The F-86 Sabre is one of those aircraft that established itself as a legend of air warfare. Mainly remembered for its epic battles against its great rival, the MiG-15, during the Korean War, the Sabre was pretty much the mainstay fighter for many Western orientated nations during the 1950s.
Indeed, the F-86 would still be a mainstay for many countries into the 1970s and wouldn’t actually be retired from frontline service until 1994.
But what isn’t so well remembered is that this remarkable aircraft actually originated from humble roots. More surprisingly, naval roots.
This is the story of the North American FJ Fury, an aircraft that created a legend and also evolved from very limited origins into a genuinely formidable fighter. And all in all, it is kind of surprising that it ranks as a “Forgotten Aircraft”.
The first Fury, the FJ-1, originated in a requirement issued by the US Navy in 1944 for one of the fancy new jet aircraft that seemed to be making ripples amongst aeronautic designers. In fact, the Navy were so keen not to get left behind that they ordered four separate aircraft designs; the McDonnell XFD-1 Phantom, the McDonnell XF2D-1 Banshee, the Vought XF6U-1 Pirate and the North American XFJ-1 Fury.
For the latter, and because of the desire of the Navy to get a jet into service ASAP, North American largely went with what they knew, which was the P-51 Mustang; probably not a bad basis for building a new fighter. Like the P-51 the new FJ-1 had a frameless teardrop canopy, a cockpit mounted high up in the fuselage to give the pilot excellent visibility, and thin straight wings.
The difference came in the powerplant, which was a single Allison J35 turbojet which produced 3,820 lbf in the prototype aircraft and 4,000lbf in the production ones. This was mounted within the fuselage and North American elected to go for a single nose air inlet in contrast to the wing root or cheek-mounted inlets of the other American jets in development at the time, giving the FJ-1 that distinctive tubby, barrel-like look that was common in the early jets that used nose inlets.
The initial hope was that at least one of these jet aircraft types would be available for service before the end of the war, and so in May 1945 one hundred FJ-1s were ordered practically off the drawing board. As it was, the war ended somewhat sooner than had been expected and so the order for the FJ-1 was cut to just three prototypes and thirty production aircraft, with the development rush slowed down.
So it wasn’t until September 1946 that the XFJ-1 made its first flight, and deliveries of the production aircraft to the US Navy began in October 1947, with the FJ-1 only serving with a single squadron, VF-5A. With the FJ-1 this squadron was to be the first operational jet fighter squadron in the US Navy, landing aboard the USS Boxer in March 1948.
But even by this point the FJ-1 was already recognized as a very limited design and its top speed of 547mph (880km/h), while not bad for a first-generation jet fighter, was soon surpassed and so it was that the front-line service of the FJ-1 was extremely short, only fourteen months, and they were swiftly transferred to the US Navy reserve before being retired completely in 1953.
And that would be it, a rather unremarkable aircraft that would be memorable for conducting a few “firsts” and for an extremely short service life. But as said, the Fury was to lay the groundwork for a line of much more famous and successful descendants.
As the FJ-1 was in development in 1945 North American had proposed to the United States Army Air Force, as it was then, that they could build a much-improved aircraft derived from the basic design. This was authorized and when German research and data on jet aircraft was captured and became available to the North American team at the end of the war, the new aircraft was altered to have swept wings and a longer, slimmer fuselage.
This, the XP-86, was the first of the Sabres, and though a far more formidable aircraft than its progenitor, the lineage was still clear to see.
Read the full story at Ed Nash’s Military Matters