The Vought F6U Pirate was the

Vought Vought was the name of several related American aerospace firms. These have included, in the past, Lewis and Vought Corporation, Chance Vought, Vought-Sikorsky, LTV Aerospace (part of Ling-Temco-Vought), Vought Aircraft Companies, and Vought Ai ...

company's first

jet fighter 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 ...

, designed for 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 ...

during the mid-1940s. Although pioneering the use of

turbojet The turbojet is an airbreathing jet engine which is typically used in aircraft. It consists of a gas turbine with a propelling nozzle. The gas turbine has an air inlet which includes inlet guide vanes, a compressor, a combustion chamber, an ...

power as the first naval fighter with an

afterburner An afterburner (or reheat in British English) is an additional combustion component used on some jet engines, mostly those on military supersonic aircraft. Its purpose is to increase thrust, usually for supersonic flight, takeoff, and co ...

and

composite material A composite material (also called a composition material or shortened to composite, which is the common name) is a material which is produced from two or more constituent materials. These constituent materials have notably dissimilar chemical or ...

construction, the aircraft proved to be underpowered and was judged unsuitable for combat. None were ever issued to operational squadrons and they were relegated to development, training, and test roles before they were withdrawn from service in 1950.

Design and development

A specification was issued by the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics (BuAer) for a single-seat, carrier-based fighter powered by a Westinghouse 24C (later J34) axial turbojet on 5 September 1944. Chance Vought was awarded a contract for three V-340 (company designation) prototypes on 29 December 1944. The XF6U was a small aircraft with

tricycle undercarriage Tricycle gear is a type of aircraft undercarriage, or ''landing gear'', arranged in a tricycle fashion. The tricycle arrangement has a single nose wheel in the front, and two or more main wheels slightly aft of the center of gravity. Tricycle g ...

and with straight wings and tail surfaces. The wings were short enough that they did not need to fold. To fit more aircraft into crowded

hangar A hangar is a building or structure designed to hold aircraft or spacecraft. Hangars are built of metal, wood, or concrete. The word ''hangar'' comes from Middle French ''hanghart'' ("enclosure near a house"), of Germanic origin, from Frankish ...

s, the nose gear could be retracted and the aircraft's weight would rest on a small wheel attached by the ground crew. This raised the tail up so that it could overlap the nose of the aircraft behind it, allowing more aircraft to fit into available hangar space. The turbojet engine was mounted in the rear fuselage and was fed by ducts in each

wing root The wing root is the part of the wing on a fixed-wing aircraft or winged-spaceship that is closest to the fuselage The fuselage (; from the French ''fuselé'' "spindle-shaped") is an aircraft's main body section. It holds crew, passengers, o ...

. The most unusual feature of the aircraft was its use of "Metalite" for its skin. This was made of balsa, sandwiched between two thin sheets of aluminum. "Fabrilite" was also used for the surfaces of the

vertical stabilizer A vertical stabilizer or tail fin is the static part of the vertical tail of an aircraft. The term is commonly applied to the assembly of both this fixed surface and one or more movable rudders hinged to it. Their role is to provide control, s ...

and

rudder A rudder is a primary control surface used to steer a ship, boat, submarine, hovercraft, aircraft, or other vehicle that moves through a fluid medium (generally air or water). On an aircraft the rudder is used primarily to counter adve ...

; this was similar to Metalite but used fiberglass instead of aluminum. Two fuel tanks were fitted in the center of the fuselage; the forward tank, ahead of the wing, contained and the rear tank, . These were supplemented by two jettisonable tip tanks. The cockpit was well forward and was provided with a

bubble canopy A bubble canopy is an aircraft canopy constructed without bracing, for the purpose of providing a wider unobstructed field of view to the pilot, often providing 360° all-round visibility. The designs of bubble canopies can drastically vary; s ...

which gave the pilot good visibility. He was provided with a Mk 6 lead-computing

gyro gunsight A gyro gunsight (G.G.S.) is a modification of the non-magnifying reflector sight in which target lead (the amount of aim-off in front of a moving target) and bullet drop are calculated automatically. The first examples were developed in Britain ...

. Underneath the cockpit were four 20 mm (0.79 in) M3 autocannon. Their 600 rounds of ammunition were carried behind the pilot. The empty casings of the two upper guns were retained in the aircraft, while those from the two lower guns were ejected overboard. After a company-wide contest to name the aircraft, the initial prototype received the name ''

Pirate Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another ship or a coastal area, typically with the goal of stealing cargo and other valuable goods. Those who conduct acts of piracy are called pirates, v ...

'' and made its first flight on 2 October 1946.

Flight test Flight testing is a branch of aeronautical engineering that develops specialist equipment required for testing aircraft behaviour and systems. Instrumentation systems are developed using proprietary transducers and data acquisition systems. D ...

ing revealed severe aerodynamic problems, mostly caused by the airfoil section and thickness of the wing. The vertical stabilizer also had to be redesigned to smooth out the airflow at the intersection of the horizontal and vertical stabilizers. Other changes included the addition of

dive brake Dive brakes or dive flaps are deployed to slow down an aircraft when in a dive. They often consist of a metal flap that is lowered against the air flow, thus creating drag and reducing dive speed.Crane, Dale: ''Dictionary of Aeronautical Terms, ...

s on the sides of the fuselage and the replacement of the Metalite panels near the engine exhaust with stainless steel ones. The first XF6U-1 prototype was powered by a Westinghouse J34-WE-22 turbojet with 3,000 lbf (13.34 kN) thrust, one third of the weight of the aircraft. To help improve the underpowered aircraft's performance, the third prototype, which first flew on 10 November 1947, was lengthened by to use a Westinghouse J34-WE-30"Westinghouse J 34-WE-48: The X-power."
''Arkansas Air Museum''. Retrieved: 7 October 2007. afterburning engine of 4,224 lbf (18.78 kN) thrust, the first

fighter to have such a powerplant.Green and Swanborough 1998, p. 587.

