21 July 1946, USS Franklin D. Roosevelt

On 21 July 1946 a stubby, straight-winged fighter with two small jet engines buried in its wing roots caught the wire aboard the carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt. The McDonnell XFD-1 Phantom had just become the first purely jet-powered aircraft to land on an American aircraft carrier. The company that built it was barely seven years old, had never put a fighter into production, and was run by an engineer from Arkansas who had been trying to build aeroplanes of his own since the 1920s.

Mr Mac and the Doodle Bug

James Smith McDonnell, known as Mac, was born in Denver, raised in Little Rock, and graduated from Princeton in 1921 before taking a master’s in aeronautical engineering at MIT in 1925. He worked for Stout Metal Airplane, part of Ford, and in 1929 designed the Doodle Bug for the Guggenheim safe aircraft contest, which offered a $100,000 prize. It failed to win. McDonnell went on to work at Glenn L. Martin, resigned in 1938, and on 6 July 1939 founded McDonnell Aircraft Corporation in St. Louis. He would remain its president until 1962.

From parts maker to Navy jets

The Second World War made the company. It grew from 15 employees in 1939 to about 5,000 by the end of the war, largely as a parts producer, while testing its own ideas such as the XP-67 Bat fighter prototype, which flew in January 1944 and was cancelled that September. The Navy, though, liked McDonnell’s jet work. The FH Phantom, 62 built, led to the larger F2H Banshee, first flown in 1947, of which 895 were built. The Banshee flew escort and reconnaissance in Korea and became the only jet fighter ever deployed by the Royal Canadian Navy.

Voodoo and a fighter in a bomb bay

McDonnell’s engineers were not afraid of odd briefs. The XF-85 Goblin, first flown in 1948, was a tiny egg-shaped parasite fighter meant to ride in the bomb bay of a Convair B-36 and hook back on after a fight; only two were built. The XV-1 of 1954 was an experimental compound helicopter. The F3H Demon carrier fighter followed, with 519 built. The F-101 Voodoo, first flown in 1954, was more successful: 807 were built, and on 12 December 1957 a JF-101A set a world speed record of 1,207.6 mph.

The Phantom II

Then came the masterpiece. The F4H-1, later F-4 Phantom II, first flew on 27 May 1958 with Robert C. Little at the controls. It began as a Navy interceptor without a gun and became the defining Western fighter of its era, flown by the Navy, the Marine Corps and, unusually, the US Air Force. From 1959 it set 15 world records, including an absolute altitude record of 98,557 ft in Operation Top Flight and an absolute speed record of 1,606 mph in Operation Skyburner in 1961. Production reached 5,195 by 1981, most of them after the merger, and as of 2026 it still serves in Turkey and Iran.

Capsules for astronauts

McDonnell’s hypersonic research won it a place in the space race. In January 1959 NASA chose McDonnell as prime contractor for the Mercury capsule, the spacecraft that carried America’s first astronauts. In December 1961 it was contracted to build the larger two-man Gemini spacecraft, the first delivered in 1963. Capsules were built in a clean room at St. Louis, and McDonnell engineer Guenter Wendt supervised launch-pad preparations for both programmes. A fighter company had become a spacecraft builder in barely twenty years.

Buying Douglas

By the mid-1960s Douglas Aircraft, maker of the DC-8 and DC-9, was reeling from cash-flow problems. McDonnell saw a perfect fit: Douglas’s airliners would cushion it against swings in military orders, and McDonnell’s defence income would steady Douglas. Douglas accepted the offer in December 1966, and on 28 April 1967 the two firms merged as McDonnell Douglas. McDonnell Aircraft lived on as the St. Louis fighter division, later producing the F-15 Eagle and F/A-18 Hornet, before McDonnell Douglas merged with Boeing in August 1997. James McDonnell died on 22 August 1980.

Továrny

• St. Louis works · Lambert Field, St. Louis, Missouri — Headquarters and main plant; clean room for Mercury and Gemini capsules; now part of Boeing

Lidé

• James Smith McDonnell · founder, president 1939–1962 — Princeton 1921, MIT 1925; died 22 August 1980
• David S. Lewis · president 1962–1967 — Later president of McDonnell Douglas
• Robert C. Little · test pilot — Flew the F4H-1 Phantom II on its first flight, 27 May 1958
• Guenter Wendt · engineer — Supervised Mercury and Gemini launch-pad preparations

Rekordy a prvenství

• First purely jet-powered landing on a US aircraft carrier, XFD-1 Phantom, 21 July 1946
• World speed record 1,207.6 mph, JF-101A Voodoo, 12 December 1957
• 15 world records for the F-4 Phantom II from 1959
• Absolute altitude record 98,557 ft, Operation Top Flight, 6 December 1959
• Absolute speed record of about 1,606 mph, Operation Skyburner, 22 November 1961