cursed Cutlass: The USN's Ensign eliminator, The

Flight Journal, Oct 2003 by Tegler, Jan

"We discovered that someone had serviced Thayer's F7U's landing-gear emergency system with oxygen; it used nitrogen. The system's plumbing was close to the engines and may have contained a leak. When Thayer completed his pass, he pulled up, like everyone else, and he engaged the after-burners, which lit up the leaking oxygen. The airplane immediately turned into a ball of fire. It was an impressive sight!

"Later on, one of the Grumman test pilots was doing some bombing in an F7U-3 from a carrier off Pt. Loma, near NAS North Island in San Diego, just a short distance from the air station. When they catapulted him, the bridle (a V-shape attachment to the nose-tow catapult shuttle that hooked to fittings on the left and right wing-the predecessor to today's shuttle launch mechanism) shifted and got hung up on his gear. As he climbed away from the carrier, he wasn't able to retract the gear and shake the bridle loose. He couldn't land on the carrier or the field, so it was decided that he come across the air station, point the jet out to sea, eject-so he could float down on the field-and let the airplane fly on and crash into the sea.

"He did as instructed, trimmed the airplane up and ejected. He egressed safely and was picked up on the field. One of the crash crewmen said, 'That was close! Your buddy's still up there.' The pilot replied, 'Buddy? I don't have a buddy up there!'

"They looked up: the Cutlass was circling the field at around 5,000 feet and it started down; on its last go-around, it just missed the cupola on the famous Del Coronado Hotel. It was close! It landed on Imperial Beach right at the water line, gear down on the sand, by the SEALS training camp. Naturally, it wiped out the gear, but it actually made a nice smooth landing. That is how stable it was. They picked it up and the airplane was rebuilt."

CARRIER LANDINGS

From the start, the Cutlass had a checkered history "around the boat." Even before its first shipboard landing, the F7U-1 was found unsuitable for operations at sea; nevertheless, initial sea trials went ahead. Whitey Feightner was one of the few to fly the Dash-One out to a carrier, one of the few to survive it, and one of the few who knew why they took the F7U-1 to the ship. He and the Vought team of engineers on the Cutlass program did what they could to improve the airplane's performance, solving many of the problems that plagued the F7U-1 with the new and improved version-the F7U-3. But once again, the result was a mixed bag. Whitey found the F7U-3 relatively easy to bring aboard; others did not. As the development of the aircraft continued, the question Cutlass or "Gutlass" became ever more prominent.

"We had actually decided it wasn't worth taking the F7U-1 to the ship, but about that time, the Navy was supposed to do the first shipboard launch of the F2H Banshee with the 'special' [nuclear] weapon on it, something it did not want to be known. So, we listed the Banshee trials as the trials of the Cutlass. We thought, at least we learned something about the airplane, but it was really a cover for the F2H Banshee. It worked perfectly, no one ever knew!