The Panther was the Navy's first successful carrier-based jet fighter.
“Icons of Aviation History” is a diary series that explores significant and historic aircraft.
The American jet fighter program is a direct outgrowth of the British efforts led by Frank Whittle. When Frank Whittle’s W.1 turbojet engine made its first successful flight in May 1941 in the UK, the United States was years behind in jet technology, with virtually no work having been done. The US had not yet entered the war, but was already deeply committed to England as an ally and was providing aid in the form of Lend-Lease, so the British felt comfortable in sharing the super-secret discovery with the Americans. Copies of both the engine and the design drawings were dispatched to the US onboard a B-24 and, under the strictest secrecy, the General Electric Company was assigned to produce their own version of the Whittle engine. Much of the research was carried out for the US Army Air Corps, but it produced only a string of failures.
The US Navy, meanwhile, was also interested in jet engines, but was far more cautious than the Army due to the stringent requirements for taking off and landing from carriers. So in 1943 the Navy tasked the Ryan Aircraft Company to design an airplane that could utilize both a standard piston-propeller engine and a turbojet. This resulted in the XFR-1, an experimental plane that was able to take off and land from a carrier using a Wright R-1820 radial engine in the nose, but which could also switch in flight to an I-16 jet engine in the tail when it needed a burst of speed. Test flights of the “Ryan Fireball” began in June 1944, and the Navy ordered 700 FR-1 Fireball fighters, to be delivered beginning in March 1945. As it turned out, only 66 had been sent to the Navy before the war ended in August, and none of those were ever deployed. Instead, the Navy began replacing its F6F Hellcats with piston-engined F8F Bearcats.
By 1946, the Grumman company went to the Navy with its own design for a carrier-based jet fighter, designated as Project G-79. There were two possible jet engines under development for the G-79, and the prototype airframe, which first flew in November 1947, was intentionally designed to be able to accept either one. The first of these was Allison's J-33-A-8, which could produce 4600 pounds of thrust. The other was the Pratt &Whitney J-42-P-6, which was a licensed copy of a British Rolls-Royce design known as the Nene and could produce 5000 pounds of thrust. In the end, the Nene proved to be the better engine, and when the Navy accepted the new fighter as the F9F Panther, it was powered by the Pratt & Whitney copy.
Production began in November 1948. The Panther was armed with four 20mm cannons, and permanently-mounted gas tanks were placed on the wingtips to increase the range to 1400 miles. The top speed when combat-loaded was 575mph. Later models used the more powerful J-48-P-2 engine, which was a Pratt & Whitney copy of another British engine, the Tay.
The F9F-5 model was equipped as a ground-attack fighter, with an external load of six unguided rockets and 2,000 pounds of bombs. One of the last versions was the F9F-6, which in 1952 replaced the Panther's straight wings with faster 35-degree swept wings. It became known as the “Cougar”.
When the Korean War broke out in 1950, the Air Force found that its F-80 Shooting Stars were outclassed by the MiG-15 jet fighters that had been provided to North Korea by the USSR and China. The F9F was a more even match. The first jet v jet air victory came in November 1950 when a Navy Panther shot down a Chinese MiG-15. However, the Navy had so few frontline Panthers available that even the Blue Angels flight demonstration team was stripped of its F9Fs, which were sent to Korea.
Navy Panthers flew 78,000 sorties during the Korean War. They were at first assigned to the air superiority role, but once the F-86 Sabres began arriving, most of the F9Fs were switched to ground-attack missions. In air-to-air combat, the Panthers are credited with shooting down two Russian Yakovlev Yak-9 piston-engined fighters and seven MiG-15 jets, for a loss of two Panthers.
The Cougar arrived too late for service in Korea, but remained as the standard Navy jet fighter until 1957, when they were phased out, though a few Cougars went on as trainers and several of these lasted long enough with the Marines to see action as forward air control planes in Vietnam. A handful of Panthers were sold to the Argentine Air Force in the 1960s.
About 3400 Panthers and Cougars were produced. About 20 still exist, of various models.
NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)