
The Gutless Cutlass: Pilots had good reason to fear the F7U - smacktoward
http://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/the-gutless-cutlass-12023991/?all
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Animats
1950s jet aviation had a wide variety of new aircraft, and many of them were
duds. Early jet engines were unreliable. Compressor stalls were not well
understood. Materials weren't strong enough. Control systems weren't very
good. Airframe designs good for a wide range of speeds and altitudes hadn't
settled down yet.

Navy pilots of the era had about a 1 in 5 career chance of death, without any
help from an enemy.

Then, suddenly, around the end of the 1960s, the job was done. The 1960s
produced the SR-71, the F-4 fighter, the OH-58 helicopter, the Boeing 747, and
the Concorde, all of which were quite good and were used for decades
thereafter. Since then, most aircraft development has been continuous minor
improvements.

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douche
The history of military aviation between the end of WW2 and the end of Vietnam
is really kind of fascinating. So many different designs were designed,
produced, and put into action, often for just a few years until they were
superseded by something else. Piston-engined -> straight-wing jet -> swept-
wing jet, plus all the concept designs and oddities like this. I think my
favorite is the Twin Mustang
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_F-82_Twin_Musta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_F-82_Twin_Mustang)).

I always end up on deep wiki-walks from these kinds of articles...

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cam-
Pretty awesome how the Commander of the Carrier can order a type of aircraft
off the ship for safety reasons.

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oofoe
This was a good article about the realities of deploying an overcomplicated
and fragile system from the political and practical point of view.

BTW, after reading the article, make sure you catch the author's byline at the
bottom...

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danso
Pretty fun read...but would've liked to see more context and numbers for this:

> _Supporters say it was a necessary step in the advancement of naval
> aviation, and that while the numbers were bad, so were the numbers of just
> about everything involving jet fighters and aircraft carriers in the early
> to mid-1950s._

Given the desire to show the Cutlass off at airshows, I'm surprised there
weren't any massive disasters, though I suppose if there were, we wouldn't be
reading about the F7U today...though apparently when a British prototype jet
killed 31 people at a show, it still managed to make it into service after
being grounded:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Farnborough_Airshow_DH.11...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Farnborough_Airshow_DH.110_crash)

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mcguire
Does anyone else have the strange suspicion that, if we were willing to kill
as many people doing it as we were in the history of aviation, we'd be
wandering around on Mars now?

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troutwine
That suspicion would be wrong. Spaceflight isn't something that you can wing,
even if you are completely callous as to human life. Missions over long
distances with very low margin for error imply an attention to detail that
doesn't have an analog in early aviation. Even more, each human you kill in
spaceflight is the loss of a highly-trained, highly-skilled engineering /
pilot. They aren't just goofs along for a rocket trip.

Similar story in modern aviation. Some things are just too expensive to get
wrong. Some things are too specific to get wrong. Spaceflight is both.

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mcguire
You're probably right. A closer analogy would probably be sea voyages in the
"age of discovery", but in that case you didn't need skilled people; you
didn't even need _willing_ people.

On the other hand, all of the test pilots killed by the Cutlass (and most
killed by aviation since Thomas Selfridge) were highly-skilled people.

~~~
troutwine
Quite so. I guess it depends on where you draw the line at "modern". I was
implicitly lumping anything past the jet age in as "modern".

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iso-8859-1
What happened to airframe 129554? Some random person claimed[1] on Wikipedia
that it was sold in September 2014. Earlier, it was at the Museum of Flight
Restoration. I'm wondering because I wan't to see a flight capable example.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vought_F7U_Cutlas...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vought_F7U_Cutlass&diff=next&oldid=635671364)

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UhUhUhUh
This sounds like too wide a gap between design and current state of technical
aspects, such as higher yield engines and control systems. These were times
when design had sort of a life of its own. I guess one can look at the Tomcat
as the alignment of a similar design with a technology that can carry it.

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hackuser
Consider that we work in an industry of innovation, and innovations are hard
to understand and usually fail to be adopted. How wise is it to encourage
know-it-all, shaming post-mortems? If we knew it all we wouldn't need to
innovate. In fact, it's the know-it-all atmosephere that leads to shouting
down innovators, who are necessarily people who see further than the know-it-
alls, and that leaves us with 'faster horses'.

For every innovation there is a universe of information, some of which points
to its success and some that points to its failure, and much that is uncertain
and subject to interpretation. Also, many innovators envision novel goals and
possibilities, but the public is stuck in the old mindset. To the extent the
innovation is politicized, critics will emphasize one set of data and
interpretations, and supporters will emphasize another, and most will be
answering the wrong questions with misunderstood information. A realistic
understanding of innovation, the new goals, and the technology itself is often
left out of the conversation.

When the innovation is or isn't adopted (which might be due to market issues
or politics - sometimes those critics are self-fulfilling - and have nothing
to do with the technology) senseless narratives tell stories in hindsight
where the result was obvious the whole time, as if the critics/supporters
analyses were 'right' and more meaningful than coin flips.

A useful post-mortem would grasp the goals, uncertainty, and risks of
innovation. What did they envision? What were they hoping to achieve? What was
known and where were the risks? How were those risks managed and how did they
turn out? Given the innovators uncertainty, what could they have done
differently? Did the innovation fail to be adopted because of tech? Politics?

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jlg23
The OP did not attempt a pure technical post mortem, he was writing from the
pilots' perspective. And I don't even think it is too biased - he admits that
some old flying techniques just did not hold anymore with this new design.

Last but not least he still gave a pretty good technical reason for the
failure of the design - the under-powered engines that delivered about 2/3 of
what they were supposed to deliver and that could not be exchanged for more
powerful ones.

All in all I think it is a pretty nice read for a lazy Sunday afternoon :)

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ssimpson
The author blurb at the end is funny!

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michel-slm
This plane sounds like the F-35 of its time -- with even worse reliability!

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elipsey
The F-35 arguably had a design philosphy that was the opposite of the one used
for the Cutlass. It looks like the design started in 1945, and this story was
taking place in the early 50's. The F35 took longer and cost more, whereas the
Cutlass was killing people and being improved on the fly only 6 years from
inception, so maybe this is a lesson in extremes of "agile" developement vs.
extremes of big budget "waterfall" approaches.

I guess the developement philosphy for the Cutlass would be "fix it in
production."

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michel-slm
F7U was an unusual design (cf F35 thanks to the USMC's S/VTOL requirements),
and its development period was quite lengthy for its time (though nothing
compared to some programs these days including the F35). The F-9F first flew
less than a year earlier and was already serving in Korea in 1950, the F-7U
finally made its carrier deployment in 1955 and it didn't stay in service for
that long afterwards.

I'd point out similarities to teething problems with the F-35 -- the first
time the USMC deployed it, didn't they find that the exhaust would damage deck
plating, which subsequently had to be strengthened? Didn't happen when
Harriers are taking off and landing...

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geyang
I don't get the blurb in the end. Can anyone explain?

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evan_
There was a car called the Oldsmobile Cutlass (mentioned in the article) and,
one imagines, "flying" it would lead to a broken axle.

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geyang
Thanks:)

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gaius
Moral of the story: be careful what the name of your product rhymes with.

