. For example, the first helicopter deployments aboard carriers typically only involved two aircraft and a handful of personnel. As a result, two helicopter utility squadrons were formed, one (HU-1) based on the west coast and one (HU-2) on the east coast, that supplied detachments to aircraft carriers, cruisers, etc. These were big squadrons from the standpoint of aircraft, naval aviators, and maintainers. (They were reportedly even overstaffed, as some naval aviators were reluctant to transition from props to jets and sought an alternative assignment in the burgeoning need for helicopter pilots.)

HU-1 used the tail code UP:

HU-2 was assigned UR:

Similarly, so-called composite squadrons were formed to provide small detachments of specialized mission airplanes (night attack, night fighter, airborne early warning, reconnaissance, etc.) to deploying air groups. These were different in usage from the World War II composite squadrons, which deployed as a unit.

One example is VC-35, which was eventually redesignated VA(AW)-35. As the subsequent designation indicates, it was an all-weather squadron. However, initially it was assigned more missions than simply attack, including ASW, hence the use of C for composite. During the Korean War, it provided detachments to attack carrier air groups deploying from the west coast, flying AD-4Bs, AD-4Ns, and NLs with the squadron tail code NR.

These consisted of VAN (airplane/attack/night) teams of four airplanes, six officers, and 40 enlisted men. There were usually five or six VAN teams deployed at any one time. The squadron itself consisted of more than 100 officers and 650 enlisted men.

Another example is VFP-62, the east coast photo-reconnaissance squadron. It was assigned tail code GA.

Note that by this time, the early 1960s, the tail code on the detachment airplane was changed to that of the air group it deployed with.

In October 1962, VFP-62 had 29 RF-8As (redesignated from F8U-1P the month before) assigned, 20 of which were deployed with seven detachments. Seven of the remainder were flyable when the squadron was tasked with providing photo-reconnaissance of suspected ballistic missile sites in Cuba with an eighth detachment of eight airplanes. The squadron rose to the occasion and received a Presidential Unit Citation, along with a four-RF-8A VMCJ-2 detachment, personally presented by President Kennedy.

For much more on the missions flown by VFP-62 and VMCJ-2 over Cuba, see http://www.vfp62.com/cuban.html

Anybody can find their way nowadays with GPS, even back to a carrier far at sea, never having caught sight of land. It took considerably more skill in World War II, although the naval aviator was provided with electronic tools to do so.

For more on each of these tools, see http://tailspintopics.blogspot.com/2014/01/world-war-ii-navy-carrier-airplane.html

However, if all else (or simply the electricity) failed, the pilot had a fallback, his plotting board. (The pilot also needed to be sure that he didn't fly farther from the carrier than he had fuel for the return; none of his electronic aids provided that information.)

This is famed John A. Flatley, about to man his F6F with his plotting board under his arm.

It was removable, like a kitchen drawer, sliding in and out of a slot in the lower side of the instrument panel.

A circular slide rule, fondly known as a whiz wheel, was mounted in the lower right-hand corner of the plotting board. This was used to calculate ground speed, fuel burn, etc. The big circular grid was used to plot the carrier's projected track and the airplane's actual track. A plastic cover allowed the pilot to mark on the board and erase it for subsequent use.

Before takeoff, the pilots would be briefed on the carrier's intended course and speed and the forecast wind aloft at various altitudes. Since missions might last three hours or more, the carrier might be long gone and out of sight relative to its position at takeoff. Wind aloft was also critical because airplanes, like balloons, drift with the wind and do not necessarily go in the direction that they are headed or at the speed being flown through the air.

After takeoff, the pilot could resort to the same navigation technique of captains on sailing ships in centuries past, keeping close track of airspeed, heading, and time at the different speeds and heading, the manual equivalent of an inertial navigation system. Wind aloft then had to be factored in to determine the ground speed, track, and distance made good. (Pilots were taught how to estimate the strength and direction of the wind from various clues like the appearance of the waves.)

The result was a continuous record of the approximate position of the airplane relative to that of the aircraft carrier. When the time came to return, a course back to home plate could quickly be determined.

Of course, the pilot might not know exactly where he had been, since a lot of maneuvering might have been involved so his plot was not complete or accurate, the wind might have been different from forecast and checking it not possible, etc. The carrier also might not have made good its intended plan of movement. So if the carrier was not in sight when he got to where he thought it was, he would execute an expanding square search.

