The McDonnell F2H-3 Banshee was the only jet fighter the Royal Canadian Navy ever flew from a carrier deck, and Canada very nearly did not get it. The navy asked for sixty new aircraft. It received thirty-nine used ones, handed down from the United States Navy and, in the words of the Shearwater Aviation Museum, “used and tired” on arrival. Canadian maintainers rebuilt them on the hangar floor. Canadian pilots then flew them to the best intercept record of any squadron in the country, shot five drones out of the sky over the Irish Sea with Canada’s first air-to-air missiles, and lost twelve of the thirty-nine along with eight of their own. When the last squadron paid off in September 1962, nothing replaced it. Canada has not operated a carrier fighter since.

Canada ordered sixty new Banshees and the Cabinet changed its mind

The Royal Canadian Navy’s operational requirement, drawn up in 1951 and 1952, was for sixty aircraft: sixteen to equip two squadrons, a full hundred per cent reserve behind them, and “an alarming 28 aircraft for attrition over the six year period”. That last figure tells you what the navy already expected from single-seat jet operations off a small deck in the North Atlantic. In 1952 the Chief of the Naval Staff approved the purchase at $500,000 an aircraft, plus $9 million for spares including Sidewinder missiles.

McDonnell agreed to hold the St Louis production line open past its scheduled shutdown in September 1953 so that the Canadian aircraft could be added to the last US Navy production run. Canada made the initial payment. Then, as the Shearwater museum records it, “the Canadian Cabinet reneged on the agreement for fiscal reasons and the RCN’s only alternative was to buy used Banshees from the U.S. Navy.”

What followed was arithmetic rather than strategy. The requirement was cut from sixty to fifty-four. The navy then proposed borrowing fifteen T-33 jet trainers from the RCAF to offset fifteen Banshees, which brought the number to thirty-nine. The RCAF, busy training NATO aircrew, could spare only four T-33s. By then the Banshee order was already placed. “As the order for the Banshees was already placed, the difference in the number of aircraft was never made up.” Canada’s entire carrier fighter force existed at the size it did because of a loan that never happened.

The thirty-nine second-hand F2H-3s cost $25 million, a figure that included several million dollars of spare parts. They kept their US Navy Bureau Numbers — 126294 through 126488 — and they arrived in poor condition. Deliveries began in November 1955 and were not completed until June 1958. The first two flown into Shearwater were in the hands of the squadron’s commanding officer, Lieutenant-Commander R.H. Falls, and Lieutenant Walter Sloan.

The museum is blunt about what the Canadians then had to do: “It was only through exceptional diligence and hard work, often performing factory level repairs on the hanger floor, that the RCN maintainers were able to get their Banshees into excellent operational condition.”

Sixteen fighters on a carrier that barely fitted them

VF 870 reformed at RCNAS Shearwater, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, on 1 November 1955 as the navy’s first jet squadron; three weeks later the first Banshee “whistled in to a landing on the runway”, in the words of the Department of National Defence’s own official history. VF 871 converted from the piston-engined Sea Fury in August 1956. A third unit, the experimental squadron VX 10, ran the acceptance evaluations. Both fighter squadrons were shore-based at Shearwater permanently and embarked in HMCS Bonaventure only for deployments.

Four aircraft went to the United Kingdom in early 1957 for the carrier’s initial trials. The first Banshee deck landing on Bonaventure took place in the English Channel on 5 April 1957, shortly before midday; the first catapult launches followed that same afternoon. Bonaventure’s initial air group was sixteen Banshees and eight Grumman CS2F Trackers, with Sikorsky HO4S helicopters, out of a total complement of thirty-four aircraft.

Sixteen was optimistic. The ship was a Majestic-class light fleet carrier with an eight-degree angled deck, a steam catapult and a mirror landing aid, and she could not carry enough Banshees for fleet air defence and enough Trackers for round-the-clock anti-submarine work at the same time. The fighters were, as one account of the ship puts it, a tight fit. In practice the air group flexed with the task: October 1957 in the Caribbean was VF 870 with VS 881 and a single HO4S; November 1960 was VF 870, VS 880 and HS 50. Increasingly often, Bonaventure sailed with no Banshees embarked at all.

Period film of Royal Canadian Navy F2H-3 Banshee operations aboard HMCS Bonaventure.

The Grey Ghosts

Neither VF 870 nor VF 871 ever carried an official nickname — the Directorate of History and Heritage lineage for 870 lists a motto, Intercedimus et delemus (“to intercept and to destroy”), and a badge, but no nickname. The name that stuck belonged to something else: the demonstration team formed within VF 870 at Shearwater in 1956 under Lieutenant-Commander Robert Falls, which from 1958 called itself the Grey Ghosts. The aircraft itself was known as the “Banjo”.

The team had no aircraft of its own. The Banshee fleet was far too small for that, so the Grey Ghosts simply flew whichever active-duty aircraft were serviceable on the day of the show. In 1958 that meant a five-plane routine; in 1959 a sixth Banshee was added at Shearwater to fly an opposing solo for Canada’s Golden Anniversary of Flight.

