Some warplanes make their name in dogfights, twisting through the sky with guns blazing. The McDonnell F-101 Voodoo made most of its name doing the opposite: flying low, flying flat out, and flying completely unarmed straight over the people trying to kill it, carrying nothing but cameras and a pilot with very steady nerves. It was one of the biggest, fastest members of America’s “Century Series” of jets, and its finest hour came not with a trigger but with a shutter.

A bomber escort that outgrew its job

The Voodoo began life answering a question the US Air Force asked right after the Second World War: who escorts the bombers all the way to the target and back? Strategic Air Command wanted a long-range “penetration fighter,” and McDonnell’s answer grew out of its earlier XF-88 prototype. By the time engineers had stretched it and bolted in two Pratt & Whitney J57 afterburning turbojets, the F-101A had become the largest single-seat fighter built to that point, more than 67 feet long and weighing over 48,000 pounds fully loaded.

It was ferociously fast, eventually topping Mach 1.7. It was also, in the early days, ferociously unforgiving. Its high, T-shaped tail gave the jet a nasty tendency to “pitch up” without warning, snapping the nose skyward toward an uncontrollable spin. Engineers eventually fitted a device to stop the stick pulling too far, but the Voodoo never entirely lost its bite. And the escort mission it was designed for? SAC quietly dropped it: even the long-legged Voodoo could not follow the new jet bombers all the way to their targets.

The camera ship that could outrun almost anything

Salvation came from a different direction. Strip out the radar and the four cannon, stretch the nose and pack it with cameras, and the Voodoo became the RF-101, the world’s first supersonic photo-reconnaissance aircraft. Here the jet’s brute speed became a virtue rather than a liability: it could sprint over a target faster than defenders could react.

On 27 November 1957, the RF-101C put on a national show. In Operation Sun Run, pilots of the 363rd Tactical Reconnaissance Wing set three transcontinental speed records in a single day, one crossing Los Angeles to New York and back in well under seven hours. It was a headline-grabbing stunt, but it advertised something serious: this aircraft could be anywhere in a hurry.

Thirteen days over Cuba

In October 1962, that reputation cashed out. As the Cuban Missile Crisis boiled over, high-altitude U-2 spy planes had photographed Soviet missile sites under construction, but Washington needed the close-up, unambiguous, low-level imagery that only a fast jet skimming the deck could deliver. The reconnaissance wing deployed its Voodoos to Florida within hours of the alert.

Beginning in late October, RF-101s ran in over the island in pairs, sometimes as low as a few hundred feet and at close to 600 knots, the kind of treetop profile the aircraft’s designers had never imagined. They were shot at by anti-aircraft fire and shadowed by Cuban MiGs. The imagery they brought back, alongside US Navy RF-8 Crusaders, confirmed the missile sites in detail and later verified that the weapons were being dismantled. When a U-2 was shot down and its pilot killed on 27 October, the value of a jet that could get in low and get out fast was written in stark terms.

The interceptor with a nuclear surprise

While the recon Voodoos grabbed the glory, the most numerous version of all wore a very different hat. The two-seat F-101B was rebuilt as an all-weather interceptor for Air Defense Command, the force tasked with stopping Soviet bombers before they reached American cities. Its party trick was the AIR-2 Genie: an unguided air-to-air rocket tipped with a nuclear warhead of roughly one and a half kilotons. The idea was blunt but effective. Rather than score a precise hit, an F-101B would fire the Genie into a bomber formation and detonate it. Nearly 480 F-101Bs were built, and they served for years with the US Air Force, the Air National Guard and Canada, whose CF-101s stood NORAD alert until 1984.

The RF-101C, meanwhile, went to war again in Vietnam, flying thousands of dangerous reconnaissance sorties over the North and losing dozens of aircraft in the process. It was the only Voodoo variant to see combat, and it kept flying the mission until sleeker RF-4C Phantoms finally took over.

That, in the end, is the Voodoo’s strange charm. It was designed for a job it never really did, made its name doing work its creators never planned, and left its deepest mark not by shooting anything down but by coming home with the pictures nobody else could get. Big, fast, twitchy and quietly indispensable, the “One-Oh-Wonder” deserves a better memory than “forgotten.”

More on the big, fast Voodoo.

Sources: Wikipedia (McDonnell F-101 Voodoo); HistoryNet / Aviation History; The Aviation Geek Club; GlobalSecurity.org; National Museum of the U.S. Air Force.