The Brits considered the workload and degree of difficulty in finding the way back to the carrier to be so high that their front-line fighter at the start of World War II, the Fairey Fulmar, had a two-man crew, pilot and navigator.

On or about the time that jets were introduced, the plotting boards were removed and no longer required in favor of knee boards and presumably an increased reliance on the electronic aids.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-navy-jet-suit-20140125,0,4137919.story#axzz2ryLV5DCe

For my previous posts on the tortuous path of the settlement through the courts and negotiations:

http://thanlont.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-12-avenger-ii-program-end-is-near.html

For a Naval Aviation News article on the A-12 Avenger when it still had a bright future, albeit for only a matter of weeks, see:
http://www.history.navy.mil/nan/backissues/1990s/1990/nd90.pdf

This is an illustration from that article:

More Ordnance! Farther! And Stealthy!

Unfortunately, the Navy lost credibility with the Secretary of Defense with respect to the program's cost and schedule and the airplane's weight and capability, which resulted in its cancellation in early January 1991.*

Instead of this great leap forward in carrier-based strike, the Navy eventually decided to buy the F-18E/F and a player to be named later, UCLASS (Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike).

*For a very detailed account of the A-12 program's rise and fall, see The $5 Billion Misunderstanding by James P. Stevenson. For a much shorter and more readable one, buy my book, Strike from the Sea (see the sidebar).

The amount of organization information displayed on U.S. Navy carrier aircraft underwent some interesting changes between the Korean War and the Vietnam War. For example, the F2H-2 Banshee in the early 1950s displayed the branch of service (Navy), a tail code (F) that represented the air group it was assigned to, and a three digit number on the nose, the first of which indicated in this case that it was an airplane in the first squadron in the air group.

Toward the late 1950s, the basic color scheme had changed from overall blue to gray over white and identification of the squadron that the airplane was assigned to was generally being marked on it, as shown on this VF-61 F3H.

Finally, in the early 1960s, the name of the carrier to which the air group was nominally assigned was usually added to the markings, as in the first F4H deployment, which was VF-102 on Enterprise.

I hadn't paid much attention to when the carrier name first began to appear on the airplanes, although it was clear that there was a time when it wasn't and then it was. I found the answer by happenstance in an excellent monograph by Angelo Romano, NAVA 1 Naval Air Weapons Meet, 1956-1959.

These meets were competitions between selected east coast and west coast fighter and attack squadrons (fighters only the first year) for aerial gunnery (fighter) and bombing accuracy (attack). They were held annually from 1956 through 1959 and then never again.

This monograph is beautifully illustrated with high-quality reproductions, many in color, of images taken by noted aviation photographer William L. Swisher at the competitions in each of the four years.

It can be purchased here, http://www.aeroslides.com/modelpublishing/book-store.html. Also note the availability of an illustrated history of Carrier Air Wing One: Part Two 1957-1973, which is also highly recommended, at a discount if you buy it along with NAVA 1. (Too bad for you that NAVA 2 is sold out, at least from Model Publishing, if you don't have it.)

What caught my eye was that in the fourth and last year of the competition, the name of the carrier that each east coast squadron was assigned to was prominently marked in red on the aft fuselage, apparently specifically for this event.

I don't know whether the Commander Naval Air Forces Atlantic decreed the addition for the morale benefit to the ships company or the east coast squadrons got together and decided to do it for their esprit de corps but in any event, the added marking became almost immediately fashionable on both coasts.

While in the process of preparing a set of notes and illustrations about the F4U-4 configuration changes, I was somewhat surprised to find that the cannon-armed variant was designated both F4U-4B, the one I am familiar with, and F4U-4C, which didn't ring a bell right away other than C has been taken to mean a modification to add cannon armament, as in F4U-1C, SB2C -1C, and as it turns out, F8F-1C. My first thought was that the F4U-4C designation might be bogus until I discovered this photograph of BuNo 97448 in my files. It is clearly cannon-armed and almost certainly fresh off the Vought production line at Stratford, CT.