Geoff Craven, then a lieutenant in VF 870 and later a colonel in the RCAF, wrote an account of flying the Canadian National Exhibition show at Downsview in 1958 with a full fuel and weapon load on a hot day and a short runway.

Their competition, Craven wrote, was the RCAF Golden Hawks, the US Navy Blue Angels and the USAF Thunderbirds, which is why the squadron commander and his wingmen would come back from two hours of practice with their flight suits wringing wet and in bad humour. Not everyone in the squadron thought it was worth it: Craven records Lieutenant Harry Swiggum’s view that the risks of low-level formation aerobatics were not justified, and that spectators mostly want noise, their next hot dog and maybe a spectacular accident.

What the practice looked like from the ground at Shearwater, remembered by the Cape Breton artist Gary LeDrew, who watched it as a young man around 1960:

Canada’s first missile-armed fighter

The Banshee was the first fighter in Canada to carry an air-to-air guided missile. The official history, written in 1965 as the type retired, described the AIM-9 Sidewinder as a weapon “which finds its target by homing on to the heat emitted by an enemy aircraft” and judged that the fitting of it had “appreciably increased” the aircraft’s fighting efficiency. Until the CF-188 Hornet arrived in the 1980s, no other Canadian military aircraft carried Sidewinder.

Separation trials were flown with two RCN Banshees at Chincoteague, Virginia, in January 1958. The main block of missiles reached Canada in 1959, and in November that year VF 870 detached from Bonaventure to RNAS Yeovilton to shoot live on the Cardigan Bay missile range. The Royal Navy provided remotely piloted Firefly drones flying at around 15,000 feet with infrared sources at the wingtips, at a price the Canada Aviation Museum records as “the cost of the aviation fuel used”.

Six missiles were fired. The first failed to acquire and self-destructed after thirty-one seconds. “The remaining five missiles all successfully intercepted, hit and destroyed five drone targets; they were all seen to crash into the sea.” The Shearwater museum’s version of the same event adds the detail that matters: the Royal Navy, which had offered ten drones, stopped the demonstration after six to save the rest.

That capability had a use at home. When the squadrons were not embarked, their Banshees were the prime interceptors of the 22nd NORAD Region, working with RCAF ground controllers at Radar Station Beaverbank, thirty kilometres north-west of Shearwater. The RCAF’s own interceptor, the CF-100, climbed faster, carried better radar and had a second crew member. It did not have Sidewinder. The Banshee, the Shearwater museum notes, had “an equivalent or better probability of destroying its target” — and VF 870 went on to post the highest intercept and kill rate of any Canadian squadron in NORAD exercises, most of it at night against Strategic Air Command bombers.

Air defence was not the only job. In mid-summer 1959 eight Banshees put on a ground-attack demonstration at Camp Gagetown, New Brunswick, in front of some 5,000 onlookers, each aircraft “carrying two 500-lb. general purpose bombs, four 3" high explosive rockets and 400 rounds of 20 mm. ammunition”. The squadrons also supported the army at Rivers, Manitoba, and trained for night and all-weather fighting out of Jacksonville, Florida.

A documentary account of the Sidewinder-armed Banshee wing and its short Canadian career.

Twelve of thirty-nine, and eight pilots

Nearly a third of the fleet was destroyed. The Canada Aviation Museum, which holds one of the survivors, publishes the figures without softening them: of the thirty-nine aircraft Canada bought, twelve were destroyed or lost at sea, fifteen were cut up for scrap, nine were burned for fire practice and three survived.

What became of them

All 39 Royal Canadian Navy Banshees

12 Destroyed or lost at sea

15 Cut up for scrap

9 Burned for fire practice

3 Survive in museums

One square is one airframe. Figures from the Canada Aviation Museum’s history of Banshee 126464.

The losses started before the aircraft even reached Canada. On 22 April 1956, a Banshee being ferried from NAS Quonset Point, Rhode Island, vanished south-west of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. “An extensive sea and air search failed to turn up any clues as to its fate,” the official history records. The wreck was never found, and Lieutenant Donald Wardrop was the first of eight Banshee pilots killed.

1957 was the worst year. On 14 May a Banshee crashed at Prospect, Nova Scotia. On 31 May another lost its starboard wing in flight and came down on McNab’s Island in Halifax harbour. The official history of the month is a single flat sentence: “two Banshee accidents spoilt an otherwise satisfactory period. One fighter struck the ground and exploded while the other broke up in mid-air, both pilots being killed.” On 27 August a VF 870 Banshee flown by an exchange officer, Lieutenant Edward Trzcinski of the US Navy, collided at Shearwater with a TBM-3E Avenger of VC 921 — the Banshee doing circuits on runway 16, the Avenger taking off from intersecting runway 20, a radio inoperable and patchy fog hiding the tower’s red flares. Both pilots were killed. On 2 October a Banshee went into the Atlantic off Bonaventure; its tail was recovered from the sea floor by a fishing boat in 1964.

