This Date in Aviation History: November 23 - November 26

"ttyymmnn" (ttyymmnn) 11/26/2019 at 12:35 • Filed to: wingspan, Planelopnik, TDIAH

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Welcome to This Date in Aviation History , getting of you caught up on milestones, important historical events and people in aviation from November 23 through November 26.

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A US Navy Grumman F9F-2 Panther of fighter squadron VF-71 flies over Task Force 77 in 1952 during the Korean War (US Navy)

November 24, 1947 – The first flight of the Grumman F9F Panther. The turbojet engine first appeared over the battlefield of WWII powering the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , and the British soon followed with the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . America’s first operational jet fighter, the rather disappointing !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , took its maiden flight in 1942, but never made it into battle. The jet engine was clearly the future of aviation, and the US Navy fielded its first jet fighter with the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , an abysmally underpowered and underperforming fighter that turned out to be an unqualified failure. Grumman, which had provided some of the best naval aircraft of the war, set their sights on a jet-powered carrier plane with a four-engine night fighter, the G-75, but ultimately lost out to the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . So, Grumman abandoned their early attempts and focused instead on an entirely new, single-engine day fighter that received the internal designation G-79.

Two Grumman F9F Panther prototypes in flight in 1948. The front Panther is the XF9F-3 with an Allison J33-A-8 engine, the rear plane is a XF9F-2, powered by a Pratt & Whitney J42-P-6 engine, a licence-built Rolls-Royce Nene. Note the lack of wingtip fuel tanks. (US Navy)

The new fighter, now designated XF9F by the Navy and given the nickname Panther following Grumman’s !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , had straight wings like other early jets of its era. The engine was fed by air intakes in the wing roots. Since early attempts at jet engine manufacturing in the US were not producing sufficiently powerful engines, the Panther was equipped with a !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! turbojet built under license in the US by Pratt & Whitney and given the US designation J42. In a nod to the short range of the early, thirsty jet engines, permanent wingtip fuel tanks were added to the prototype to increase fuel capacity. This addiction also had the serendipitous benefit of increasing the Panther’s roll rate. Though still under development, the Panther was cleared for carrier operations on September 1949, and the decision was made to replace the original J42 with a more powerful Pratt & Whitney J48, another license-built Rolls-Royce engine based on the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! .

Armed with four 20mm cannons and hardpoints for 2,000 pounds of bombs or rockets, the Panther entered service with the US Navy and Marine Corps during the Korean War and became the most widely used Navy fighter and ground attack aircraft of the war. Over the course of the conflict, Panthers flew more than 78,000 sorties and scored the Navy’s first air-to-air victory of the war when a Panther downed a North Korean !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! piston-engined fighter. But the straight winged Panther proved no match for the swept-wing !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! fighter, so Grumman developed a swept-wing variant of the Panther which was known as the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , though it shared the F9F (later F-9) designation. From 1949-1955, the F9F served as the first jet aircraft to be flown by the US Navy !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! demonstration squadron, and nearly 1,400 Panthers were produced for the Navy and US Marine Corps, as well as an export version that was sold to the Argentine Navy. The US Panthers were retired in 1958, but the Argentine fighters served until 1969.

F9F-5 Panthers flown by the US Navy Blue Angels demonstration squadron. The Panther was the first jet flown by the Blue Angels, serving from 1951-1954. (US Navy)

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Mosquitos in flight, 1942 (Author unknown)

November 25, 1940 – The first flight of the de Havilland Mosquito. Founded !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! in 1920, the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! quickly made a name for itself with the development of innovative and advanced aircraft of all types. By the 1930s, the world’s fascination with air racing reached a fever pitch, and the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! from England, to Australia, billed as the world’s greatest air race, presented an opportunity for de Havilland to showcase their knack for building light yet powerful aircraft. To save weight, their entry, the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , featured a wooden frame covered with spruce plywood, and the team of Comet pilots were the outright winners of the race with an elapsed time of just 71 hours. De Havilland further refined their wood-working skills with the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , a four-engine passenger plane with a pioneering monocoque fuselage constructed from a sandwich of two pieces of plywood encasing a layer of balsa wood. This construction resulted in a very strong, yet very light, aircraft.