This is a closeup of the markings on the vertical fin; you may have to take my word for it, but F4U-4C is marked on the rudder:

I have written about the confusing conflation of Navy designation suffix meanings used during different time periods (see http://thanlont.blogspot.com/2013/06/navy-aircraft-designation-suffixes.html). Basically, the meaning of a letter not only changed over time but should be separated into two categories, a specific added/changed capability (C for cannon armament) and a simple revision letter (C as the third minor change but one worthy of differentiating the airplane from its predecessors). Actually, I argued that C, at least early in the war, was used for the first notable change because the suffixes A and B were reserved at the time for a Navy airplane delivered to the U.S. Army and one delivered to Britain, respectively.

As it turns out, the use of suffixes by BuAer and its airplane manufacturers during the war was not well regulated and more specifically, there was no published definition for suffixes C or D as there came to be over time for A, B, E, F (briefly and replaced in effect by Z), H (except for the PBJ-1H), N, P, R, and S. After the war, in January 1946, definitions were added for the suffixes J, K, L, Q and W.

In March 1946, however, BuAer decreed in Aviation Circular Letter 43-46 that henceforth—among other additions, deletions, and changes—that the suffix B would be used for "Special armament version" and C for "Carrier operating version of a non-carrier aircraft". In the case of the cannon-armed F4U-4C and the F8F-1C, the change was made retroactive so they became the better-known F4U-4B and F8F-1B. In the case of the F4U-4B, at least, speculation resulted decades later that these were Corsairs destined for Britain but taken by the U.S. Navy instead (or in one account on the interweb, dumped at sea by the Brits in lieu of expending the cost to return them to the U.S. after the war in compliance with the terms of use).

This suffix history is described in full in a draft monograph apparently prepared by the history section at BuAer in May 1955. See http://www.alternatewars.com/SAC/Use_of_Suffix_Letters_in_Model_Designation_of_Naval_Aircraft_-_May_1955_Monograph.pdf

In the mid-1950s, several Essex-class carriers were repurposed from attack to antisubmarine warfare and redesignated CVS. Although the air groups primarily consisted of ASW and AEW (Airborne Early Warning) aircraft, some deployments were made with a fighter detachment for self defense. The first few of these were provided by the VC squadons that operated all-weather fighters, which in this case was the propeller-driven F4U-5N.

It was recognized, however, that jets were more appropriate and a few detachments of different jet fighter types were provided by attack squadrons in the late 1950s. The mission was then assigned to attack squadrons (and in a couple of instances, Marine Headquarters & Maintenance Squadrons) operating A4D Skyhawks. These detachments were equipped with Skyhawks that had been modified with Sidewinder missile capability.

The requirement was eventually formalized with the creation of two VSF squadrons operating A4Ds.

Note that VSF-3 appears to have borrowed a VSF-1 external fuel tank.

For more on the A4D fighter assignment and the VSF squadrons, see Scooter!

The last detachment before the assumption of the role by squadrons operating Skyhawks was the most unusual. VAW-11, a large squadron providing AEW and radar countermeasures detachments to deploying air groups, was assigned a dozen F2H-3/4 Banshee all-weather fighters. As far as I know, the only deployed detachment, P, went out with Hornet, a newly designated CVS, from April to October 1959.

Note that the Banshees have Sidewinder capability and are marked with the VAW-11 tail code RR. For some reason, there were no AEW airplanes provided for the deployment, which would have reduced the Banshee's effectiveness at defending the carrier. However, they at least had all-weather interception capability, something the A4Ds lacked entirely.

More photos can be found on the Hornet Museum's excellent website here: http://www.usshornetmuseum.org/PhotoGallery/gallery.php?galleryFolder=1959_CVS12_Ballenger_Collection (to go to the home page or an index for the rest of the photo gallery, click on the icons at the top of that webpage).

I lived on NAS Sangley Point, Phillipine Islands, as a boy in the mid 1950s (my stepfather was the assistant Public Works Officer there). One anecdote I heard was about a station SNJ that was taken up for a check flight after heavy maintenance. When the pilot raised the gear, one landing gear went up and the other stayed down. Deciding to come back and land to check that out, he put the landing gear handle down, whereupon the gear that had retracted extended and the one that hadn't retracted, did so. He finally had to land on one wheel.

Another story was that an F4U was used to spray for mosquitoes after the war, probably using the rig developed to lay down screening smoke, a prewar tactic to preclude accurate targeting of warships like Langley here.

