The Royal Navy’s first jet fighter had a tail wheel. Two of them, in fact, tucked under the rear fuselage, so that the aircraft sat on the deck nose-high like a Spitfire.

Every jet you can picture has a nosewheel, for the obvious reason that a jet pointing at the sky cannot see the runway, cannot accelerate efficiently, and blows its exhaust into the tarmac. The Supermarine Attacker had a tail-dragger undercarriage anyway, because it was built in a hurry out of the parts of something else.

It entered Fleet Air Arm service in August 1951. It was gone from front-line service by 1954.

Built From a Propeller Fighter

The Attacker traces back to Specification E.10/44, issued in 1944, which asked for an experimental jet fighter with a laminar flow wing and a single jet engine. Supermarine’s answer was pragmatic to the point of bluntness: take the wing already developed for the Spiteful, their most advanced piston-engined design, and build a new fuselage around a Rolls-Royce Nene.

That decision is the key to everything odd about the aircraft. A wing designed for a tail-dragging propeller fighter comes with tail-dragging geometry, and the flight controls were based on the Spiteful’s too. The Attacker is a jet wearing a propeller fighter’s legs.

It first flew on 27 July 1946 — four years after the Gloster Meteor. Flight testing then dragged on, held up by a series of problems including handling difficulties. Production orders did not arrive until November 1949, and the first production F.1 flew on 5 May 1950.

The Parts That Were Genuinely Good

It would be unfair to write the Attacker off as a botch. The structure was strong, making extensive use of heavy-gauge aluminium alloy in stressed-skin construction supported by 24 closely spaced stringers and formers. The nose used an unusual lobster-claw arrangement of thick plates.

And the cockpit was genuinely well liked. Its far-forward position was well received by pilots and gave an exceptionally good view — which matters more on a carrier than almost anywhere else, since deck landing is fundamentally a problem of seeing where you are going.

Royal Navy footage from 1951, the year the Attacker entered service.

Three Years and Out

The Attacker’s front-line career lasted from August 1951 to 1954. That is not really a failure of the aircraft so much as a symptom of the era: jet development was moving so fast in the 1950s that first-generation fighters were obsolete almost as soon as they were delivered. The Hunter and the Sea Vixen were already coming.

The type did not leave without cost. Attackers were lost in training and practice flying through the mid-1950s, including one, WP275, which went into the English Channel off Littlehampton in July 1956 after a wing folded in flight. The pilot ejected safely. Parts of that aircraft were brought up by a dredging vessel in 2005, almost fifty years later.

After the FAA retired it, surviving Attackers went to Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve squadrons, which is how a jet fighter ends up being flown by weekend aviators within a few years of being cutting edge.

Pakistan’s Decade

The second act is the more interesting one. The newly formed Pakistan Air Force adopted the Attacker and operated it for far longer than the Royal Navy did — possibly as late as 1964.

There is a pattern here that recurs throughout aviation history. An aircraft that is marginal for the demanding role it was designed for can be perfectly adequate for a different operator with different requirements. Landing on a pitching deck at night is the hardest thing you can ask of a 1950s jet; operating from a long land runway is not. Take the carrier out of the equation and the tail wheel stops being a serious problem.

A fuller account of where the Attacker came from and what became of it.

What It Was For

The Attacker’s real purpose was not to win a war. It was to get jets onto British carrier decks and start accumulating the institutional knowledge — deck handling, arrested landings with a jet’s approach speeds, maintenance, engine handling at sea — that the Fleet Air Arm would need when genuinely capable naval jets arrived.

Measured that way it succeeded completely. Somebody had to be first, and being first meant flying a compromise.

Sources: Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm records, Supermarine company histories, Air Ministry Specification E.10/44 documentation, Fleet Air Arm Museum, Pakistan Air Force histories.