All-Weather Fighters: The Second Team of the United States Air Force for Much of the Cold War

By Gordon B. Greer

Mr. Greer outlines the not well-known aircraft and activities of the United States Air Force's all-weather fighters during the first part of the Cold War. He covers the organization, development and decline of the all-weather force in response to the Soviet Union's long-range strategic bomber force equipped with atomic weapons. The author describes not only the individual aircraft from the early night fighters of World War II through the F-106A of the seventies and beyond but also the control organization that directed them until the whole operation was made superfluous by the ballistic missile standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union in the latter half of the Cold War.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 11, 2006
• ISBN: 9780595850228

Gordon B. Greer

Gordon B. Greer was born in Butler, Pennsylvania, and educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He practiced law for 43 years and served in the United States Air Force from which he retired as a Major. Mr. Greer lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.

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Copyright © 2006 by Gordon B. Greer

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Contents

Acknowlegements

Introduction

The Pioneering Years of Aviation

The Years of the Great War

The Late Twenties and the Thirties

The Second World War

The First Night Fighters

The Jet Age Arrives

The Air Defense System of the United States

The Critical Third Generation of Night/All-Weather Fighters

The Lockheed F-94A/B

The Northrop F-89C

The Second Generation of All-Weather Fighters

The North American F-86D

The Lockheed F-94C

The Northrop F-89D

The Third and Final All-Weather Generation

The Northrop F-89H

The Northrop F-89J

The McDonnell F-101B

The Convair F-102

The Convair F-106A

The Costs of Progress

The End of the Air Force All-Weather Fighters

All-Weather Fighters of the Royal Air Force and the Royal Canadian Air Force

All-Weather Fighters of the United States Navy

Early Navy All-Weather Fighters

Later Navy All-Weather fighters

Conclusion

Some Abbreviations Used in the Text

Acknowlegements

All-weather fighters were a brief and not well-remembered part of the United States Air Force. I should like to thank the personnel of the 354th Fighter Interceptor Squadron for teaching me enough to survive in those fighters in spite of the Air Force’s dubious proposition that my observer flight school class could skip the last third of its usually mandatory training and join an operational squadron immediately upon receiving their wings.

The staff of the Information Technologies Department of Bingham McCutchen, and particularly Dennis Scheffler and Dean Ganz, have done their usual fine job of keeping my word processing equipment processing words. My son, Bruce Greer, a former F-14 Top Gun and an excellent military historian, has made a number of most useful suggestions on earlier drafts and has aided greatly in the proofreading. My wife, Nancy, has been very patient and helpful throughout the writing process as well as contributing many very useful editorial comments. The staff of the publisher, particularly Katie Egan, has done a good job of converting my efforts into an attractive format.

Any errors in the following material are mine alone.

Belmont, Massachusetts

July 2006

Introduction

Of the many extraordinary events in the twentieth century, certainly one of the most dramatic and important was the invention and development of heavier-than-air flying machines. From the time of the Wright brothers first flights through the end of the century many different general types, as opposed to specific models, appeared ranging from lighter-than-air craft to helicopters. While some types, such as dirigibles and autogyros, quickly reached evolutionary dead ends and largely disappeared, others prospered throughout most of the period although individual models within those types often had quite short lives, particularly most military models developed before the 1970s.

The United States Air Force all-weather fighters and their immediate predecessors, the night fighters, were types of aircraft which in their day were very important but their day lasted for less than three decades and included at least five generations of vastly changing models.¹ Thanks largely to rapidly evolving technology, most of those models served in active duty squadrons for only a few years. In a sense they might be thought to be akin to the adult mayflies, the name of which (ephemeroptera—briefly winged) seems appropriate for both, appearing suddenly in flight in large numbers and then disappearing quickly. It is the story of those metal ephemerop-terae and of their place in the history of the twentieth century that is the subject of this book, but before that story can be told some background is necessary.

