PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - F-35 Cancelled, then what ?
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Old 27th Sep 2016, 19:24
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KenV
 
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Indeed the list is small, but for jets you can add the FJ Fury (series)...
I guess it depends on how you define successful. The FJ-2, despite lots of money spent and lots of mods was never a satisfactory carrier aircraft. Almost all went to the Marines who operated them mostly from land bases. By 1956 (only 5 years after the first flight of the prototype) essentially all the FJ-2s had been retired. It took a major wing redesign and a new engine (license built Sapphire) that resulted in the FJ-3 to make the Fury an acceptable carrier aircraft. But even then there were problems. The Sapphire's lubrication system tended to fail under the acceleration load of a catapult launch and there were turbine blade issues resulting from steam ingestion. It was not until the FJ-4 Fury was developed that the Navy had a real carrier aircraft. The the FJ-4 was an almost complete redesign of the FJ-3, including a totally different wing and much greater fuel capacity, and shared only basic configuration with the earlier Furys. It was also a fighter/bomber, not an air superiority fighter, and had an extensive air-to-ground capability, including in later versions a nuke!

The waters get further muddied if one considers (I believe incorrectly) that the F-86 was itself a derivative of the straight wing FJ-1 Fury. So technically, a Naval design (FJ-1 Fury) was derived into an Air Force design (F-86), which was then derived back into a naval design (FJ-2, 3 and 4 Fury). This was the very beginning of the jet age, so there was lots of cross pollination. Navy/Air Force fighter design and features diverged quite a bit after this early period.

Last edited by KenV; 27th Sep 2016 at 19:44.
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