The Gutless Cutlass: Pilots had good reason to fear the F7U | Hacker News Reader

The Gutless Cutlass: Pilots had good reason to fear the F7U

airspacemag.com

70 pointssmacktoward24 comments

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.

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 So many different designs were designed, produced, and put into action, often for just a few years until they were superseded by something else.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...).

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

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

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...

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...

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?

At the risk of sounding unsympathetic, it's cheaper to kill people at lower altitudes.

It's always a lot easier to talk about human loss when it happens to somebody else and in the abstract.

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.

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.

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".

Check the Orion project (Freeman Dyson's son wrote a good book). We could have been further out than Mars... 40 years ago. :-(

The motto was "Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970" (but that was probably optimistic... by maybe five years or so. :-) )

And sure, there was talk about a failed launch increasing the background radiation by 1%. Some cancer risk would arguably be cheap to get an industrial infrastructure outside the atmosphere.

(Also note the implications for the Great Filter theory regarding the Fermi paradox. With a bunch or Orion launches starting in the 1970s we could have viable colonies somewhere between now and 2030. So any big catastrophe as filter would need to sterilize a whole solar system, not just a planet.)

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...

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.

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?

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 :)

The author blurb at the end is funny!

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

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."

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...

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

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

Thanks:)

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

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