Last Of The Gunfighters

The F8U Crusader aircraft was developed in the early 1950s as a high speed fighter.  In 1957 a Crusader flown by John Glenn set a speed record flying from Los Angeles to New York City in 3 ½ hours.  Glenn had previously flown 59 combat missions in WW II, and a further 90 missions in Korea.  This was no Johnny-Come-Lately pilot padding some sort of personal record.  Five years after that record-setting-across-the-country-high-speed-run the hot-rod pilot was setting another record as the first American to orbit the earth, on February 20, 1962.  That's him climbing from the cockpit after his run.

In 1957 when Glenn was setting that blistering pace from the Pacific to the Atlantic I was transitioning from working on SNJ Navy training aircraft to maintaining the lumbering P2V5Fs that patrolled the skies all over the world in pursuit of safety for Americans wherever they may have been at the time.  After three years of experience working on and flying in the Neptune I was transferred to VF-174 the training squadron for those high-speed gun platforms called “the last of the gunfighters,” by those who flew them and worked on them, but officially were F8U Crusaders.  For nearly seven years I worked on or around the F8U Crusader, although the Navy during that period took the Air Force designation system, and they were changed to F8A – F8Js.

The last of the Crusaders, as a fighter aircraft, were phased out by the Navy in 1976 after nearly 20 years of deadly service.  Its .50 caliber cannons were the last to be installed on a Navy Fighter Aircraft.  Even as the Crusader was armed with modern missiles, the guns had come to an end as a method of warfare.  At least 21 Russian MIGs were shot down by Crusaders in the Vietnam Conflict, but the age of the missile was the future.  That's a fully armed Crusader being shot off a carrier deck.

In 1970 I began working with the A-7 Corsair II which was a much modified version of the venerable old Crusader used as an attack aircraft.  The general shape of the Crusader was still there, but the modifications were deep.  Yet it still seemed like an old familiar friend when I looked at one.  That's one from my squadron, VA-25, based at Lemoore, California Naval Air Station, but in this instance catching a tailhook cable on board a carrier.