A de Havilland Mosquito IIF of No. 456 Squadron RAAF in flight. A wartime censor has scratched out the wingtip antennae of the Airborne-Interceptor radar. (RAF)

In 1936, the British Air Ministry issued Specification P.13/36 calling for a twin-engine medium bomber that could carry 3,000 pounds of bombs, and aircraft designers replied with traditional heavy bombers such as the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . But de Havilland believed that a lightweight, simple design could carry the same load at even higher speeds, perhaps even outpacing modern fighter planes. The idea was similar to the German !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!!   concept, which proposed that fast medium bombers would be capable of outrunning enemy fighters and would not need defensive armament or extra crewmen.

Drawing on its previous experience with the Comet and Albatross, de Havilland made their new bomber out of wood, which provided a strength to weight ratio that was as good as !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! or steel, and also preserved scarce metals in a time of war. They also followed their design ethos of mating the most powerful engine possible with the lightest airframe possible. Powered by a pair of !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! engines, the Mosquito made its first flight just 11 months after detailed design work began, and further tests proved that the “Mossie” was indeed as fast as promised. Its top speed of 392 mph outpaced the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! by 3o mph, though it was twice as heavy and twice as big, and was one of the fastest aircraft in the world at the time.

Forty Canadian-built Mosquitos were flown by the US as the F-8. (NASA)

Even though the Mosquito showed promise, and certainly lived up to its billing as a fast bomber, some in the RAF were hesitant to accept such a radical aircraft. So the Mosquito was initially adopted for reconnaissance missions to test its mettle, then developed into a high-speed fighter with the addition of forward-firing armament. Ultimately, the Mosquito proved to be a jack of all trades for the RAF, fulfilling the roles of reconnaissance, bomber, fighter, night fighter, trainer, torpedo bomber and target tug. The “Wooden Wonder” ended the war with the lowest loss rate of any aircraft in the RAF Bomber Command. Over 7,700 were built before production ended in 1950, including over 1,100 in Canada. Forty Canadian-built reconnaissance Mosquitos were flown by the US Army as the F-8, and Mosquitos of all types served the air forces of 21 countries. The Luftwaffe was so impressed with the British Schnellbomber that they named their own all-wood !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! the Moskito , perhaps in homage to the brilliant de Havilland design.

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November 25, 1940 – The first flight of the Martin B-26 Marauder. During World War II, large, four-engine strategic bombers such as the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ranged the skies over Europe and the Pacific, dropping huge loads of bombs on both civilian and military targets. But not all missions required the biggest bomb load possible, and there remained a need for a smaller, twin-engine tactical bomber that could attack targets at lower levels and with greater accuracy. Two years before the US entered WWII, the USAAF issued Circular Proposal 39-640 that called for a new high-speed, twin-engine bomber with a top speed of 350 mph that could carry up to 2,000 pounds of bombs at a range of 3,000 miles. In July of that year, the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! proposed their Model 179 to fulfill that requirement, and, with all out war looming, the USAAF ordered 201 aircraft off the drawing board before any prototype flew. In 1940, an additional 930 Marauders were ordered, still before the first aircraft ever left the ground.

