Vought's F7U Cutlass Was Part Innovative Fighter And Part Safety Disaster
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- Опубликовано: 1 окт 2024
- In recent times there have been attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of one of the most legendarily dangerous Cold War fighter aircraft: the F7U Cutlass. In this video I take a long look at its history, design and try and understand whether the Cutlass was a disaster, or just misunderstood.
Main sources:
"Naval Fighters No. 6" by Steve Ginter is interesting but typically eclectic in style
"Vought F7U Cutlass: A Developmental History" by Tom Gardner is a slightly heavy read, but contains fabulous detail
I also referenced the Pilots Instructions for the U-1 and U-3 models to get a sense for the control and equipment differences
This is a brilliant blog post on the Cutlass cockpit configuration and the Sparrow: tailspintopics...
News stories on the narrow escape of the Del:
www.sandiegoun...
www.sandiegoun...
Strapping into the last prototype left after the first one disappeared and the last one did its best to try to kill you is the essence of what it meant to be a 50s jet test pilot
The movie First Man kinda hints at this with the test program funeral receptions they show.
Not like he could refuse
On a happy note the Crusader was a conservative design, had the very dependable J-57, and gave the USN and French Navy excellent service for years
Conservative? I think the radical variable incidence wing says otherwise. Sure it still had guns but a lot of other "new" technology on top of the wing.
Like most Vought designs the F-8 was not that conservative and introduced innovation. The variable incidence wing allowed for shorter and lighter landing gear as well as better pilot visibility on approach to landing. In keeping with some other Vought innovations it worked but was not really necessary, and was not used on subsequent designs. But it was another example of Vought not settling for the common solution.
And it was the development base for the incredibly versatile A-7 Corsair II, the first US aircraft with a modern HUD and itself the basis for the imho underrated YA-7F.
@@kilianortmann9979 I had a pair of those blast over me unannounced (as in, snuck up, no sound beforehand) while I was on the Batsto River in Southern, NJ back in the mid 80's. Scared the crap outta me at first, but then I gotta good look at them. They were in a sort of aggressor camo with grey undersides. They were flying perfectly in formation at what looked to be 1500 - 2000 ft arcing to the left as they followed the river bend. The site is burned into my mind.
Not sure I would call it "conservative", just not as radical as the F7U. Like what tradition were they falling back on by giving it high swept wings with variable incidence and Mach 1.8 performance? It had a tail, wings and stabilizer, and didn't try to delete the gun armament, does that make it "conservative"?
Imagine being the fourth guy who had to test the spin characteristics knowing that the previous three had to punch out after doing the same thing. 😂
Test pilots are like… that’s Tuesday.
Bad Tuesday, but still a Tuesday.
Westinghouse should have stuck with fridges...
That was cold
@@JTA1961 ba dum tss
@@JTA1961bruh… chill 😂
The train brakes he built his legacy on are pretty good.
Aviators said Westinghouse toasters made more heat
Not a Pound just putting out a TV quality 45 minute documentary every few days, incredible
Absolutely. And algorithm bump
Protect this man and his stellar channel at all costs!
Great Channel 👍
Top of the hill.
What "Wings" on the History Channel used to be.
I never thought about the origin of the hood ornaments. How cool! Thanks!
Excellent!! I like the cinematic Del story cutting in and out. I also appreciate how even handed and thorough you are about every subject. Very very good stuff.
Worked with an Airline pilot years (decades) ago whose nickname was " Captain Cutlass" since he obsessed on how the Cutlass was such a great airplane..... Nobody believed him.
The C172RG is a fine aircraft
The Cutlass is a premium example of the project that post-war aircraft designers apparently had to kill off all the excess combat pilots produced by the war.
But damn is it doesn't look cool - like a child's drawing of a jet fighter come to life.
Excellent narration with dry humor. My new favorite YT channel.
After this one, you simply must do the similarly cursed F3H Demon!
The clear predecessor to the slightly more successful F-110/F4.
Astonishing that the F4U Corsair and F-8 Crusader bookend this disaster, from the same engineers.