The Pioneering Years of Aviation

From the invention of heavier-than-air craft in 1903 or, if one is of the Brazilian or French persuasion, in 1906² to 1913 the ever-increasing group of pilots, aircraft designers and aviation enthusiasts attempted to make aircraft more effective, faster, more reliable and generally better. This was a long and slow process in large measure because so little was known about flying. Until about 1909 the progress was particularly slow, limiting its horizon largely to the ability to stay in the air for a while and land without breaking anything too important on either the plane or the pilot. The field was full of bold, eager people who not only had little knowledge of their subject but also were somewhat inhibited and perhaps intimidated by the Wrights and their patent position. Gradually, however, some order appeared from the chaos, helped in at least one instance by a device seemingly developed in an attempt to avoid the Wright patent. Ailerons (movable panels in or between wings) were installed (by Glenn Curtiss) in place of the wing warping system that the Wrights used to move the wings. Either system, when used with the rudder, enabled coordinated turns to be made but Curtiss’ arrangement worked better. There had always been a few serious participants, as opposed to dilettantes, in the aviation ranks, not only the Wrights but in the early days Otto Lilienthal and S. P. Langley, for example. After the Wright airplanes improved³ more people on both sides of the Atlantic became seriously involved in aviation. The various new ideas eventually coalesced into forms of aircraft we would recognize today. In spite of some efforts at monoplane and triplane aircraft, most settled on the biplane which became the standard wing configuration for many years. Engine position began to predominate at the front of the craft with the propeller forward producing tractor propulsion even though some pusher configurations continued throughout the twentieth century. The usual arrangement of control surfaces we see today, wings forward, elevators, rudders and their related stabilizers in the back, became standard, although the canard layout (elevators and horizontal stabilizers forward and wings back) continued and is still in use in some contexts. While for several decades the construction materials changed little from those used by the Wrights, wood, cloth and wire, the engines improved greatly not only in reliability but also in power. Notwithstanding all the improvements however it still took a brave pilot to fly the best 1913 version of the airplane.

The Years of the Great War

The airplane crept quietly into war, doing some light bombing in 1911 for the Italians in Libya and a little later reconnaissance work in the Balkans. By 1914 when World War I began most belligerents had some aircraft which were usable for reconnaissance but not much else. The concept of reconnaissance from the air was by no means a new idea. Tethered hydrogen-filled balloons had been effectively used for that purpose since the American Civil War and their use continued into World War I. Those balloons had been a significant improvement over cavalry reconnaissance under some circumstances; daylight, good weather and the surveyed area being close enough to the front lines to be seen from a balloon anchored behind the lines. In 1914 aircraft reconnaissance was still largely blind at night and during bad weather, to the great relief of most pilots who were not used to night or blind flying or landing. The range of aircraft reconnaissance over enemy territory was then limited only by the range of the aircraft since the participating aircraft were quite safe from enemy interference as antiaircraft guns and defensive fighters were still a bit in the future. Soon, however, the progress of the war intruded on this peaceful scene in the sky. Although it did not take long for the combatants on the ground to develop the mechanics of high-angle firing machine guns and light cannons, those antiaircraft weapons were not very effective for a while. On the other hand, once opposing pilots started taking potshots at each other with pistols and rifles, it took little time for each side to develop specialized aircraft for the purpose of shooting enemy aircraft down. The fighter aircraft was thus born even though the family name on the plane’s birth certificate varied from fighter to pursuit to interceptor in English with several other labels in German, French and Russian.⁴ For those accustomed to the long lead time for new military aircraft (five to ten years now) it may seem strange that during World War I the lead time was a matter of a few months. Thus, when it became obvious that a specialized model or an improved version of an existing model would be helpful for destroying reconnaissance aircraft or for other purposes, it took a relatively short time to create or improve aircraft for whatever specialized tasks were desired. Bombers, faster reconnaissance aircraft and flying boats were also added to the inventory and the military aircraft specialization then underway would eventually lead to, among other things, all-weather fighters.

