cursed Cutlass: The USN's Ensign eliminator, The

Flight Journal, Oct 2003 by Tegler, Jan

"The F7U-71 had a two-position main gear that shifted forward for the catapult launches to help get the airplane off the deck and back for landing. The gear changed positions by about 18 inches. Prior to the first launch, the wheels had been chocked, and these chocks had not been pulled away when I shifted the gear into the forward position. As I shifted, the plane reared back on its tail and pulled the nosewheel off the deck. The chocks didn't shift, but the airplane sure did! People scattered all over the flight deck. Nobody had warned them about this."

F7U-3

By 1951, Vought had come up with the "improved" F7U-3. The anemic Westinghouse J-34 turbojets in the F7U-1-responsible for much of the aircraft's early criticism-were replaced with J-46 motors. With roughly 850 extra pounds of thrust on tap, the J-46 was supposed to put some guts in the Cutlass. Other changes included a significantly revamped airframe and a fully redundant hydraulic control system. If the Cutlass were ever to escape the bad press of its developmental years, the F7U-3 would have to deliver. According to Whitey, in many ways it did; but once again, it was a case of one step forward, two steps back.

"The J-46 made the Cutlass a much better airplane. It was a great aerobatic performer, and the afterburners were a new experience for most of the squadrons that got them. It was a snap behind the carrier in clean configuration. But when you hung ordnance on it, in a realistic combat configuration, it was terrible. The airplane's single-engine capability was really marginal, and bring-back loads were literally nothing; you couldn't really bring anything back to the ship.

"Ironically, it was a pretty good weapons platform. It was a decent bomber. I made a lot of flights dropping bombs with it in Arizona, and it worked beautifully. Missiles and rockets worked fine, too. We had three-and-a-half-inch 'Mighty Mouse' rocket pods with which I shot down a towed target. Unfortunately, the mounts for them sat across some of the aircraft's maintenance doors, and it just wasn't feasible to work on the airplane with the mounts on. It flew formation well and was quite good behind our AJ Savage tankers. The Cutlass's nose probe sat right in front of you, and it was the simplest airplane in the world to refuel in flight. The airplane was so controllable that it was easy to hook up with the drogue-much easier than with the Banshee or the Panther. That didn't mean there weren't incidents, though.

"We had F7U-3s with the interim J-35 engines in VX-3 in Atlantic City. They didn't know what else to do with them, so they gave them to us to find ways to work the airplane up for fleet procedures. Our new skipper was Cmdr. Hawley 'Monk' Russell. He had never done aerial refueling and wanted to try it. Adm. Don Engen [former director of the National Air & Space Museum] was in the squadron and in charge of Cutlass projects. I was the development officer for the airplane. Don said, 'Let's take him up in the F7U. I think it's the easiest airplane to refuel that we have.' I said, 'Sure; I think the new skipper ought to fly the F7U.'