This was a radically different design though
Don't forget the oddball XF5U Fling Flapjack! Vought designers never lacked imagination. 😅
Aviation back in the day was kinda like that. Making good aircraft was kinda down to pure luck.
I look at it as they gambled on something that was different.
I look to other slightly weird Navy aircraft like the F-8. Its variable incidence wing turned out to work just fine.
That plane was shortened and made into the A-7 which had a long career as an attack aircraft.
Been waiting for the "Gutless" to get the "Not a Pound" treatment!
Agreed, ever since the start of his videos on early US Navy fighters, there's been two aircraft I've longed to hear about: the Vought F7U, and the Grumman F-11F. Here's hoping we get a breakdown on the Ironwork's Tiger next
@@benjaminalmquist1805 seeing a video on the Tiger would be awesome. There are a few I'd love to see him do videos on (though he makes interesting videos on any aircraft he talks about). I'd love to see him do a video on the F-101 Voodoo and the F-3H Demon. You can just so easily see how both of those designs informed the design of the Phantom. in fact, I think a video on the evolution from the first phantom to the Demon and Voodoo to the F-4 would make a fantastic video.
@@Jon.A.Scholt 100% agree with you on that. The early McDonnell aircraft are pretty much right up his wheelhouse.
Also, V-364C was a 3 engine variant, not a single engine variant. You can see the other 2 engines and ducting in the top down view
You're correct. Three J34s.
The D design was also a three engine design - two in pods on the wings, and one in the fuselage.
Way back when I was just a kid I found an unassembled plastic model kit of the Cutlass in an abandoned house. I was in awe of the futuristic look of the aircraft! But back then there was no easy access to any sources of information so I didn't learn about the "Gutless Cutlass" failings until the 21st century.
Yeah I still have my handful of cheap paperback aircraft books that I read cover to cover again and again as a youth. Part of me still misses that. I have amassed this huge collection of interesting books on all kinds of subjects and I realized the other day that I probably won't ever actually read them. I never just sit down and read books, and when I do they are usually novels and literature. At least I will be well provided when the Internet goes down, although in that case I probably won't have time for sitting back and reading books.
Such a poor aircraft they even abandoned the model and the house it was in!
@@CapitalRoach Lmao
Abandoned? Or uninhabited while you were there?
I just wondered how it would have handled a dogfight. It was early in the day of the missile so an up close gunfight would probably be the way it turned out.
Great video. Thanks for posting. Question for you. At 4.03 in the picture showing the Corsair and other aircraft, I see in the background what looks like one of the Flying Wings coming in on approach. Can it be???
Yeah does look like a B35. If that photo was taken at Muroc in the immediate post war period then that would cement that opinion. Unless it’s a complete optical illusion and just some kind of construction frame in the far distance!
XB-35,, YB-49? Can't see enough detail...
I did engineering work at LTV in the early 80's, working with older engineers who had worked on the Cutlass back in the day. I heard lots of crazy stories about the F7U. It was built like a tank, but flew like one as well.
Just have to wonder if the pilots of those written off Cutlasses didn't have a sigh of relief.Those were some tough dudes.
needed computers; that werent available back then...That's why the YB-49 was a failure...
Couple J-57's & modern-ish flight computer (delivered by magic from the future)... and all the kinks worked out of the hydraulic system(s).... and a nose gear strut that would not break.... and One Billion Dollars later... yeah, that was a weird dream. 😁
@ 20:50 Oh well done Sir... very very well done, improved range you say.
Actually laughed out loud at the shade being thrown with that line.
Saddled with the underperforming Westinghouse (1) axial flow engines and aerodynamics of questionable performance for the late 1940s. I wonder just what the difference a more powerful set of engines and fly by wire controls only really made possible in the 1970s would have made.
1) Westinghouse did have turbine engine experience prior to dipping their toes into aviation jet engine design. Unfortunately that experience was all in steam turbine or posdibly gas turbine units for power plant or possibly ship board use. The US market for steam turbines was pretty much dominated by General Electric and Westinghouse to my knowledge. And the Westinghouse was not the first acisl flow engine designed or built in the US. That goes to the Lockheed engine designed for their L-133. That engine was taken over by Marquart and never really did work out.