Then 1958. On 25 February, Lieutenant William Troy, 29, of Campbellton, New Brunswick, disappeared while operating with Bonaventure off Florida. The Crowsnest, the navy’s own magazine, reported in April that he “was on a flight from Shearwater to join the Bonaventure off Florida when his aircraft was reported overdue. it was considered the aircraft crashed near Mayport Beach, Florida.” Debris from that aircraft washed up on a Jacksonville beach after Hurricane Irma in 2017. On 4 March a Banshee landed normally on Bonaventure, suffered what appeared to be a brake failure and went over the port side. The rescue helicopter, in the official history’s words, “was on the spot within seconds but it was too late” to save Lieutenant-Commander Brian Bell-Irving, who had ejected.

Not every accident killed. On 14 January 1959 a Banshee ditched on the shore at Key West after a flameout and the pilot walked away. On 11 November 1959, during Exercise Sharp Squall IV, one went off Bonaventure’s bows after a cold catapult shot; HMCS Athabaskan fished the pilot out and returned him to the carrier by whaler an hour later. The last fatality was Sub-Lieutenant Knudd Rassow, killed practising aerobatics near Peggy’s Cove on 16 June 1961.

7 September 1962, with nothing to replace it

VF 871 had already gone, amalgamated into VF 870 on 16 March 1959 after eight years in commission. VF 870 itself was disbanded on 7 September 1962. The Canada Aviation Museum’s airframe record for 126464 gives the date the aircraft themselves came off the books: struck off strength, 12 September 1962. Five days.

The reasons were the ones that usually apply. The navy had committed itself to anti-submarine warfare and Bonaventure could not do both jobs at once. The airframes were second-hand to begin with and had absorbed years of catapult shots and North Atlantic weather. And there was no money. The official history, written by the navy’s own historians while the decision was fresh, did not pretend the consequence was acceptable:

“Bonaventure’s resources are well-suited to this task but the announced paying-off of VF 870 in September 1962 and the retirement at that time of the Banshees due to old-age, will leave her without adequate defence against air strikes.” The same passage notes that the carrier was too small for most modern interceptors and pins its hope on an experimental technology: “experiments, if successful, with vertical take-off and landing aircraft (VTOL) may enable her again to operate fighters from her deck.” They did not.

The Skyhawk that never came

There was one serious attempt at a replacement. In 1964 Bonaventure sailed to Norfolk, Virginia, for trials with the Douglas A-4 Skyhawk, a small carrier attack aircraft that would have fitted her deck in a way the Banshee’s successors could not. The LTV A-7 Corsair II was looked at as well. An account from September 1964 records deck and landing trials, describes them as successful, and notes that Bonaventure could have carried and operated twenty-five of the type.

No purchase was made, and every source gives the same one-word reason: cost. No dollar figure has been published. Canada put its money into building the Northrop-designed CF-5 at Canadair instead — a land-based aircraft for an air force, not a naval fighter for a carrier. Australia, whose navy ran a carrier of comparable size, did buy the Skyhawk. Bonaventure was paid off in 1970 and scrapped in Taiwan.

Footage from HMCS Bonaventure, the ship the Banshees flew from.

Three survivors, and one last flight

The three Banshees that were neither scrapped nor burned are all in Canada. 126334 is at the Naval Museum of Alberta in Calgary; 126402 has been on display at the Shearwater Aviation Museum in Nova Scotia since 2007; 126464 is at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa, where it was the first aircraft moved into the new building in 1988.

126334 has the better story. Late in 1962, after the squadron had already disbanded, it was flown as “Last Punch” to set a Royal Canadian Navy record: Mach 0.98, 51,450 feet, and 40,000 feet in ten minutes forty-five seconds. On 10 January 1963 it was flown to the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology to become a ground instructional airframe. That was the last flight by a Canadian Navy Banshee, and quite possibly the last flight of any Banshee anywhere.

126464 spent years outside at Shearwater before restoration. Its fuselage was lifted to CFB Downsview slung under a CH-147 Chinook of 450 Squadron, rebuilt by reservists of 400 and 411 Squadrons, and repainted by de Havilland Canada at Malton to RCN specifications supplied by the historian John Griffin. The museum’s own history of the aircraft ends with a line that is hard to improve on: “F2H-3 BANSHEE 126464 serves as a reminder of an era in Canadian Naval Aviation that is now lost forever.”

Six years after the last Banshee was struck off, the Royal Canadian Navy itself ceased to exist, folded into the unified Canadian Armed Forces on 1 February 1968. The fighter squadrons had lasted sixteen years.

Sources: D. Glenn Cook, Canada Aviation Museum Aircraft: McDonnell F2H-3 Banshee 126464, Canada Aviation Museum; J.D.F. Kealy and E.C. Russell, A History of Canadian Naval Aviation 1918–1962, Naval Historical Section, Department of National Defence, Ottawa, 1965; Shearwater Aviation Museum, “McDonnell Banshee”; Directorate of History and Heritage, official lineage of 870 Squadron, canada.ca; Royal Canadian Air Force, “McDonnell Banshee”, canada.ca; Canada Aviation and Space Museum (Ingenium) collection record; Geoff Craven, “Aerobatics and the Grey Ghosts”, For Posterity’s Sake; The Crowsnest, April 1958; The Skyhawk Association, “Skyhawk proposal for Canada”. Figures that differ between sources are flagged in the text.

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