The Curtiss F7C Seahawk was a carrier-capable

biplane A biplane is a fixed-wing aircraft with two main wings stacked one above the other. The first powered, controlled aeroplane to fly, the Wright Flyer, used a biplane wing arrangement, as did many aircraft in the early years of aviation. While ...

fighter aircraft Fighter aircraft are fixed-wing military aircraft designed primarily for air-to-air combat. In military conflict, the role of fighter aircraft is to establish air superiority of the battlespace. Domination of the airspace above a battlefield ...

of the

United States Navy The United States Navy (USN) is the maritime service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. It is the largest and most powerful navy in the world, with the estimated tonnage ...

Marine Corps in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Design and development

Curtiss' Model 43 was their first aircraft designed expressly for the Navy, rather than a modified Army type. While clearly a descendant of the P-1 Hawk, its wings were constant-chord rather than tapered, and the upper wing had a slight sweepback. The engine was a Pratt & Whitney R-1340-B Wasp radial. Entirely fabric-covered, the top wing was framed with

spruce A spruce is a tree of the genus ''Picea'' (), a genus of about 35 species of coniferous evergreen trees in the family Pinaceae, found in the northern temperate and boreal (taiga) regions of the Earth. ''Picea'' is the sole genus in the subfami ...

, while the

fuselage The fuselage (; from the French ''fuselé'' "spindle-shaped") is an aircraft's main body section. It holds crew, passengers, or cargo. In single-engine aircraft, it will usually contain an engine as well, although in some amphibious aircraft t ...

was built from a combination of aluminum and steel tubing, sufficiently strong to serve as a

dive bomber A dive bomber is a bomber aircraft that dives directly at its targets in order to provide greater accuracy for the bomb it drops. Diving towards the target simplifies the bomb's trajectory and allows the pilot to keep visual contact througho ...

as well as a fighter.

Operational history

The

prototype A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process. It is a term used in a variety of contexts, including semantics, design, electronics, and Software prototyping, software programming. A prototyp ...

XF7C-1 first flew on 28 February 1927. After some modification demanded by the Navy (such as the wing sweepback), 17 production aircraft F7C-1 Seahawks were built, and entered service in the USMC's VF-5M at Quantico. In 1930 VF-9M organized the Marines' first aerobatic stunt team, "The Red Devils", with F7Cs featuring red painted noses.Barrow 1981, p. 49. They continued in service until 1933.

Variants

*XF7C-1: Prototype aircraft; one built. *F7C-1 Seahawk: Single-seat fighter aircraft, main production version; 17 built. *XF7C-2: Single F7C-1 conversion for evaluation with the

Wright R-1820 The Wright R-1820 Cyclone 9 is an American radial engine developed by Curtiss-Wright, widely used on aircraft in the 1930s through 1950s. It was produced under license in France as the Hispano-Suiza 9V or Hispano-Wright 9V, and in the Soviet Uni ...

-1 radial engine and large-span full-span flaps. *XF7C-3: A demonstration prototype for

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

with an armament of four M1919 Browning

machine gun A machine gun is a fully automatic, rifled autoloading firearm designed for sustained direct fire with rifle cartridges. Other automatic firearms such as automatic shotguns and automatic rifles (including assault rifles and battle rifles) a ...

s, I-type interplane struts, and

aileron An aileron (French for "little wing" or "fin") is a hinged flight control surface usually forming part of the trailing edge of each wing of a fixed-wing aircraft. Ailerons are used in pairs to control the aircraft in roll (or movement around ...

s on both the upper and lower wings rather than on just the upper wing. The type was superseded by the ''Model 64'',

F11C Goshawk The Curtiss F11C Goshawk was an American naval biplane fighter aircraft that saw limited success. It was part of a long line of Curtiss Hawk airplanes built by the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company for the American military. Design and dev ...

Operators

; *

United States Marine Corps The United States Marine Corps (USMC), also referred to as the United States Marines, is the maritime land force service branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for conducting expeditionary and amphibious operations through combi ...

Specifications (F7C-1)

References

Notes

Bibliography

* Barrow, Jess C. ''WWII Marine Fighting Squadron Nine (VF-9M)'' (Modern Aviation Series). Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania: Tab Books Inc., 1981. . * Eden, Paul and Soph Moeng, eds
cover ''The Complete Encyclopedia of World Aircraft.''
London: Amber Books Ltd., 2002. . * Jones, Lloyd S. ''U.S. Naval Fighters''. Fallbrook, California: Aero Publishers, 1977, pp. 50–52. . {{DEFAULTSORT:Curtiss F07C 1920s United States fighter aircraft F07C Seahawk Carrier-based aircraft Single-engined tractor aircraft Biplanes Aircraft first flown in 1927