Highly informative and excellently written. I love the term "madcap" I reference to Vought's design team. Sometimes it doesn't work, as with the Cutlass, but sometimes it does. Witness the Crusader and Super Crusader.
In pilot trials it was found gibbons achieved very poor range while velociraptors proved very fuel efficient pilots. 20:46
Clever 😂
The 'Cutlass' appears a joint USN and Vought aerospace mistake in every way. The Crusader series was if anything the very antithesis of the Cutlass, in all respects; where Vought built highly innovative and reliable aircraft in a single engine form. The complete aberration that was the Cutlass cannot be accounted for. It remains one of the most errant and confused of designs, which attempted to break rules for no reason than novelties sake. The massive front strut, and widely dispersed vertical tails appear a novelty item, rather than aerodynamic elements. The delta along with its excessively short horizontal stabilisers would have presented control difficulties at high AOA, even I can see, while also avoiding lower tail strakes, which may have given the fuselage some stability?
Would I have flown a Cutlass?
With that roll rate? You kidding?
Ohhhh yeah! 😎👍🏻
Would I have _landed_ a Cutlass?😳
Only on a runway the size of Texas after praying to the Omnissiah and burning expensive incense to sooth the machine spirit.
Land on a carrier? Out of the question. Never happening. I'll punch out attempting to land on the deck in a hurricane first thank you very much.🧐
GR8 piece.
The dud, the dead end & the disappointment (XF-5, F-6, F-7) guaranteed the F-8's success. Many thanx 👍👍
Oh Westinghouse. The engine company that really messed up US Navy Aviation in the 50s. The Pirate's issue was that the Navy tried to make a small jet fighter. It's big issue was that it was underpowered, so a bigger swept-wing F6U would have likely been a very workable aircraft.
I wish the early jets like these had the engines and electronics to match their designers vision. They came up with some very beautiful, nearly unflyable aircraft because they lacked the power and control systems.
Power and more important reliability in the engines. Early jets were notoriously fragile.
It’s aerodynamics we’re ahead of the current tech…If the Cutlass had fly-by-wire computer aided controls and systems (as in the F-16) plus more powerful reliable engines and reliable hydraulics…it would have been successful….it was just aerodynamicly too advanced for its time.
There is a privately owned Cutlass that is being restored to flight. And no it's not mine, mine was a 1971 Cutlass coupe that I wish I still had.
Super video. Although Cutlass was really a troubled fighter, esthetically it is one of my favourite airplanes, that ever hit the flying deck.
And what a beautiful wreck they made when they did.
It’s like an F-14 or F-15 that’s missing a couple chromosomes
As someone who grew up in San Diego and stayed at the Hotel Del several times, it was cool to hear that story that I was somehow not aware of.
A friend moved to SD from Seattle about 10 years ago. She posted on Facebook having lunch with her mother at the, Del, being a military sort of person (father career Navy, did a hitch myself) I had to relate to her the tale of Jimmy Doolittle and his bride and their honeymoon.
My dad wrapped his career in Coronado, but I was only with him at that point for a few week on summer vacation so, living in Imperial Beach, so I never even got up that far.
You’re getting really good at telling these stories.
I believe that Al Casby, on Facebook, is the world expert on this airplane. He is actually rebuilding a Cutlass. Anyone interested should look him up there. I once heard a long interview with a Cutlass pilot. He thought it would have been a good fighter with hydraulic issues fixed…it’s biggest problem according to him. I’m glad the video ended with putting the accident rate in context of the time. Every jet fighter had lots of accidents at that time.
Yes. 3000 PSI hyd. systems were in their infancy at that time. Couple of GE J-85 (civilian CJ-610) engines that were used in the T-38 would work very well-with or without afterburner.
It's notable that the biggest factor in reducing losses wasn't mature hydraulic systems or engines that put out rated power; it was the tool control program.
