Chain Lightning

Flight Journal, Apr 2003 by Farmer, James H

Chain Lightning Video available from Belle & Blade Home Video: (973) 328-8488; www.belleandblade.com; $19.95 (plus S&H).

Warner Bros.' 1950 release of "Chain Lightning" was one of two films that got me hooked on flying and aviation in general. The other feature, released just a few months later, was "12 O'Clock High." "Chain Lightning," however, offered jetpowered speculation about the bright, fast-paced technological future of military aviation. For a 6-year-old kid, it was the stuff of dreams! Just imagine a jet that would someday fly at twice the speed of sound and at an altitude of more than 58,000 feet with rocket-assisted ascents to 90,000 feet!

"Chain Lightning" was remarkably prophetic; the first flight of Kelly Johnson's XF-104 was only four years away, and the rocketassisted NF-104 appeared not many years after that. Nor was the film's depiction of an experimental ejection pod far off the mark, though Convair eventually gave up the idea for its B-58 Hustler.

To be sure, the design of the film's featured and fictional experimental jet fighter, "the JA-3," clearly reflected the two fastest American aircraft of the immediate post-WW II era. That .50-calibershaped fuselage was similar to Chuck Yeager's sound-barrierbreaking Bell X-1 rocket plane, and those swept wings mirrored the planform of the era's bestperforming jet fighter: the USAF's F-86A Sabre. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, the jet intakes were left out of the mix!

Movie flier Paul Mantz designed the full-scale mock-up. It was built up around the shell of a surplus P-39 Airacobra, and Mantz actually drove the mock-up at a high speed down the nearby Van Nuys Airport runway assisted by a tailpipe-mounted JATO bottle-a dicey proposition, even on a good day!

As for the story itself, it is pure Hollywood formula with test pilot Humphrey Bogart battling aircraft designer Richard Whorf for the affections of Willis Aircraft Co. secretary Eleanor Parker: the old-fashioned love triangle in which death holds the deciding hand. An early flashback offers a look at 8th Air Force operations in Britian circa 1943, with a number of B-17 sequences. Distant ground-to-air shots of a genuine F-86A are used to depict the JA-3 in flight, except when the film resorts to using miniatures.

Also interesting is the Lockheed factory flight ramp with its lines of F-80Cs awaiting USAF delivery. Take particular note of the background 44.5 minutes into the film as Bogart walks by F-80, S/N 49500 (buzz number: FT-500). By the late fall of 1950, this Shooting Star would be one of the first American jets to operate from Korea at Taegu (K-2); it became 49th FBW Cmdr. Col. Stanton T. Smith's personal aircraft.