Like the other medium bombers of the era, the B-26 featured a shoulder-mounted wing with two engines slung underneath, in this case !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! 18-cylinder radial engines. the Marauder was manned by a crew of seven: two pilots, bombardier, navigator, and three defensive gunners. The first production Marauder served as the flying prototype, and soon after the new bomber entered service it became clear that the emphasis on speed had an unfortunate side effect for the pilots. The relatively small wing, which was designed for high-speed performance, also created particularly high !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , which resulted in higher landing speeds than many pilots had experienced in training or in other similar aircraft. Inexperienced pilots, particularly trainees, discovered that if they dropped under 120-135 mph on landing, depending on the weight of the aircraft, the Marauder would stall and crash. The bomber gained the nickname “Widowmaker,” and pilots training in Florida began to chant, “One a day in Tampa Bay.” Other structural issues beset the early Marauders, and many pilots believed that the bomber could not be flown on one engine, until more experienced pilots, including !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , proved that it could be flown safely.

Even when these difficulties were solved, including a redesign of the wing, the B-26 remained a demanding aircraft to fly, but it ended the war with the lowest combat loss rate of any US aircraft. The Marauder first saw action in the Pacific Theater in 1942, though the bulk of B-26 missions were flown over Europe and the Mediterranean. The US Army Air Forces calling the Marauder “the chief bombardment weapon on the Western Front” and, by the close of WWII, Marauders had flown more than 110,000 sorties and accounted for more than 150,000 tons of bombs dropped while serving with the US, Britain, Free France and South Africa. Production ended in 1945 after more than 5,200 Marauders had been built, and the type was retired by 1947.

Though Marauder crews suffered the fewest combat losses of any American bomber type, bombing missions were still risky business. Here a B-26 suffers a direct hit by flak over Toulon, France in 1944. (US Air Force)

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Short Takeoff

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(FAA)

November 23, 1959 – The first flight of the Boeing 720, a short- to medium-range airliner developed from the successful !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . Launched in 1960 with United Airlines, the 720 was smaller than its predecessor and carried fewer passengers, but was developed to operate from shorter runways at airports that were inaccessible to the larger 707. The 720 became a popular charter aircraft, famously for the British band !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , who named their 720 !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . A follow-on variant of the 720, the 720B, replaced the original !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! turbojet engines with !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! turbofan engines, and the 720 was eventually superseded by the Boeing !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! .

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(US Navy)

November 23, 1942 –   The first flight of the Vought V-173. Nicknamed the “Flying Pancake” for obvious reasons, the V-173 was a developmental proof of concept aircraft to create a new fighter for the US Navy that would take advantage of the unorthodox aircraft’s !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! wing and provide lower take off and landing speeds while preserving maneuverability at high speeds. The V-173 was eventually developed into the all-metal !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and, while the design promised excellent performance, the XF5U came at a time when the Navy was transitioning to jet aircraft (it shares a maiden flight date with the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ) and the program was canceled by 1947.

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November 23, 1910 – The death of Octave Chanute. Chanute was born in Paris on February 18, 1832 and emigrated to the US when he was six years old. He became a civil engineer and did the majority of his work building railroad bridges in the Midwest. After retiring from civil engineering, Chanute turned his interests to aviation and began compiling all the information he could find about flight attempts from all around the world. He began to work with early pioneers of glider flight, and eventually came in contact with the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! in 1900, where his work heavily influenced the brothers in their quest to build a flying machine. Chanute shared his findings freely, but chafed at the Wrights’ refusal to share any of their discoveries with the world. However, he continued to give them advice and helped publicize their achievements. Despite the failure of his own flying machines, Chanute’s work to promote aviation has led some to consider him the father of heavier-than-air flight. The former Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois was named in his honor.

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November 24, 1971 – The hijacking of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, a regularly scheduled flight between Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington. The suspected hijacker, !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , who has since come to be known as D.B. Cooper, claimed to have a bomb and demanded that $200,000 and four parachutes be given to him when the flight reached Seattle. After the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! (N467US) landed, the passengers were released and officials met Cooper’s demands. The refueled airliner took off and Cooper ordered the crew to fly to Mexico City. Once in the air, Cooperopened the rear stairway of the aircraft, parachuted out, and was never seen again. Authorities believe Cooper perished in the jump, but neither his body nor the money was ever found. The case remains the only unsolved act of air piracy in American aviation history.

