One Hundred Years of U.S. Navy Air Power (54 page)

  
31
.
  
Rick Burgess, “HS-1 Seahorses,”
Naval Aviation News
81, no. 1 (November/December 1998), p. 12.

  
32
.
  
U.S. Navy,
Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships
, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1977), pp. 153–54.

  
33
.
  
Malcolm W. Cagle and Frank A. Manson,
The Sea War in Korea
(Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1957), p. 416; Hill Goodspeed, “Whirlybirds over Korea,”
Naval Aviation News
85, no. 1 (November/December 2002), p. 33.

  
34
.
  
Richard F. Kaufman, “Behind the Bridges at Toko-ri,”
Naval Aviation News
84, no. 3 (March/April 2002), pp. 18–23; Goodspeed, “Whirlybirds over Korea,” p. 33.

  
35
.
  
Personal experience of author over eleven years in HS squadrons and in flight test; also author conversations with Lieutenant Commander David Moran, USN; Captain Douglas Roulstone, USN; and Captain Paul A. “Tony” Laird, USN, during the course of these tours.

  
36
.
  
Andreas Parsch,
Directory of U.S. Military Rockets and Missiles
, Appendix 4, QH-50 DASH (28 April 2004),
http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/app4/qh-50.html
(accessed 25 November 2009); “DASH History,”
http://www.gyrodynehelicopters.com/dash_weapon_system.htm
(accessed 5 December 2009).

  
37
.
  
Bill Gunston,
An Illustrated Guide to Military Helicopters
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1986).

  
38
.
  
The black berets and the reading of the CNO order authorizing their wear was an integral part of the HS-4 change of command ceremonies during the period the author served on the CVW-14 staff and as a department head in the squadron.

  
39
.
  
Robert E. Jones, “The Most Highly Decorated Navy Squadron in Vietnam?”
Foundation
2, no. 1 (1981), pp. 91–97.

  
40
.
  
HC-7 Rescue Log, 3 October 1967 to 8 April 1975, unofficial document,
http://www.hc7seadevils.org/draftrescuelog.pdf
(accessed 10 December 2009).

  
41
.
  
Hill Goodspeed, “Into the Night,”
Naval Aviation News
84, no. 6 (September/October 1998), pp. 27–29.

  
42
.
  
James R. Lloyd, “To Those Who Returned for Me,”
The Hook
25, no. 4 (Winter 1997), pp. 33–36.

  
43
.
  
Mark Morgan, “Orphans of 7th Fleet,”
The Hook
26, no. 2 (Summer 1998), pp. 26–37.

  
44
.
  
Edward J. Marolda and Robert J. Schneller Jr.,
Shield and Sword: The United States Navy and the Persian Gulf War
(Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 1998; Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2001), pp. 221–25.

  
45
.
  
Rear Admiral Thomas J. Kilcline, “Navy Helicopters at the Core of Strike Group Capability,”
The Hook
32, no. 4 (Winter 2004), pp. 8–10.

CHAPTER 12

The Transition to Swept-Wing Jets

Robert C. Rubel

Definition of an optimist: a naval aviator with a savings account
.

—Naval aviation quip
        

I
n this centennial year of naval aviation's history, the jet engine and jet-powered aircraft are ubiquitous. Millions travel safely in jet airliners, and the military jet fighter is almost a cultural icon. However in the late 1930s the prospect for powering aircraft with anything but piston engines seemed remote to all except for a few visionary engineers in Great Britain and Germany. Their work resulted in the first flights of jet-powered aircraft in the early 1940s, but due to the low thrust of their engines these aircraft were outclassed by existing piston-engine fighters. Additional advances in engine design in Germany resulted in the fielding of the ME-262 “Swallow” fighter, which, although not as maneuverable as the American P-51 Mustang and other Allied fighters, had a top speed 100 mph greater due to its jet engines and swept wings, giving it significant operational advantages. After the war, aeronautical engineers from all the Allies studied German technical advances and strove to incorporate them into their new generation of fighters.

