In the early 1950s the United States lay awake at night worrying about Soviet bombers slipping across the Arctic in the dark. The aircraft it scrambled to meet them was the Lockheed F-94 Starfire — the first American jet fighter with an afterburner, the first all-weather jet to fight in Korea, and, in its final form, a fighter that carried no guns at all, only a nose ringed with rockets.

The Starfire is a forgotten link in the chain: the awkward, urgent step between the propeller night fighters of the Second World War and the missile-armed interceptors of the Cold War.

A trainer grows fangs

The Starfire's roots were humble. Lockheed took the two-seat T-33 Shooting Star trainer — itself a stretched version of the P-80, America's first operational jet fighter — and turned it into a radar-equipped night hunter. The back-seater became a radar operator, guiding the pilot onto targets in cloud and darkness. To give it the punch to climb after high-flying bombers, Lockheed fitted an afterburner, the first on any USAF fighter.

The first Air Force jet with an afterburner.

Night work over Korea

When Soviet-built bombers and night intruders began probing over Korea, the F-94 was sent to do the job propeller fighters no longer could. Flying blind-interception missions in the dark, guided only by their radar, Starfire crews hunted enemy aircraft over hostile territory — and scored, including a MiG-15 shot down in a radar-guided night interception, among the first jet-versus-jet night kills in history.

It was dangerous, unglamorous flying. Chasing a target you could only see on a scope, at night, over enemy ground, with strict orders not to let the secret radar fall into enemy hands, asked a great deal of the two men aboard. The Starfire did it, and helped write the playbook for radar-guided air defence.

F-94 Starfires of the 319th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron in Korea.

Throwing away the guns

The final version, the F-94C, took a radical step. It got a thinner wing, a swept tail and a more powerful engine — and it threw out its machine guns entirely. In their place, a ring of 24 unguided "Mighty Mouse" folding-fin rockets sat behind snap-open doors around the nose radar, with more in wing pods. The idea was to salvo a shotgun blast of rockets into a bomber formation.

In practice the rockets were wildly inaccurate and their smoke could blind the pilot at the moment of firing. The all-rocket interceptor was a dead end — but a necessary experiment on the road to the guided missiles that would soon replace guns and rockets alike.

A short history of the Starfire.

By the mid-1950s newer, faster interceptors were pushing the Starfire aside, and it faded into Air National Guard service and then the boneyard. It never became famous. But for a few tense years it was the aircraft standing watch over the dark top of the world — the first American jet built to fight blind, and the bridge to everything that came after.

Sources: Wikipedia (Lockheed F-94 Starfire); National Museum of the U.S. Air Force; Vintage Aviation News.