"Guy Alcala" wrote in message
. ..
Arved Sandstrom wrote:

"Kevin Brooks" wrote in message
...

[ SNIP ]
"It was also very maneuverable, featuring an incredible rate of roll,
and
one Navy test pilot who flew the Skyray said that Air Force
chase-plane
pilots were desperate to find a USAF machine that could out-turn it.
Air
Force pilots flew the F4D, no doubt with an eye to assessing its
strengths
and weaknesses. It did have weaknesses, significant ones. Along with
its
agility came a degree of instability, particularly in the critical
transonic
speed range. This does not seem too surprising given the aircraft's
aspect
in the top view, which suggests some of the aerodynamic features of a
pancake; it also had a steep glide ratio, being described as a "lead
sled".
One pilot said the Ford's handling "bordered on the bizarre." In fact,
there
were some test pilots who despised the F4D and felt it should have
never
been accepted into operational service. This appears to have been a
minority
opinion, but even its admirers admitted the Ford's instability made it
a
handful for a relatively inexperienced pilot. Skilled pilots who liked
the
machine also found it tiring to fly for long distances: keeping it on
the
level was a continuous balancing act."

Presumably it was as well-loved as the F-101 Lawn Dart....ummmm, Voodoo.

The Navy brass certainly appreciated it, and the unit that flew it as part
of
NORAD/ADC. VF(AW)-3 was the squadron, and they were based at NAS North
Island,
commanded by WW2 USN Hellcat ace Eugene Valencia. They won NORAD's best
squadron competition two years running, a source of great joy to the navy
brass
and considerable heartburn to the USAF brass. The biggest problem with
the
'Ford' appears to have been its honeycomb wing skin structure, which just
wasn't
up to the rigors of day-in/day-out operations. Ed Heinemann put an
entirely
different, thicker wing skin on the follow-on supersonic F5D, but it was
decided
not to put it into production, probably partly because the navy wanted to
spread
the wealth around a bit and not have an all-Douglas fleet. So they
cancelled
the production order for the F5D and went with the F8U exclusively.

From what I have read, the wing structure was not the "biggest problem". The
biggest problem it faced was probably its sometime squirrely handling
characteristics; sounds like it was bordering on instability (not a bad
thing for a fighter, if you use today's models as the reference, but the
late fifties was a bit before the advent of stability augmentation via
computer controlled surfaces). This made it very agile, but it also
apparently made it kind of dangerous. Your wing structure may have been
related to another of its problems, which was its unsuitability for
offensive strike/CAS use.

Brooks


Guy