Fireflash and Sparrow: A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, February 1955

 

This post is about the contemporary British Fireflash and American Sparrow beam-riding air-to-air missiles, so of course there is a perfectly good reason that I picked this old picture of a Vought F7U Crusader for  thumbnail. A very good reason. I'm certainly not picking on Vought, Westinghouse, and the United States Navy. No sir!  

Last time, I got on my  high horse about the idea that not only was the United States  ahead of the U.K. in the air-to-air missile field, but that the American missile in question was already in service, unlike the British. You'd have to be a mind reader to guess that I was arguing with that with my links, and that's good, because of course I was wrong. I was thinking about the Firestreak and Sidewinder infrared seekers, whereas the missiles in question are the beam-riding Sparrow and Fireflash. 

Now, Flight qualifies. For the regular reader, aware that Flight usually knows the actual circumstances, this  is evidence that the rhetorical offensive against the Ministry of Supply from the Labour benches is misguided. As we now know, the RAF had a stockpile of 500 Fireflash missiles, but had elected not to issue it to the squadrons on account of it being useless. The AAM-N-2 wasn't any less useless, but after flight testing at China Lake, 28 Douglas F3D Skynights were modified to use the missiles in 1954, which technically qualifies as operational, although in fact by this time the Skyknight had been withdrawn from carrier service. A small number of F7Us were fitted to fire the Sparrow in 1955. 

The Sparrow and Fireflash have common origins. Originally, British work on the Unrotating Projectile antiaircraft rockets gave experimenters a chance to play around with proximity fuzes. These experiments led to suggestions that external guidance would be more effective, and the middle of the war saw experiments with optical guidance from the fighter gunsight. This was putting a lot of work on the pilot's shoulders, and led to a call for automatic control, and from there to homing on the fighter's radar lock on, or beam-riding. For a high-speed interceptor circa 1945, "fighter radar" meant the low power gunsight radar, and when the high-speed, high-altitude interception case was considered, the engagement envelope wasn't greatly expanded, and workers moved on to develop an all-aspect engagement guided by the much more powerful radars visualised for upcoming all-weather fighters, a goal that soon proved hopeless ambitious given the limits of contemporary electronics. At one point, RED DEAN, the Fireflash's prospective replacement/alternative weighed 1300lbs! Taken together, flying a Hunter (or Swift) up to the tail of an incoming Tu95, or alternatively a Lightning onto the tail of a Tu22 and unloading on it with 30mm ADEN fire seemed like the better idea. Given that it was technically all but impossible, Duncan Sandys, for all the flack he gets, was right to shift resources to the Bloodhound.

Given its complete uselessness ahead of a decade of electronics miniaturisation, it might seem strange that the Sparrow flew on a the Vought Crusader in 1955. But then it might seem strange to see the USN leading development on such a demanding front of avionics technology. That's the shambling monster of American government for you. (You know that your political theorists are top-drawer when they read Samuel Pufendorf and say to themselves, "Let's have some of that"!)

The Lippisch DM-1. With  developmental foundations this deep, how can it fail?

If we let Norman Friedman whisk us back to 1946, BuAer had only enough money for two fighter projects, and if push ahead two years to the "Revolt of the Admirals," we'll recall just how important the Navy thought that wargaming an F9F Panther/B-36 interception was to their case that Congress should fund a supercarrier instead of a super-bomber. Apart from the everyday requirement for a fleet defence interceptor, there was the question of securing the institutional future of naval aviation by demonstrating that the next-generation naval interceptor would do a similar job on the B-47. The Navy didn't have much room to experiment, and Vought's F7U was the most conservative of the proposed designs, mainly because it was light enough to do the job with just two of the Westinghouse axial jet turbines upon which the Navy had set its eyes after giving up on Lockheed's L-1000/J37. Everyone else wanted to use three in outlandish configurations that seemed a lot more likely to fail than the Crusader, which had the virtue of being backed by the excellence of German engineering. (It was based on sketches from the Alexander Lippisch. Teutonic science!) 

Conceived at Lockheed, fobbed off on Menasco(!) and sold to Wright, which 
tried to turn it into a turboprop to power the B-52. Talk about orphaned projects!

As the front benches field uncomfortable questions in Britain, Congress is beginning hearings into the failure of the Wright J46, the engine intended to power not only the F7U, but the F3D-3 and other next-generation Navy aircraft. There's a further interesting parallel with ruffled feathers in London in that the J46 story was precipitated by the news story about spectators on the highway seeing fighters, specifically Douglas F4D Skyrays, sitting out on the tarmac. Behind the heat and light, the point was that a a  member of Congress was among the observers who noticed that the aircraft were sitting around engineless, waiting on delayed J46 deliveries. This precipitated the final reckoning for Westinghouse (apart from an extended effort to license the Avon). It also allowed the USN to gracefully retire the F7U, which was  kicked off USS Hancock in March, 19556 and Ticonderoga in August 1956, most embarrassingly at Port Lyautey, which was hard to  hide from the European press. It was immediately before this that the ship's captain confined the commander of pilots of VA-66 to quarters after a flight deck accident. And while this might seem excessive, it was in the context of the F7U that the Navy had discussions about the deck landing arrangements for dealing with a 21,000lb aircraft missing the trap at 101 knots. 

Apart from being underpowered, the F7U was known for bad aerodynamics (I know, I know, I'm as amazed as you are that a semi-flying wing design adopted in 1946 on the strength of a few months of shambolic late war German development work wasn't safe), but even that isn't the end of it. Vought had been known for bad engineering details back when it was building the Corsair, but got away with it because that gull wing was just so cool. When the two F7Us sent to the Blue Angels were found to have persistent landing gear failures, engine fires, and hydraulic failures, the Navy was inclined to bend to pressure from senior officers and "senators" (presumably the loathsome Styles Bridges). When It dropped a landing gear door on a grandstand during an air show, this was enough to bring some sense of reality back to the proceedings. The Wiki article cites an aviation enthusiast's history of the Blue Angels for the statement that the Blue Angels took their Crusaders to Naval Air Station Memphis, Tennessee (NAS WHAT?) and just abandoned them on the field. 

The moral of the story here is something along the lines of the panicked spending of the Korean Emergency coming back to haunt the air forces of both countries, and maybe some pushback at the idea that British aviation was floundering in some unique way in 1955. We're currently moving from the all-too predictable Comet disaster to the first of the unconscionable project cancellations of the Eden/Macmillan era,so that's a thought to hold in mind.     

The other is that the F7U was one cool-looking ship.