The U.S. Navy, accustomed to working with Westinghouse on turbochargers for its piston-engine fighters, let a contract with them during World War II to develop a jet engine, and most of the early Navy jets were powered by Westinghouse engines. Westinghouse experienced significant difficulties in producing jet engines, which proved to be a serious impediment to the success of Navy jet designs in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Whether developed by Westinghouse, General Electric, or other manufacturers in the United States and elsewhere, all early jet engines suffered from low thrust and high fuel consumption and were slow to power up and power down, as well as having poor reliability. Thus the first generation of jet fighters such
as the Air Force's P-80 Shooting Star and the Navy's FH-1 Phantom were of limited operational utility despite having the high-speed and high-altitude capabilities characteristic of jet-powered planes. It was not until the second generation of jet engines was produced that viable operational jets could be fielded.

When the Navy introduced its first operational jet, the McDonnell FH-1 Phantom, in 1947, it began a transition phase that turned out to be extended and very costly in terms of aircrew lives and airplanes lost. The higher speeds and altitudes of jets presented a new set of problems to the aircraft designers and manufacturers as well as to the Navy squadrons that operated them. In 1946 nobody knew that a high-performance jet fighter needed such appurtenances as a stabilator (instead of an elevator); irreversible, hydraulic flight controls with artificial feel; redundant hydraulic systems; pitch and yaw stability augmentation; ejection seats; air conditioning; and others.
¹
Learning these lessons required a trial-and-error process that resulted in the fielding and rapid obsolescence of a series of different jets, each reflecting solutions to the defects discovered in earlier models.

It is central to the story presented in this chapter to consider how long the “transition” to jets lasted. Some histories of naval aviation regard the transition to jets to be substantially complete with the phaseout of the last propeller-driven fighters, while others maintain that the transition lasted until the introduction of the F-8 Crusader and F-4 Phantom II—the first Navy carrier-based fighters that were the equals in performance of their land-based counterparts. Yet another way of looking at it is via the lens of safety; one might declare the transition to have been complete when the Navy aviation accident rate became comparable to that of the U.S. Air Force. The logic behind this reasoning is that there are a multitude of factors—technical, organizational, and cultural—that constitute the capability to operate swept-wing jets, and mishap rate is an indicator of how successful overall an organization is in adopting a new technology. Using this criterion, the Navy's transition process lasted until the late 1980s, which is not coincidentally the era in which the F/A-18 was arriving in the fleet in numbers. The basis for this argument is that tactical jet aircraft design and technology presented Navy aircrews, maintenance personnel, and leadership with several major challenges that were not substantially overcome until the introduction of the F/A-18 Hornet in 1983. These challenges included technical problems such as engine reliability and response times, swept-wing flight characteristics, and man-machine interface problems. The Air Force also encountered these challenges, but the Navy's operating environment and indeed its organizational culture presented significant impediments to achieving a fully successful transition until well after the Air Force had.

Between 1949, the year jets started showing up in the fleet in numbers, and 1988, the year the Navy/Marine mishap rate finally got down to Air Force levels, the Navy and Marine Corps lost almost 12,000 airplanes and over 8,500 aircrew of all types
(helos, trainers, and patrol planes in addition to jets), in no small part as a result of these issues. Perhaps the statistics about the F-8 Crusader, a supersonic fighter designed by Vought in the late 1950s, provide a good illustration of the problem. Always known as a difficult airplane to master, 1,261 Crusaders were built. By the time it was withdrawn from the fleet, 1,106 had been lost to mishaps. Only a handful of them were lost to enemy fire in Vietnam.
²
While the F-8 statistics might be worse than most models, the magnitude of the problem is clear. Whether from engine failure, pilot error, weather, or bad luck, the vast majority (88 percent!) of Crusaders ever built ended up as smoking holes in the ground, splashes in the water, or fireballs hurtling across the flight deck. This was naval aviation from the start of the jet era through about 1988. Today the accident rate is normally one or fewer per 100,000 hours of flight time, making a mishap an unusual occurrence. This is in stark contrast to the landmark year of 1954, when naval aviation (USN and USMC) lost 776 aircraft and 535 aircrew, for an accident rate well above 50 per 100,000 flight hours—and the rate for carrier-based tactical aviation was much higher than that.

