Old planes

North American FJ-3 Furies.

 When I found the album with photos from my New England grandfather's life, I also found a packet of photos from my Navy grandfather's time in the service, most seemingly from the early to mid-1950s.  They were photos of naval aircraft of that era, at least some of which my grandfather had flown if the comments jotted on the back are any indication.

As I've written about before, he began his career flying Grumman F3Fs

Convair R4Y. Douglas ADs in the background.

before Pearl Harbor, was flying Brewster F2As when the Japanese attacked, switching to the Grumman F4F at the end of that December.  He engaged in his first air combat flying that plane in February, 1942, then flying it through the Solomon Islands campaign before his squadron was equipped with the Grumman F6F, which he flew for the rest of the war.

Immediately after the war he flew the Chance-Vought F4U, which, from the few comments of his I've read about it, he didn't think much of, calling it "the hose nose" and "the pig." His first jet was the McDonnell F2H Banshee but transitioned to the Grumman

McDonnell F2H Banshee.

F9F which he flew on a Korean cruise in 1951 (about which I've written).  His job was flak suppression for the  F4Us and Douglas AD ground attack planes. I guess that was because the jet was faster and so less susceptible to being hit by AAA.

After Korea, he flew several different aircraft, including the Banshee again, which he seemed to like.  It was a time of rapid evolution of carrier fighters, most of them ranging from being not very good to flat-out dangerous -- the Chance-Vought F7U was one of the latter, my grandfather almost losing his life trying to trap in one. Rather than chance another try he was ordered to land at a shore base.

Beech SNB (Twin Beech) flying over a Lockheed C-130.

Aside from assorted aerodynamic dysfunctions, a serious difficulty with these early jets was the engines, which were very slow to spool up so if you dropped below the glide path and needed to add power quickly, you couldn't, and a ramp strike was assured.  It was not until the McDonnell-Douglas F4B and variants came along that the Navy's jets had enough immediate power on hand to eliminate that danger.  Even the Chance-Vought F8E that my grandfather flew in the early days of the Viet Nam war, the last before he retired, had the slow spooling problem.

Anyway, scattered in this post are a few of the photos I found. Looking through them, I couldn't help spotting the Twin Beech in the photo above. It seems like that airplane has been around forever.  The company built 9,000 of them, only ending production in 1970, a run of 33 years, and hundreds are still flying, a number still in commercial service of one type or another.  The C-130 it's flying over in the photo has also been around seemingly forever.  I flew in one in Afghanistan from Bagram to Leatherneck and also on a trip from Futenma, Okinawa, to Iwo Jima.

Lockheed T-33B

I always liked the look of the T-33: simple and clean (like Utada Hikaru's song!) lines, no angles and bends and protuberances. I read somewhere that the nose is that of the P-38, reused when Lockheed engineers designed the original P-80, the fighter the T-33 trainer was derived from.  Save a buck where you can, I guess.  Richard Bong, the Army Air Force's top ace in World War Two, was killed test-flying a P-80.  The main fuel pump failed on take-off from Lockheed Field in Burbank and he had forgotten to switch on the auxiliary fuel pump, even though it's an item on the pre-flight checklist. Instead of remembering, oh, right, the aux, and flipping it on so the engine would restart, he rolled the plane upside down and dropped out (I guess the early P-80 didn't have an ejection seat).  The plane crashed at the intersection of Satsuma and Oxnard in North Hollywood.  Bong was too low for his parachute to open and he was killed.  I'm not writing that to say what a moron Bong was.  I'm sure he was a vastly more capable pilot than I will ever be, but he just got a little bit careless one time, and one time is all it takes. Sometimes when I climb into the left seat, impatient to get going, I remind myself that if even Richard Bong could screw up, what are the chances dumb old me will? So I settle down and methodically go through the pre-flight procedures.

North American FJ-3 Fury

I also like the clean look of the FJ-3 Fury.  It was the Navy version of the F-86. My grandfather did fly these for a while and apparently considered it "a pretty good flyer"; at least that's what's written on the back of the photo to the left; I assume it's his handwriting.  He added "the engine is crap." I wonder what experience he had with it that led to that comment. 

I remember a story my dad told me about gramp's carrier landings in the pre-Vietnam-war era. In those days, a white flag was raised at the landing signal officer's platform to indicate "ship into wind and deck ready" so landings could commence.  Then and only then were you supposed to begin your landing approach.  But gramps would lead his squadron over the fleet at 20,000 feet and when he saw the wake of the carrier and its escorts begin to curve into the wind, he would throttle back to minimum power, pop his dive brakes and wing over into a 70-degree dive toward the ship, his squadron's planes following at 30-second intervals.  Before the carrier had completed its turn he would whoosh past the boat close aboard the starboard island. Then he would haul up into a chandelle, dropping his landing gear and hook, then flaps as he banked into a constant-rate descending turn to the left, straightening out in the groove and getting the "cut" signal from Paddles just as the white flag went up, catching the number two wire.  His squadron would come in behind him boom, boom, boom and all 16 planes would be aboard in eight minutes.  The amazing thing about this is how he timed every move so that at the earliest possible second he got the cut.  Not one second was lost in delay.  Now this may seem like hot-dogging, but it wasn't because gramps could remember the early days of the Pacific war when planes would have to come in fast when the carrier was under immanent threat of attack, refuel, re-arm and launch again just as fast as they could to lessen the risk that they could be caught on the deck by enemy planes or the carrier be torpedoed by an enemy submarine while it was sailing a predictable, steady course into the wind.  So he was making sure his squadron could do that while providing an example to every squadron aboard.

Here's a Wiki photo of F9F-8s.

I was looking for a photo of the F9F, gramp's favorite I think, but didn't find one in this batch. Maybe next time I dig around I'll find more photos.  Anyway, here's a note he copied into his his journal (which I've excerpted from extensively before) about the handsome, swept-wing Cougar: "The F9F-8 came pretty close to being the best all-around jet fighter during the mid to late '50s.  An excellent dogfighter, with good payload and range, very reliable, docile and cooperative, well-armed with four 20mm cannon as well as the ability to carry Sidewinders, it was only pushed aside by the mad rush to develop  Mach 1 and Mach 2 fighters, a capability that, it would turn out, was not used during the Viet Nam War."  I get the feeling gramps would have rather faced MiG-17s in an F9F-8 than in the F8E that he did, the legendary "last of the gunfighters" though it may have been.

I trust I'm not boring you guys with all this airplane stuff, but I'm not doing a lot worth writing about these days, just taking care of the newest member of the family,  the Poopster, the Partaker of the Fountain of the Boob, heir to all the riches of a mighty civilization. 

I hope.

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Update:  El jefe informs me that the plane I identified as a C-130 is in fact a Douglas C-133.  Okay, but I ain't changing what I wrote about the C-130 and I don't have anything to say about the C-133, never having heard of it before, although it seems to have had an impressive history. I looked it up and it went into production in 1957.  Tying that in with the fact that the F2H pictured above it belonged to VC3, which was disestablished in 1956 (I looked it up!), that suggests the date of these photos is 1957ish .  But anyway, now you know the photo is of a C-133.  And so do I.