Operational history

In 1947, before the flight testing of the prototypes was completed, 30 production aircraft were ordered. They incorporated an

ejection seat In aircraft, an ejection seat or ejector seat is a system designed to rescue the pilot or other crew of an aircraft (usually military) in an emergency. In most designs, the seat is propelled out of the aircraft by an explosive charge or rock ...

and a redesigned vertical stabilizer as well as two auxiliary fins, one towards the tip on each side of the tailplane in an attempt to improve the directional stability of the aircraft. The fuselage was lengthened to fit additional equipment and the wing had fillets added at the rear junction with the fuselage. During the production run, the Navy decided to move the Chance Vought factory from Stratford, Connecticut, to a much larger facility in

Dallas Dallas () is the List of municipalities in Texas, third largest city in Texas and the largest city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the List of metropolitan statistical areas, fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States at 7.5 ...

Texas Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by ...

, which had been vacant since the end of World War II; this badly disrupted the production of the Pirate. The airframes were built in Stratford and trucked to Dallas, where government-furnished equipment, such as the engines and afterburners, were installed. The completed aircraft were then taxied around the new plant's airfield, but the runway was deemed too short to handle jets. The aircraft had to be disassembled and trucked to an abandoned airfield at Ardmore, Oklahoma, with a runway long enough for acceptance testing. The first production F6U-1 performed its initial flight on 29 June 1949, and 20 of the aircraft were provided to

VX-3 Air Development Squadron 3 or VX-3 was a United States Navy air test and evaluation squadron established on 20 November 1948 and disestablished on 1 March 1960. Operational history VX-3 was established by the merger of the assets of VA-1L and V ...

, an operational evaluation squadron based at

Naval Air Station Patuxent River Naval Air Station Patuxent River , also known as NAS Pax River, is a United States naval air station located in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, on the Chesapeake Bay near the mouth of the Patuxent River. It is home to Headquarters, Naval Air S ...

Maryland Maryland ( ) is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It shares borders with Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware and the Atlantic Ocean to ...

. The judgment from the evaluation was that the Pirate was unacceptable for operational use.Green and Swanborough 1998, p. 588. Naval aviators disparagingly called the F6U the "groundhog".O'Rourke, G.G, Capt USN. "Of Hosenoses, Stoofs, and Lefthanded Spads". ''United States Naval Institute Proceedings'', July 1968 On 30 October 1950, BuAer informed Vought of the Navy's opinion of the Pirate in terms both bureaucratic and scathing: "The F6U-1 had proven so sub-marginal in performance that combat utilization is not feasible."Koehnen 1983, p. 15. The aircraft ended up being used primarily to develop

arresting gear An arresting gear, or arrestor gear, is a mechanical system used to rapidly decelerate an aircraft as it lands. Arresting gear on aircraft carriers is an essential component of naval aviation, and it is most commonly used on CATOBAR and STOB ...

and barriers, but were used operationally for a short time by at least one Texas-based

United States Naval Reserve The United States Navy Reserve (USNR), known as the United States Naval Reserve from 1915 to 2005, is the Reserve Component (RC) of the United States Navy. Members of the Navy Reserve, called Reservists, are categorized as being in either the Se ...

squadron as they transferred to jets. The 30 production aircraft had only a total of 945 hours of flight time, 31.5 hours each. Some aircraft flew only six hours which was enough for little more than their acceptance flight and the flight to their disposition. The downfall of the aircraft was that it was underpowered and was at times considered "sub-marginal", not an unusual problem with jets of the era.

Variants

*XF6U-1: Three prototypes, two with a Westinghouse J34-WE-22 turbojet engine (BuNo 33532, 33533), one with a J34-WE-30 with

(BuNo 33534).Koehnen 1983, p. 11. *F6U-1: Afterburner-equipped production version, 30 built (BuNo 122478-122507), 35 cancelled.Swanborough and Bowers 1990, p. 533. *F6U-1P: Conversion of one F6U-1 (BuNo 122483) for photo-reconnaissance.

Operators

**VX-3

Survivors

Although the F6U had a very short operational career, one example remains intact (122479, Vought production number 2) and has undergone restoration by the Vought Aircraft Heritage Foundation, at the Vought plant in Grand Prairie, Texas. , the aircraft is currently at the

National Naval Aviation Museum The National Naval Aviation Museum, formerly known as the National Museum of Naval Aviation and the Naval Aviation Museum, is a military and aerospace museum located at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida. Founded in 1962 and moved to its cur ...

in Pensacola Florida."F6U Pirate/122479."
''National Naval Aviation Museum.'' Retrieved: 27 January 2015.

Specifications (F6U-1)

References

Bibliography

* Green, William and Gordon Swanborough. ''The Complete Book of Fighters''. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1988. . * Koehnen, Richard. ''Chance Vought F6U Pirate (Naval Fighters Number Nine)''. Simi Valley, California: Ginter Books, 1983. . * Swanborough, Gordon and Peter M. Bowers. ''United States Navy Aircraft since 1911.'' London: Putnam Aeronautical Books, Third edition, 1990. .