A Brief History of the F-111B Flight Test Program

I thought I had posted this before but I can't find it.

151970 Stricken Dec 1969.  Stored at the Naval Surface Weapons Center, Dahlgren VA for vulnerability testing. Transferred to Pax River for potential display at the museum. Subsequently sold to a scrap dealer in the Washington, D.C. area and destroyed in 2000.

151971 crashed Sept 11, 1968 off California coast, reportedly due to a component failure or disconnect in the rudder control system. Test pilots Barton Warren and Anthony Byland killed.

151972 Ferried to NAS Lakehurst NJ in January 1971. Stricken in Dec 1971.  At least the fuselage was shipped to China Lake for vulnerability testing and remains there in outdoor storage.

151973 crashed on takeoff at Calverton, Long Island Apr 21, 1967 due to an incorrect inlet cowl position switch setting—as a result, the translating inlet cowls closed when the landing gear retracted causing both engines to compressor stall. Test pilots Charles Wangeman and Ralph Donnell killed.

151974 transferred to NASA Ames for wind tunnel testing following at-sea carrier trials aboard Coral Sea  off the west coast, based at Point Mugu, CA. Ferried to Moffett Field from Point Mugu on Oct 10, 1968 and administratively stricken at Point Mugu the next day (this event is frequently conflated with the report of a 7 October 1969 emergency landing of 151972 at Point Mugu). Following the wind tunnel test, the wings were removed to be used as the test article for a jet/deflected flap concept. The fuselage was trucked to China Lake, where it was stripped of usable parts for the ongoing Hughes test program and the carcass eventually scrapped. 

152714 ferried to Davis-Monthan AFB from Hughes and stricken on 25 May 1971. It was shipped to McClellan AFB, California for potential use in battle-damage repair training. (McClellan was the Air Force repair depot for the F-111.) It was eventually sold to a scrap dealer and for several years the fuselage resided in a junkyard two miles east of Mohave, California. It was acquired by the Cactus Air Force museum and is now located at Silver Springs, Nevada near Reno.

152715 ferried to China Lake from Hughes in April 1971 for desert exposure testing and stricken in May 1971. It still resides today.

Dive Bombing

http://divebombingnavy.blogspot.com/

27 Charlie

 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/.

Black Knights Rule!

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.

Once Upon a Time

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/

CVS Carrier Self Defense

In the mid-1950s, several Essex-class carriers were repurposed from attack to antisubmarine warfare and redesignated from CVA to 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! or Boom Powell's excellent article in The Hook magazine here: http://www.oldro.com/VSF_article_Sp06.pdf

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).

Navy Aircraft Designation Suffixes Redux

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