By 1943 Grumman had a problem worth solving. Its F6F Hellcat was winning the Pacific air war, but naval planners wanted something that could climb faster and reach an incoming raider sooner — a lightweight interceptor to protect the fleet. Grumman’s answer, first flown on 21 August 1944, was radical in its simplicity: take the same class of engine as the Hellcat, the mighty Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp, and wrap the smallest, lightest airframe the company could build around it. The result, the F8F Bearcat, weighed roughly a fifth less than the Hellcat while carrying almost the same power.

The payoff was spectacular. The Bearcat could climb at around 4,500 feet per minute at sea level — and in a famous demonstration a stripped example reportedly bettered 6,000 ft/min, a rate of climb no propeller fighter of its era could match and one that would not be routinely beaten until the jet age. It was light on the controls, viciously fast in the roll, and a favourite of the test pilots who flew it. It is often described as an anti-kamikaze interceptor, though the truth is more nuanced: design work was already under way before organised kamikaze attacks began in late 1944, so it is best understood simply as a rocket-climbing point-defence fighter.

The one thing the Bearcat never got was the war it was built for. Deliveries to Fighting Squadron 19 began in May 1945, and the first Bearcat-equipped air group was still working up when Japan surrendered that August. The F8F reached the fleet just too late to fire a shot in the Second World War. Instead it became the US Navy’s premier piston fighter of the immediate post-war years, and from 1946 to 1949 it equipped the Navy’s Blue Angels demonstration team — the last propeller aircraft the team ever flew.

That lightness came with one notorious quirk. To save weight, the outer few feet of each wing were engineered to shear away under excessive load, letting the inner wing be built lighter. In theory the tips would break clean at high g; in practice they sometimes broke asymmetrically — one tip departing while the other stayed on — throwing the aircraft into a sudden, often fatal roll. Grumman tried wiring the tips with explosive cord so one failure would trigger the other; when that proved unreliable the safety tips were abandoned and the wing simply reinforced.

Jets ended the Bearcat’s front-line US career almost as fast as it had begun; it was largely gone from the fleet by around 1952. But the aeroplane found a second life abroad. 法国 flew Bearcats hard in the First Indochina War, where they became the type’s only combat mounts — several were destroyed on the ground by Viet Minh artillery at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Thailand made the Bearcat its principal fighter of the mid-1950s, and the South Vietnamese Air Force flew ex-French examples into the early 1960s.

Its most enduring fame, though, came on the race course. In 1969 Darryl Greenamyer’s modified Bearcat “Conquest I” set a piston-engine world speed record of about 483 mph (777 km/h), finally breaking a mark the Messerschmitt Me 209 had held since before the war. Two decades later the legendary “Rare Bear” pushed the piston record to 528 mph (850 km/h) and became the winningest Unlimited racer in the history of the Reno National Championship Air Races. Eighty years after it first flew, the last great US Navy piston fighter is still, by the numbers, the fastest of them all.