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TreborNehoc — demon retouched
Published: 2016-11-23 17:03:44 +0000 UTC; Views: 370; Favourites: 17; Downloads: 14
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*** not my photo ***mcdonnell f3h-2n demon, 1956
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McDonnell F3H-2N Demon 133572 as seen during its test/acceptance flight out of the McDonnell plant at St. Louis Airport, Missouri (KSTL) on June 4th 1956.
The aircraft would eventually be assigned to VF-131 in 1961, and took part on the USS Constellation (CV-64) shake-down cruise to the Mediterrean, which lasted from March to May 1962. However, 133572 never completed the 'assignment', as she was lost on March 22nd 1962 over water. Its pilot, Ensign I. Gale Lane, made a succesful ejection and was rescued from the water some 30 minutes later.
It wouldn't be Ensign Gale Lane's only ejection from a Demon, however - just over a year later he had to make a quick exit through the canopy of F-3B (formerly F3H-2) 143417 while flying out of NAS Cecil Field with VF-13 Nightcappers; again he made a safe landing on the water, and was rescued by helicopter not much later.
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Nah, just the lucky kind of unlucky. It wasn't uncommon for pilots at the time to have eject twice; however it was slightly more uncommon for them to survive a second one.
Demons in particular had a couple of nasty habits, some of which were never solved over their service life.
In the thirteen years between the first flight of the F3H (August 1951) and the last flight of the type (September 1964), some 143 out of 519 Demons produced were lost in accidents (at least 33 of which fatal), starting in March of 1954 - eight of those being F3H-1 variants (60 built) with the early, hopeless Westinghouse J40 engine (which gave the heat and thrust of the average Westinghouse toaster - yes, Westinghouse made jet engines, toasters and fridges, but even the fridges gave more thrust than their woeful J40 jet engine...), the engine issues ensuring that the F3H-1 variants were only ever used for training and never entered operational service; the remainder of the accidents happening with the F3H-2 versions which were re-engined with the Allison J71. Even with the more powerful J71, the power-to-weight ration was so poor, that Demons were commonly referred to as 'lead sleds'.
An early issue with the F3H was the afterburner fuel pump, which initially was air driven. It was prone to failure; losing the afterburner on take-off usually resulted in a nasty loss of power and an unrecoverable stall.
A more serious issue was the engine, which was sensitive to cold weather - if it passed through a patch of cold air, the sudden influx of cold air would cause the compressor case to shrink on the compressor blades, effectively stalling the engine. One incident in 1958 saw a formation of Demons through a rain squall - three aircraft suffered a sudden engine flame out, all three aircraft crashing before the pilots had a chance to eject (all killed). The remainder of the formation made an emergency landing; when one of the aircraft took off the next day, it too suffered a flame-out and crashed, luckily with the pilot surviving - it was later found that all aircraft of that formation flight had engines damaged to various degrees by passing through cold weather. This issue too was eventually fixed (in 1960), but at the cost of further engine performance.
An even worse issue was the McDonnell ejector seat which was originally fitted to the F3H Demon - it was found to be unreliable; sometimes it would fail to fire, or fire but not extract the pilot from the aircraft. The McDonnell seats also had poor low-level performance, so any ejection under 500 feet or at a high sink rate would either end up fatal, or career-ending at best. This was eventually solved by replacing the original seats with Martin-Baker Mk.5s, but even this would not always guarantee the safe extraction of a pilot.
Just imagine what Congress would say today if over 140 F/A-18s were lost in a span of just 10 years, a quarter of them with the loss of the pilots...
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interesting info, but to an extent it was typical of the era. check out the history of a soviet contemporary, the MiG-19 - if I recall, they used to occasionally explode, just to keep everyone on their toes.
and thanks again.
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A lot of these aircraft were designed and pressed into service rather quickly, before all issues with their designs were discovered or cured - in fact, most of these aircraft designs had a shorter span between their first flight and withdrawal from frontline service, than some of today's aircraft have between their first flight and entry into service!
Always a pleasure! ^_^
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thanks. this photo was in pretty good shape, with not too many scratches or specks (if you check other pics of the demon, you'll see it has lots of ports and rivets and stuff that look like photo defects, but that's how the aircraft actually appeared). the biggest edit was some color adjustment to take out the green fade that some color photos from this era seem to get.
truth is, retouching this was just an excuse to display a cool photo of an interesting aircraft.
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thanks. this photo was in pretty good shape, with not too many scratches or specks (if you check other pics of the demon, you'll see it has lots of ports and rivets and stuff that look like photo defects, but that's how the aircraft actually appeared). the biggest edit was some color adjustment to take out the green fade that some color photos from this era seem to get.
truth is, retouching this was just an excuse to display a cool photo of an interesting aircraft.
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