No, that was the F8 Crusader, a superstar in it’s own right. Pilots LOVED that plane, it was a HOTROD for its day!
I loved them as an aviation buff.
As a kid, I would go to Cubi Point in the Philippines and walk around the tarmac. Things were so different then, an 11 year old boy could just wander in and out of the planes, peering into their intakes, up their tailpipes and around the wheel wells. So different then. When the pilots came out, I would walk over and follow them on their pre-flight walkarounds. I would ask them all kinds of questions, look at what they were looking at and check out their equipment. I remember thinking how amazing these guys were, in their olive colored flight suits and g-suits walking with their helmet under their arm, the oxygen mask dangling down. I looked at their boots, the way they laced and tucked them in. But I found the helmets with all the stuff painted on them completely intriguing.
But most of all, were the very few times I would get them to let me sit in the cockpit, and though I never asked, I never did get to wear one of those helmets. I would sit in the cockpit and soak it all in, looking at the instruments, the throttle, the stick.
I know this is all sickening kid hero-worship, but yeah. I thought guys like he and my dad were amazing.
The reason I bring this up, is because this one pilot I followed around let me sit in the cockpit, and then as he climbed up, he bent over to me and said: “Watch what I do when I take off!”
I walked over to the edge of the tarmac, and creeped as close as I could get to the runway side without attracting attention, and I watched this guy take off in an F8 Crusader at Cubi Point.
He took off in full afterburner (actually the Crusader only has on/off I think) and as the wheels left the runway, he retracted them, and instead of taking off gradually in the plane, kept it pretty level after raising his gear to build up speed.
When he hit the end of the runway (Which stuck out like a finger into the water at Cubi Point) he pulled the nose up to what I guess must have been a 70 degree climb, and that frikking plane climbed like a rocket. I had never seen that before. Flight ops at Cubi were pretty controlled, and I know because I watched them all the time. There was never anything unusual.
But the coolest thing was, as he pulled up the nose and steadied into that climb, he began doing full deflection aileron rolls. I only remember three, but that is only because I stopped counting with my mouth hanging open. That plane just screwed into the sky, going up, up, up, roaring.
It was unbelievable. And he had told me he was going to do it.
When I saw them on the JFK (They were the RF8U Crusaders, stripped down with cameras in them. They were beautiful in flight, but I always thought they looked ungainly, like gooney birds as they came in to land with those wings in the “up” position. When they landed, they always looked to me like they were going to break up on landing, or at least have the nose gear break off. After they caught the wire, the nose gear would hilariously (to me, for some reason) spin 180 degrees so it was completely backwards. It looked so clumsy and awkward.
But when they took off, man did I ever love that. They still used the cable to launch those, but once they got them settled in and the jet blast deflector up, the engines would spin up as the cat officer wiggled his fingers in the air.
As soon as they reached full power, they would kick in the afterburner. When it kicked in, you felt the concussion.
The afterburner on the F8 was odd to me, because the only other plane on the ship with an afterburner at that time was the Tomcat, and when they fired up the afterburners on those, they came up gradually. They roared, roaring louder and louder as the flames would get bigger and bigger. They were yellow, and the gas margins were kind of jagged on the edges, just a massive, heavy stream of burning hot gases overwhelming you the same way a wave does when it hits you gradually.
On the Crusader, the afterburner would come on...POW! No pussyfooting around, no massive river of burning gas, it was sharp, precise and focused more like a welding torch than a flamethrower. Often their gas margins were extremely sharp with the inner and outer zones of somewhat transparent burning gases, usually colored mostly blue. Efficient. Occasionally you would get some concentric rings on the cone of exhaust, and I think I even remember seeing diamond patterns on occasion.
But as beautiful as it looked, it was the WHAM as it came on that was awe inspiring to me.
I saw one go into the drink off the bow cat one time, too. As soon as it left the deck, the plane did a sharp roll to starboard and went straight into the water. Amazingly, I recall the pilot ejected almost immediately, but the plane drilled nose first into the water and simply vanished. Disappeared. I even recall seeing a spout of water come out the tailpipe as it went in. Funny, as I get older and think of these things, they are as vivid in my mind’s eye as they were when I saw them, like a videotape played over and over, but I begin to question, do I have these details right?
It is a very strange feeling, and...I am not that old!