Which, as a former ground crewman, is humbling. You can't engineer a better yard ape, you can only ask him if he left his wrench in the intake fairing... again.
I’ve been looking forward to this one!!!!
Man, the Navy hated this fighter so much that they were basically looking for excuses to write them off.
Vought F4U & A7 Corsair & A8 Crusader.Enought said. The best comparison for Vought is Team Lotus in Formula One. If it wasn't wiz bang than Collin Chapman wasn't excited. Just Like Vought. Most people love Vought, so maybe stow the snarky attitude.
Glad I'm not the only one who dislikes the snarky commentary. I also dislike the overly dramatic descriptions of events that drone on and on in the attempt to provide excitement for the viewer. I'd rather just hear the facts and save a half hour of my life to spend elsewhere.
This thing wouldn't look out of place in a star wars movie.😄
This has been the most comprehensive vid about the Cutlass I've seen. Thanks.
The Cutless was my favorite fighter jet as a young boy. I received a model kit of one for Christmas and thought it was the best thing produced. Back then I had no idea it was such a nightmare of an airplane to fly and land. But to boy of 10, it was the coolest jet in the military.
The poster child that disproves "If it looks right it flies right".
Sure does look good on a poster though, doesn't it?
Does it look right? Anyway that saying Is nonsense. What is "right"? There are plenty of ugly planes that fly very well, and plenty of real lookers that don't.
@@billdewahl7007 That was an important part of the Cold War. Like the Avro Vulcan, if it looks scary and futuristic, it's done half the job. If it doesn't look scary enough, make it really noisy.
Huh?
This plane looks like hammered dog dirt.
Not only is the Del still standing but they still do a decent brunch, at least they did before the Rona, and it's still a very useful visual mark when you're coming into the channel to get into the bay. That spire is just very easy to pick out along the skyline of Coronado.
Am happy to wake up to this because the Cutlass is one aircraft I've always thought looked super cool, but never really heard anything substantial about it besides that it existed
Reminds me a tad of the British vampires but they handled nicely...
Sea Vixen might be close going by size and performance, I always thought the Cutlass was a pretty small aircraft but its 3 meters longer and over double the weight of a vampire
Potentially a good aircraft if it had decent engines rather than the Westinghouse rubbish. The fourteen ft nose strut (F7U-3) on an aircraft slamming onto carrier decks does look like an accident waiting to happen.
After two duds (F6U, pedestrian is to overpraise it, F7U-3, pioneered things like AIM-7 Sparrow I, apparently quite manoeuvrable WHEN everything was working), Vought’s designers came up with the superb F8U.
Nice job on naval aviation "Gutless Cutlass". Please keep up the outstanding work.
Mate, i really appreciate your focus on naval aviation, that's a topic i'm interested to dig further and your videos are exhaustive and quite useful. Especially early naval jets that are now mostly forgotten. Brillant work !
Well we've had the Phantom, Banshee, Pirate, Skynight, Fury, Panther and now Cutlass, here's hoping to see the Cougar, Tiger, Demon and my personal favorite jet The Skyray.
My favorite is the flapjack, but that’s definitely an earlier design.
Thanks for another deep, informative dive into a little-known early jet design!
Being of a thoroughly conventional outlook, the Cutlass always looked weird to me.
Pity they didn't have fly-by-wire back then, plus decent engines.
Very nice. Thanks. I tend to have been interested in each indivisual type at a time and the F7U was never came in to my view. Thanks for widening the nallow window of mine
There’s a guy at KFFZ in the US restoring a cutlass to flying status. He’s made a decent amount of progress on it
Suppose that's one way to go
@FallenPhoenix86
Well said sir! (You got a laugh out of me!)
Anyone helping this guy restore a Cutlass to flying status should be considered "Assisting a suicide".
I wonder if he has good life insurance then 😂
Where on Earth did he find the aircraft and the spares?
That’s at Falcon Field, Mesa, AZ.
I read abut that last fatal ejection-incident on wiki and it hurt even when reading about it.
