Aug 022011
Another film from the San Diego Aerospace Museum archive:
[youtube Z7DcqfFpb4Y]
This one chronicles the development of the XF2Y-1 “Sea Dart,” a supersonic delta-winged jet fighter designed to operate from the water. Interestingly, this film spends a fair amount of time showing the Skate concept, a swept-wing seaplane concept. Back In The Day, analysis was by means of actual testing, rather than computer analysis, and here that meant building 1/10 scale models and catapult launching them over the water. Some of the landings were just plain *ugly.*
6 Responses to “Skate/Sea Dart”
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It’s interesting that Convair was at least talking about launching from submarines. I wonder how the airplane was to be carried.
The airplane was not to be carried by sub. Instead, it would be *serviced* by a sub. These were the early days of turbojets, when they drank jet fuel like a Kennedy soaking in a tub of booze. The planes would be based on an island, but would rendezvous with subs way out to sea for refueling and re-arming.
No, they had plans to carry them on subs also; there’s a cutaway drawing of how it was going to be done on page 180 of the book: “US Submarines Since 1945”; the aircraft (I assume they were going to incorporate folding wings and vertical fins on the operational version) were to be carried in a pair of 15 foot diameter watertight cylinders set atop a third lower pressure hull housing ballast tanks in the middle of the sub – with two aircraft hangers on the starboard side and one on the port side. Directly ahead of the port side one was a hatch on the top of the hull through which it would be raised up onto the deck after sliding forward out of its storage cylinder through a domed watertight hatch, followed by the rear starboard one sliding sideways into place in the hanger that the port one had occupied, and then forward onto the elevator. This would be followed by the forward starboard one sliding back into the aft position, then sideways to port, and then forward onto the elevator.
The aircraft would be facing backwards as they came up on deck one-by-one and put in position on a launch track that ran clean back to the stern (they were worried about surface launching them in rough seas). They would then be launched rearwards, each one carrying twin 1,000 pound conventional or nuclear weapons.
Recovery would involve landing astern of the sub and then taxiing up onto the rear hull till they could engage the launch track and move up it till they were next to the port side elevator hatch, before being lowered into the hull and stowed, now facing forward (?).
The sub that carried them was going to be a real monster; 460 feet long with a 38 foot beam and 7,000 ton submerged displacement. The launch track would be 170 feet long and the sub was to be powered by a 70,000 SHP reactor in the proposed 1955 version, driving it at 28 knots submerged.
The idea was an outgrowth of the submarine-carried Regulus missiles concept, but got canceled pretty early on after it was realized that it was going to be very hard and expensive to develop versus the damage one could do with only three Sea Darts aboard, and how vulnerable it would be on the surface during all of the launching and recovery operations of the aircraft.
> they had plans to carry them on subs also
“They” not being Convair, at least not for Skate.
> page 180 of the book: “US Submarines Since 1945″;
Which shows a Bureau of navy concept, not Convair. And further, it shows a concept for using SeaDart, not Skate.
These are GREAT! Keep them coming! (please)
BTW, where exactly was the Sea Dart supposed to carry its armament in the interceptor version?
You don’t see any gun ports or missile storage bay doors on it.
If you were going to carry missiles on pylons, you would have to put them atop the wings or fuselage to prevent them getting submerged while it was floating prior to starting its takeoff run.