Something Extra: My next project--The McDonnell F3H Demon

It's natural during the course of any research project to read up on a lot of subjects that have nothing directly to do with the task at hand, but that provide vital context and are interesting in their own right.  In some cases, the source documentation needed to expand on one of these little "rabbit holes" is fragmentary with much important information lost.  But in others, even when there have been recently-published titles, sometimes by sheer luck you find small, but very important nuggets that have been missed and provide an opportunity to tell not only a more complete story, but use that story to talk about a lot of other things along the way.  This was the approach that I used with my recent book on the McDonnell F-101.  I got to talk about key developments that opened the road to Mach 2, the realities of nuclear testing, nuclear weapons design, and peel back the placid memory veil covering the Eisenhower years and reveal just how dangerous those times were, and how rapidly things escalated to the brink of nuclear war on two occasions during the subsequent Kennedy administration.  In a more subtle manner, I was also able to draw attention to parallels between the mindset and decision-making process of Kennedy, his inner circle, and its relationship with military authorities with that of the current Obama administration. History is useless if it does not illuminate the past to guide the future.

A few months back, I received a gratis copy of a new book on the F3H Demon by my friend Tony Buttler.  (You can read an excellent review here: http://thanlont.blogspot.com/2014/11/warpaint-series-no-99-mcdonnell-f3h.html).  Since I had at least some familiarity with it as it was built by McDonnell side-by-side with the F-101, he asked me to comment on it.  Fortunately, I had a couple of books covering the F3H in my library as well as some files related to engine development and the like.  Tony's book is intended more for modelers, but he encouraged me to write a more comprehensive technical history along the lines of the F-101 book.  I began to write an outline, knowing that there was another more comprehensive book as the opening title of the return of Bert Kinsey's outstanding Detail & Scale series...now available as digital books far superior to the already-renowned paperbacks published in the 1980s and 1990s (available here: http://www.detailandscale.com/f3h_demon_digital_book.html).  His series of books have been invaluable over the years, and with a new digital format that allows as many pages of material as desired, what could I possibly add?

My usual procedure is to take all of the information that I can find from every source available and fit it all into a master time line.  This approach has proven very useful in establishing connections and patterns to guide further research and hopefully tell a compelling story, as well as to vet information and check for typos or just flat-out bad information.  But as I began fitting the pieces together and filling them out, I remembered something that I had seen several years ago on the NASA Technical Reports Server.  In an old report that I ran across, I saw a wind tunnel model of the distinctive fuselage and inlet duct design of the F3H.  I rediscovered that report and much more, finding that those studies were first commissioned just after World War 2, and at least two years before the Navy announced its competition for a high-performance interceptor that would become the McDonnell F3H.  This had been missed.

Photo of transonic axisymmetric inlet model, circa late 1946.  Source: NACA Technical Note 2684.

The travails of engine development for the F3H have long been documented, and in the mid-1950s made national headlines under the blinding scrutiny of a Congressional inquiry.  The original Westinghouse J40, which turned out to be a truly worthless piece of hardware, was replaced by the workable, if only marginally better, Allison J71.  With the J71, the production F3H-2 version proved to be severely underpowered.  But the funny thing was, I had seen several photographs of the airplane in full afterburner.  Each of the photos showed clear "shock diamonds" in the afterburner plume.  These can only be produced if the exhaust gases are exiting the nozzle at supersonic speed, which in turn could only be produced by an advanced convergent-divergent nozzle.  Hmmm....  Kinsey's book shows excellent details of the exhaust nozzle of an F3H-2 in a museum.  It is clearly a convergent-divergent nozzle design and would have been among the first (if not the first) production turbojet engines so equipped.  This has not been mentioned nor explored before.  If the J71 was a "dog" with such a nozzle, what would it have been like with a conventional, sonic-limited convergent nozzle?  Something else to write about....

The F3H was recast with new armament, switching from a combination of 20-millimeter cannons and unguided rockets to cannons and the first production guided air-to-air missiles, the Sperry AAM-N-2 Sparrow I.  Not much has been written about this.  The Sparrow I has always been considered a failure (and it was) but as the first deployable interceptor missile system, its development deserves to be covered in detail.  No such study has been published.  Other F3H-2 subvariants were equipped with early naval tactical nuclear weapons as well as much improved Sparrow III missiles.  The missiles and the Westinghouse radar and fire control system were carried over into the legendary McDonnell F4H-1 Phantom.  Much ink has been expended on the story of the Phantom, and justifiably so.  But little has been written on the development of this key component of its armament system.  An understanding of the development of this system is critical to understanding more modern and even current developments in radar-guided air-to-air missile and fire control systems.  A thorough treatment of this story could fill a small but critical role for those trying to achieve that understanding.  So, more to write about....

The enemy, of course, is time.  But the stories have to be told, and the muse--that beautiful bitch!--can never be denied for long!  So, it looks as though another book is in my future.