At least the _"Gutless"_ looked *_COOL._*
Did it?
Get some glasses. 🤓
An interesting design to be sure, but not very good. We have an example at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola.
Interesting channel, love the detail.
If the Cutlass had more modern avionics with comupter assisted stability controls, it would have been a more successful plane. It was an airframe design that was too far ahead of its time. Why tuey insisted on keeping Westinghouse the engine supplier is weird, after they fsiled many times to deliver engine performance needed for the Cutlass. Westinghouse must have had the right contacts in the armed forces and Washington to keep their contracts going, after non-performance of their product.
With better engines it would have performed much better.
It was too much ahead of its time...
Looks like it could make an interesting remote control electric ducted fan model. Twin 30mm fans would do it. Don't forget the gyro to make it flyable.
Thanks for this, Such a cool looking plane... So interesting aerodynamically wish it hadn’t been ...errr..such a death trap😮 .Always wondered if it could have been a genuinely good plane if it had been further developed & fitted with ( much!) better engines.
Great no-nonsense, detailed content, as always. Fantastic job. Did anyone else notice what looks like a landing Northrop YB-35 or YB-49 or similar in the background of the photo @ 4:04? Very cool pic, especially with the foreground planes still in the wartime 2-color stars & bars!
Thanks for putting this one up. I dug out the old Hobbycraft F7U-3M. Pretty basic kit, this adds some details to it.
I remember seeing some of these coming into NAS Millington near Memphis. They looked like spaceships.
I read a few years ago that someone was trying to get one of them flying again, but I haven't heard anything since.
Maybe he sobered up? Lol!
I think the colour U.S. Navy footage is really good, don't you?
Even increasing the height of the vertical stabilisers and the addition of rear fuselage strakes; the short nose precluded the advances in radar etc. An ill-conceived aircraft which lacked a purpose really.
Should have bought more f4ds
Lindberg Models made a 1/48 scale model of the Vought F7U-1 Cutlass in the early 1950s. For its time, it was a pretty good kit.
Yes, I built that one as well. The only 1/48 scale kit of the prototype version.
It is still available on Amazon. Model kits of the F7U-3M missile carrying version are also available.
@@lancerevell5979 It's a pretty easy kit to find on-line.
Redesigned in the Stealth Fighters era this could be a dashing lookin fighter
Wow the prototype looked really cool, never saw that before
Obviously pilots were guv property & so brass continued to order them to their deaths on something they already knew was crap.
27:46 Did they try a 'fuel dip' when the guns were firing?
You've excelled yourself on this one. Thank you.
To this day on Wikipedia if you look up the term Ramp Strike on the upper right hand corner you see a still image of the infamous July 14th 1955 Gutless Cutlass (03:22 you have the video) ramp strike on the USS Hancock. Lieutenant Commander Jay T. Alkire was killed and up 5 sailors suffer various injury's when LCMDR Alkire's Cutlass crash into the Catwalk before it went overboard . And this Cutlass Ramp Strike was the worst US Navy peace time carrier accident post WWII until the USS Forrestal fire in July 1967.
I wish someone would give the Cutlass the “Me-262 treatment” by installing modern high-power-to-weight-ratio engines in the airframe. It’s such a beauty, and as we all know, “beautiful airplanes fly well.”
A pair of F404s and fly-by-wire controls would make this aircraft fly as good as it looks
Beautiful? I saw one of the production versions around 54 or so. As a kid, I remember it looked fat and not graceful like the panther. It looked like crap and flew the way it looked. The fact that no modern planes look like this proves this was a dead end. Better to give it the LeMay treatment. The pictures of it landing are comical.
@@georgeburns7251...tragic, in some cases
i like the stories of aircraft that seem to have a mind of their own. That one example, knowing that would be its last flight, prolonged the flight, would not be deterred, gave a little show and then finally set itself down safely in the water. But more than that, the general rule that if you got one in a spin the answer was to take your hands off the stick and let the aircraft sort itself out. The thing wanted to fly.
