Feb 232011
 

Courtesy Mark Nankivil.

 Posted by at 9:15 pm

  4 Responses to “F4D-1 Skyray Structures Diagram”

  1. Airplanes remind me of women. This one has always reminded me of a specific girl named Patricia. (The F-80 “looks like” Linda, and the F-104 reminds me of my daughter, while my ex-wife always made me think of the B-47.)

  2. I always liked the looks of that aircraft with its rounded contours and wings.
    In fact, in that drawing it actually looks a bit like the Space Shuttle orbiter in the top and side views.
    The pilots wished they could have taken it up against the MiG-15’s during the Korean War, as they were sure they could have kicked the MiG’s ass.
    The aircraft’s 55,000 foot service ceiling meant the pilots wore a Mk. IV full pressure suit that looked like a spacesuit also:
    http://www.salimbeti.com/aviation/images/equip/usnavypilotsmk4.jpg

  3. I had no idea that there’d been some talk about facing MiG-15s. How would it have fared against a Mig-17?

    I was told by someone that the USAF gave a few minutes of thought to testing and perhaps buying some of them. A lighter, ground-based version would have been fantastic. Perhaps the same thing that would have happened had North American built P-40s as the British had requested, thereby making buying Hellcats or Corsairs appropriate for the USAAF.

  4. The MiG remark, as well as the aircraft’s “interesting” handling characteristics, are in this article:
    http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/skyray.html
    Both the MiG-15 and Skyray had really poor spin recovery traits.
    When Chuck Yeager encountered Artem Mikoyan at a air show and mentioned the terrible spin recovery in a captured example of a MiG-15s he had flown, Mikoyan expressed amazement that he had actually tried to spin it; the pilots were told that if it got into a spin, it was probably best to eject, because there was a really good chance that it was going to spin all the way into the ground.
    The MiG-17 improved on that, and was supposed to be a really good dogfighter, even being able to give a F-4 Phantom a real run for its money in Vietnam if the F-4’s pilot didn’t go into a vertical encounter with it or outrun it..the Skyray would probably have also used its superior rate of climb or speed to try to avoid a close-in dogfight with the MiG-17.

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