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(US Air Force)

November 24, 1959 – The first flight of the Hiller X-18, a vertical/short takeoff and landing (V/STOL) aircraft and the first to be designed with a tilting wing. The Hiller Aircraft Corporation was founded in 1942 and worked primarily with helicopters before taking on the V/STOL X-18. In an effort to shorten development time, the X-18 was built from parts scavenged from other aircraft, with the fuselage coming from the unsuccessful !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! transport and the turboprop engines from the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . For takeoff, the wing tilted upward, and ducted engine exhaust at the tail controlled pitch. Test pilots carried out a total of 20 test flights, but problems with control plagued the aircraft. However, useful information from the program, particularly the need to cross-link the engines should one fail in hover, was used in the development of the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! tiltwing.

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November 24, 1955 – The first flight of the Fairchild F-27, a turboprop airliner developed from the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . The program began in Holland with the Fokker P275, and was eventually built in the US by Fairchild as the F-27. With capacity for up to 40 passengers, the first F-27s entered service with West Coast Airlines in 1958, and the airliner was soon flying for a host of American carriers along with airlines of eight other countries. The upgraded F-27B received more powerful engines, and Fairchild developed a stretched version, known as the FH-228, which increased seating capacity to 56 passengers and added a cargo compartment between the cockpit and passenger cabin. A total of 128 F-27s were produced, along with 78 FH-227s. As of 2010, only one remained in active service with the Myanmar Air Force.

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(US Air Force)

November 24, 1947 – The first flight of the Convair XC-99, a double-deck transport aircraft built for the US Air Force and the largest piston-powered land-based aircraft ever built. Developed from the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , the XC-99 was designed to carry 100,000 pounds of cargo or 400 fully equipped troops over 8,000 miles. A civilian airliner version, the Model 37, was planned but never developed. Introduced in 1949, only one XC-99 was built, and it was retired in 1957 after eight years of service. Today, the aircraft is part of the collection of the National Museum of the United States Air Force, where it awaits restoration.

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(San Diego Air and Space Museum)

November 24, 1939 – British Overseas Airways Corporation is formed. State-owned British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) was created by an Act of Parliament in 1939 with the merger of !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . The new company started operations on April 1, 1940 and provided vital transport and logistical support to the far flung British Colonies during WWII. After the war, BOAC continued to operate flying boats until 1950, and was the first airline to introduce jet aircraft in May 1952 with the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . BOAC was eventually merged with !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! (BEA) in 1974, and ceased to be an independent organization when it was merged with !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! on March 31, 1974. Had the final merger not taken place, BOAC would have been one of the airlines operating the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! supersonic transport.

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November 25, 1961 – USS Enterprise is commissioned. USS Enterprise (CVN 65) was the eighth US Naval vessel to !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and the world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Ordered on November 15, 1957, Enterprise was built at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia and still holds the record as the longest naval vessel in the world. After her maiden voyage in 1960, Enterprise saw action during the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , as well as the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . After more than 50 years of service, Enterprise was deactivated on December 1, 2012 and struck from the Naval Vessel Register on February 3, 2017. Despite its historic status, Enterprise now awaits scrapping and recycling. The next !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , CVN 80, will be the ninth US Navy ship to be christened Enterprise.

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(NASA)

November 26, 1985 – The launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis on STS-61-B carrying Rodolfo Neri Vela, the first astronaut from Mexico. Vela, a professor in the Telecommunications Department in the Electrical Engineering Division at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, flew on board !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! as a Payload Specialist and helped to launch three communications satellites He also carried out various scientific experiments, including special experiments for the Mexican government. Vela, the second Latin-American astronaut (after Cuban !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ), logged over 165 hours in space and completed 108 orbits of the Earth.

