On November 6, 1945, an American fighter turned onto final approach to a small escort carrier off California when its engine quit. The pilot did not bail out. He kept coming, touched down, and caught a wire — and in doing so made the first jet-powered landing in the history of aircraft carriers. It happened entirely by accident, because his aircraft had two engines of completely different kinds, and the one that failed was the propeller.

The aircraft was the Ryan FR-1 Fireball, the U.S. Navy's first jet — sort of. It was a fighter caught exactly between two eras, wearing a radial engine on its nose and a turbojet in its tail.

Why put two different engines in one fighter?

The Fireball existed because early jet engines were, frankly, terrible for carriers. They guzzled fuel, gave short range, and — worst of all — responded to the throttle with a lazy, dangerous delay. On a pitching flight deck, where a pilot needs instant power to catch a wire or wave off, that hesitation could be lethal.

Ryan's answer was to hedge. A trusty 1,350-horsepower Wright radial in the nose gave the Fireball a normal propeller aircraft's low-speed manners for take-off and landing. A General Electric J31 turbojet buried in the tail, fed by intakes in the wing roots, added roughly 1,600 pounds of thrust for a burst of speed in combat. Piston reliability on the deck, jet dash in the air.

The jet-powered propeller plane, explained.

The accidental first

The Fireball reached the fleet in March 1945 with squadron VF-66, but the war ended before it could fight. Its place in history was written instead by a single emergency. As Ensign Jake West set up to land aboard USS Wake Island that November, his radial engine failed. With the propeller dead, he flew the approach and trapped aboard on the jet alone — the first time any aircraft had landed on a carrier under jet power.

It was not the triumphant milestone the Navy had planned. Nobody set out to prove jet carrier landings that day; a pilot simply used the engine he had left. But it happened, and it happened first in a Fireball.

A closer look at the WWII propeller fighter with a jet in the back.

A footnote that mattered

Fewer than seventy Fireballs were built, and the type was gone by 1947, overtaken almost immediately by pure jets like the FH Phantom and F9F Panther that solved the carrier-jet problem outright. As a weapon it achieved nothing; as an idea it was a transitional stopgap that lasted barely two years.

And yet the Fireball is exactly the kind of aircraft worth remembering: an honest, awkward answer to a real problem, built in the narrow moment when the propeller was dying and the jet was not quite ready. It bridged the gap — and stumbled into a first that the fleet's pure jets would spend years catching up to.

The Fireball: arguably the most accurate aircraft name ever chosen.

Sources: Wikipedia (Ryan FR Fireball); Naval Encyclopedia; The Drive/TWZ; Planes of Fame.