The pilot ejecting might have moved the CG aft and changed the airflow pattern over the fuselage. Would be interested to know if any wind tunnel tests were performed in that configuration. I think the plane might have become more stable in yaw after the large destabilizing canopy sail area was removed and the twin rudders became more effective. In that case, to get out of a spin, jettison the canopy.
I always wondered what if…the cutlass had great engines?
the canopy flinging off at 21:50 makes me giggle
Not only informative and entertaining. the entertainment includes a wit drier than the Sahara. Much appreciated documentaries, mate!
I've always thought the Cutlass was such an unorthodox looking aircraft, so futuristic looking and bizarre, I love it! To some it coule be considered the Ford Edsel of its time. It's too bad it killed so many pilots and was basically a failure. The mid to late 1940s through the 1950s were such an interesting period in military jet design though! ❤
Seems like there was a new plane coming out every week in the 50s... Always loved the look of the Cutlass, didn't know that it was such a disaster. Thanks for the vid, great as always. 🇬🇧
The century series was a comedy of errors. The Starfighter gets a bad rap but it was sadly typical of period designs rather than exceptionally dangerous.
Holy cow! “. . . In 1954 alone the Navy and the Marine Corps lost 776 aircraft and 536 aircrew in accidents.” I would suspect that that is more than the Navy and Marine Corps lost in combat in the entire Korean War. Thanks for a very informative video.
Well, that probably less than a 10% attrition rate. We had thousands of military aircraft and pilots in those days.
Couple of very nasty ejection " attempts " shown here-obvously Vought had much work to do on a full "zero zero" seat instead of a cartridge seat. Both pilots got launched at a very high rate of speed directly into aircraft spotted forward. With predictable results.
My Dad was an Air Force Fighter pilot on Exchange Duty with the navy in 1956-57. On the Bon Hom Richard. He flew the Fury and I believe was able to fly the Crusader a few times too. Was offered the opportunity to fly the Cutlass but another pilot that had already flown it talked him out of it.
It's like getting talked out of driving a 91 Dodge viper. Probably good for longevity.
I guess I'm a little surprised nobody's asked yet: has zeroing the throttle and or jettisoning stores ever become part of ditching procedure?
Phalanx can cover the vehicle mishaps. The flying wing was far more dangerous in it's development stage.
Did anyone spot the whole canopy flying off in the video of a cutlass crash landing on the carrier?😂
Forget the engines, the whole construction looked dodgy
One of the “what ifs” that immature technology (including, especially, the J40) ruined. It was almost the F-18 decades ahead of time.
Who knew the pitch down trim set just before ejection would trim out to neutral with out the pilot and egress seat. You weren’t kidding when you said the CG on the Cutlass was very critical.
thank you, RUclips algorithm, for introducing me to this channel
I think Vought model 346C is not a single-engined Cutlass form but rather a triple-engined one - at least that's how I would interpret those drawings, and would perhaps explain its weight and expected climb rate.
Under powered.
The gutless ah yes computer modeling would have saved lives if only it had been available as seeing all the ways a f7 could crash without real world consequences.
You should read Scotsman Eric 'Winkle' Brown's comments about the Cutlass, where he was test pilot for several of the models, at Patuxent River. The world's most prolific test pilot (having flown over 360 types, not including variants, made by the UK, USA, Japan, and Germany), speaking German fluently, and for many years squadron leader, both in the UK Navy and in the German Navy, postwar.
The only British officer to fly a Komet!
Let me guess. It was an American aircraft. He didn't like it.
Did the Cutless operate below sam radar Lock on.
I knew it.. finally the dreaded cutlass... the sci fi aircraft they built.. badly..
Many early US jet types had high accident rates. Did Soviet types suffer similar rates? How about the German ME-262?
Could be worse.... The Me-163 Rocket Interceptor killed more of it's own pilots than the Allies did. 😮
Hindsight is 20/20, but this jet just looks like a pos 💩
great video, i love your longer form content into these obscure/unsuccsessful types.
i'll often watch your vids whilst I'm building scale model aircraft, at the moment i have the he219 UHU on the bench in 1/48.