J.M.F. Haase Collection, San Diego Air and Space Museum blog*

The best time to spray for mosquitoes was thought to be first thing in the morning when there was no wind. The best altitude, according to the story, was as low as possible. You can imagine what a bored fighter pilot (or wannabe fighter pilot) would do with that.

It turns out that both stories have a basis in fact, passed down orally by station personnel for ten years in this instance. By chance Dana Bell sent me a report of an F4U crash, with pictures, that had occurred on Sangley Point in July 1946. The pilot had been up early that morning spraying DDT for mosquito control.

When he went to lower his wheels for landing, the right main gear and tail wheel extended but the left main gear trailed. He then noted that his hydraulic pressure was low. He cycled the gear a few times with the same result. He then tried pumping the gear down and hard pullups. In the end, after raising the gear one last time, he attempted to extend it with the CO2 backup. Again, only the right main and tail wheel extended. And now there was no longer any hydraulic pressure so he couldn't raise the gear for a belly landing. Given the choice of bailing out or landing with one wheel extended and the other trailing, he opted to stay dry.

He wound up against the sea wall at the west end of the field.

At the time, Sangley Point was a maintenance facility designated as a Naval Air Base, NAB Navy 961. It subsequently became a full-fledged Naval Air Station. Corsairs, of course, would have been a dime a dozen at this point. Based on the configuration of the last three digits of the Bureau Number on the cowling, I would guess that this was a low-time airplane that had never been issued to an operating squadron.

This is a picture of Naval Station Sangley Point in 1965 (it couldn't be a Naval Air Station after Cubi Point was commissioned in accordance with a treaty with the Philippine Islands that limited the U.S. to one NAS in the Philippines). You'll note that it wasn't much more than a very big but immobile aircraft carrier. (It was a seaplane base before World War II; the runway was added after the Philippines were retaken in 1945.)

*http://sandiegoairandspace.tumblr.com/

Angelo Romano has produced some excellent naval aviation monographs. I mentioned other examples here: http://thanlont.blogspot.com/2014/02/whos-your-daddy.html

Angelo has a fantastic (and incredibly well organized) collection of photographs of U.S. Navy aircraft. In this case, he has used it, along with contributions from noted aviation photographer and former editor of The Hook, Robert L. (Bob) Lawson, to author an excellent pictorial history of the Black Knights, a U.S. Navy fighter squadron that was formally redesignated several times but retained its basic identity through the years.

In addition to being a reference work on the Black Knights squadron itself, it provides a comprehensive longitudinal depiction of a typical Navy fighter squadron from the post World War II Navy reserve Hellcats/Corsairs through to the F-18E/Fs of the "present day" along with all the color scheme and markings changes. Many of the pictures are in action, including the occasional incident. Angelo also provides a good synopsis of the need for and versatility of the aircraft carrier by detailing the deployments of the squadron: carrier, duration, and significant events.

Unlike previous Steve Ginter published monographs, which have color only on the front and rear covers, this one has color pictures on virtually very one of its 137 pages, taking maximum advantage of the photographs available from Romano and Lawson.

Black Knights Rule is available from the usual sources. Steve Ginter lists it here along with a summary description of the contents: http://www.ginterbooks.com/NAVAL/NL301/USN_SQ_Hist_301.HTM

Hopefully, and with your support (please buy this book), this is the first of several similar squadron histories that we will see from Angelo and Ginter. The material is ready and waiting.

Hancock Deploying, 2 August 1969

William T. Larkins

Steve Govus was on the flight deck of Hancock during its 1969/1970 deployment to the waters off Vietnam. Not only that, but he took pictures. For his first-hand description of the experience, I recommend that you take a look at http://twentyseven-charlie.blogspot.com/.

Cannon vs. Machine Guns

Halcyon Days V

The First Flight of Vought's XF7U-1 Cutlass

Texaco

F7U-3 Cutlass Survivors

Texaco Redux

X-47B Update

Crossing the Line

F-35C: So far, so good

Composite Squadrons and Detachments

Finding the Way Home

The A-12 Program is History

Even the Mighty Will Someday Exist Only in Memories

Who's Your Daddy?

Navy Aircraft Designation Suffixes Redux

CVS Carrier Self Defense

Once Upon a Time

Black Knights Rule!

27 Charlie

Dive Bombing