Once the combatants on the Western Front (where most of the aerial action in World War I occurred) had produced aerodynamically acceptable fighters at least for their time, the next step was to find a way to arm them. Early on it was generally accepted that machine guns were the weapons of choice and that those being fired by the pilot should be solidly affixed to the fighter and pointed straight ahead. The guns would then be aimed by pointing the fighter at the target rather than by having the weapon on a pivoting mount if for no other reason than to fire in any direction other than directly ahead or behind would create very serious windage and deflection problems in aiming. Of course an additional consideration was that requiring the pilot to fly the aircraft while swinging a heavy machine gun would probably have meant that neither job would be done well. Where on the fighter one should place the guns was subject to some difference of opinion. If the fighter was in the pusher configuration, the decision was easy. The weapons could be mounted on the fuselage just ahead of the pilot providing a solid mounting base, easy aiming and conve

nient access to the weapon without interference from the propeller which would be behind him. Pushers thus were fine for armament position and for pilots’ forward vision, but they were deficient in rearward visibility and had some aerodynamic problems to say nothing of the serious difficulty of avoiding the propeller if one had to bail out. As a result of these issues pushers were pretty well phased out early in the war. That left the combatants with the problem of how to avoid shooting off their propellers with their forward firing machine guns positioned behind the propeller. One simple solution developed by a French pilot, armoring the back of the propeller blades and letting those bullets which did not pass between the blades bounce off the armor, did not have much appeal to other pilots. That left two possibilities—to mount the guns in or on the wings outboard of the arc of the propeller or to mount the guns on top of the top wing above the propeller arc. While wing-mounted guns were routine in World War II fighters, World War I fighters were much less sturdily built with the result that guns mounted far enough out on the wing to avoid the propeller arc would, when fired, damage the wings and that additionally the weight of the guns would cause a change in their alignment when the wings were stressed in maneuvers.⁵ The result was that most of the guns were located on top center of the upper wing where there was a strong enough site to support a gun position above the propeller arc. In that site, however, the guns produced a parallax problem in aiming and some difficulty in reaching the gun’s receiver for clearing jams and recharging. About halfway through the war Anthony Fokker, a Dutch engineer working for the Germans, developed a system of interrupting the flow of bullets as the propeller blades passed in front of the guns, enabling the placement of the guns directly in front of and within the reach the pilot. While this arrangement necessarily reduced the rate of fire of the guns somewhat, it was so superior to the other possibilities that it was adopted by all of the combatants for the rest of the war.

It is worth noting that there was aerial night fighting in World War I by both Germany and England. The night fighters involved were simply day fighters flying at night with no additional equipment to make it easier for them to locate and shoot down attackers at night and therefore were not the kind of night fighters that are discussed later in this book.

The Germans attacked England, particularly London, both with bombers and Zeppelins by day and by night. These attacks did some damage, in large measure helped by an initial lack of both effective antiaircraft fire and a fighter defense. Antiaircraft fire improved over time and fighters, although severely handicapped by slow rates of climb to reach the bombers’ altitude, sometimes made contact. The bombers and the Zeppelins quickly realized that, in spite of the accompanying cold and hypoxia, altitude was their best friend. Antiaircraft fire was certainly less effective there and usually non-existant and fighter attack was less likely, sometimes impossible, at the bombers’ maximum altitude. The downside of high altitude bombing was that accuracy decreased dramatically with altitude and if there were clouds below the bombing accuracy was nil. Germany stopped its attacks on England not because the defenses were so good but rather because the results of the raids were simply not felt to be cost effective.⁶ One could have supposed that the psychological effect of being able to bomb the enemy capital might have mandated continuance of bombing regardless of the economics, but it was not so.

The British, having no adequate dirigibles, could to use only bombers and, because of the range limitations and vulnerability of their bombers, had great difficulty bombing their enemy’s capital.

By the end of the war a few more types had been added to the roster of types of military aircraft, principally a class of seaplanes which were lighter than flying boats and used pontoons rather than the hull for floatation and aircraft specifically designed for training. Training aircraft have to be

stable enough to prevent the student from getting into trouble too quickly, slow enough so that the plane could be easily taken off and landed, and equipped with a second cockpit for an instructor. Operational aircraft have to give up some of their inherent stability for maneuverability and have to have higher takeoff and landing speeds because their wings, being smaller to reduce drag, have to have more speed to generate the necessary lift.

The United States, in spite of being the original source of the airplane, had fallen so far behind Europe in aircraft design and production that, even after the fighting had been going on for two and a half years, the United States did not have a single plane fit for combat when it entered the war. The only American