During this extended transition period naval aviation participated in three major wars and numerous crises, and of course many planes and crews were lost to enemy fire. However, the vast majority of aircraft losses over this period were due to mishaps, many of which were associated with the technical and organizational problems just discussed. In other words, the airplanes that populated the flight decks of aircraft carriers from the introduction of the FH-1 Phantom through the retirement of the F-14 Tomcat were, with several exceptions, hard to fly and maintain, and would kill the unwary crew. Many men and a few women gave their lives trying to operate these machines in the challenging environment of the sea. This chapter is meant to recognize their sacrifice and honor their service.

THE OPERATIONAL IMPERATIVE

U.S. naval aviation ended World War II at the top of its game; its collection of aircraft was the best in the world and the requirements of carrier suitability did not compromise their performance versus land-based fighters. By the early 1940s the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics had received word of jet engine developments in Germany and Great Britain, and had commissioned Westinghouse and Allis Chalmers to build American versions. However, high fuel consumption, low power at takeoff, and poor reliability of early engines did not make the engines attractive for use in carrier-based planes. Moreover, when details of German aerodynamic advances, specifically the swept wing, became known, Navy planners felt that their high landing speeds and adverse handling characteristics would make aircraft equipped with them unsuitable for carrier use.

On the other hand, the Navy was faced with a new opponent, the USSR, which had also capitalized on captured German knowledge. If they were to build a jet bomber, then carriers might be defenseless unless they could launch high-speed interceptors from their decks. As the Cold War came into being, this knowledge pressurized the development of jet aircraft, adding to the rapidity with which it took place but also imposing brutal material and human costs.

An additional source of pressure was the new U.S. Air Force, whose leadership in the postwar environment believed that the combination of the atom bomb and the ultra-long-range bomber rendered naval aviation irrelevant. The Navy had long regarded strikes against land targets to be a fundamental mission of its air arm, and the prospect of being sidelined in the business of nuclear attack seemed to threaten the very existence of naval aviation. In April 1949 the Secretary of Defense, Louis Johnson, cancelled the construction of USS
United States
, a very large straight-deck aircraft carrier with no superstructure above the flight deck (flush deck being the technical term) that was designed to support a new generation of big Navy jet bombers capable of carrying the large and heavy nuclear weapons of the day. This cancellation, along with USAF efforts to push the huge B-36 bomber program at the expense of the other Services, produced in October 1949 an incident that has been termed the “Revolt of the Admirals” in which Admiral Arthur Radford (CINCPAC) and other aviation flags as well as the CNO, Admiral Louis Denfeld, testified before Congress on the need for an atomic delivery capability for naval aviation and on the deficiencies of the B-36—in direct contravention of the Secretary of Defense's wishes. Although Admiral Denfeld was subsequently fired by the secretary, Congress was sufficiently convinced of the Navy's utility in strike warfare to authorize in 1951 the construction of USS
Forrestal
, the first of the “super carriers” that could adequately handle the operations of heavy, fast jets.
³
However, the Navy still needed a jet to perform the mission of nuclear strike, and development pressures continued.

The early Cold War operational environment was challenging for naval aviation, to say the least. Knowing that the Soviet Union was working on jet fighters and jet bombers that could carry nuclear weapons and drop them on naval formations, the Navy needed to develop fighter/interceptor aircraft that could defend the carrier and its escorts from attack while sailing into position for a strike and could also strike aircraft that had enough range to hit meaningful targets and enough speed to survive enemy defenses. These general requirements propelled naval aviation development efforts throughout the period from the late 1940s through the 1970s. During this period, the actual employment of naval aviation in three wars, Korea, Vietnam, and Desert Storm, demanded of Navy jets the flexibility to conduct conventional bomb delivery, close air support, and dogfighting. Thus the development of carrier jets morphed over time to designs that were more general-purpose, resulting ultimately in the introduction of the F/A-18 Hornet, an aircraft that is a true strike-fighter.