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(UK Government)

November 26, 1951 – The first flight of the Gloster Javelin, a twin-engine, delta-wing interceptor and night fighter. It was also the first purpose-built, all-weather interceptor developed for the RAF, and the last in the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! line of jets that began with the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , Britain’s first operational jet fighter. The subsonic Javelin served the Royal Air Force from the mid-1950s through the 1960s, and was eventually replaced by the supersonic !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , though the two served together for much of the Javelin’s operational career. While the Javelin never saw any actual combat, it did serve in a number of global hot spots during its career, and was retired in 1968 after the construction of 436 aircraft.

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(US Navy)

November 26, 1943 – The death of Edward Henry “Butch” O’Hare, a US Navy fighter pilot during WWII and the Navy’s first fighter ace of the war. On February 20, 1942, O’Hare found himself alone and facing nine Japanese bombers attacking his carrier. With limited ammunition, O’Hare flew his !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! at the enemy, destroying five of the bombers and damaging a sixth. O’Hare was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, which recognized his actions as “one of the most daring, if not the most daring, single action in the history of combat aviation.” While leading the first-ever nighttime fighter mission launched from a carrier, O’Hare’s !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! was shot down over the island of Tarawa. Neither he nor his fighter were ever found. The Navy destroyer USS O’Hare (DD-889) was named in his honor, as was Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

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November 26, 1925 – The first flight of the Tupolev TB-1, a large, twin-engine bomber developed by !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! for the Soviet Air Force. The Soviet Union’s first large, all-metal aircraft, the TB-1 employed a corrugated !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! skin originally pioneered by !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , and was so large that a wall of the factory had to be knocked down to get it out. Powered by a pair of !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! liquid-cooled V-12 engines (license-built !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ), the TB-1 had a top speed of 111 mph and could carry 2,205 pounds of bombs. Following a 13,194 mile promotional flight from Moscow to New York, the TB-1 entered service as the Soviet Union’s standard heavy bomber, and was fitted with either traditional landing gear or floats. A total of 218 were built, and the TB-1 was eventually replaced by the still larger !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! .

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Connecting Flights

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If you enjoy these Aviation History posts, please let me know in the comments. And if you missed any of the past articles, you can find them all at !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . You can also find more stories about aviation, aviators and airplane oddities at !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! .

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user314 > ttyymmnn 11/26/2019 at 13:19

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God, I’d love to see the XC-99 once it’s restored, either next to it’s sister B-36, or near the XB-70.

TheRealBicycleBuck > ttyymmnn 11/26/2019 at 14:10

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I’ve always wanted to see a B-26 and a Mosquito up close. I built a model of the B-26 when I was a kid. The Mosquito always fascinated me being an all-wood airframe.

Great post as always!

ttyymmnn > TheRealBicycleBuck 11/26/2019 at 14:18

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I have an unfinished B-26 model that I’ve had for at least 25 years. I stopped working on it when my D-Day stripes start to look like crap, not realizing that those stripes were slapped on hastily and never looked good to begin with. Of the 5,000 Marauders built, only 6 remain, and only 1 is airworthy. Now, that’s something I’d love to see.

https://www.fantasyofflight.com/collection/aircraft/currently-not-showing-in-museum/wwii/1940-martin-b-26-marauder/

This shot from FoF really gives a good idea of just how short those wings are. 

TheRealBicycleBuck > ttyymmnn 11/26/2019 at 14:45

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I always wanted to fly in a B-52, but that may be impossible after the crash a few months ago. I didn’t know any marauders were still airworthy! Now I have a new impossible goal!

ttyymmnn > TheRealBicycleBuck 11/26/2019 at 15:23

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It doesn’t sound like they fly it often.

facw > user314 11/26/2019 at 17:59

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This pic is from over a year ago, but they’ve clearly got a lot of work ahead of them:

Future next gen S2000 owner > ttyymmnn 11/27/2019 at 13:13

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That mosquito is low as hell in the Copenhagen pic.