The B-66 began as an adaptation of the US Navy’s Douglas A-3 Skywarrior, a large carrier-based strategic bomber. When the US Air Force wanted a modern twin-jet tactical bomber in the early 1950s, taking the proven Skywarrior design and reworking it for land-based use promised a quicker, cheaper path than an all-new aircraft.

The two aircraft are close relatives and share a family resemblance — a shoulder-mounted swept wing, two podded engines and a glazed nose — but the B-66 was intended for a different service, a different basing concept and a different mission. That gap between the two, greater than it first appears, shaped everything about the Destroyer’s design.

Although it looks like a Skywarrior, the B-66 was redesigned so thoroughly for Air Force tactical use that it ended up sharing surprisingly few components with its naval parent. It received different engines, a revised structure freed from the demands of carrier operations, and equipment tailored to the low-level tactical role the Air Force envisaged.

This is a common point of confusion: the A-3 and B-66 are often assumed to be near-identical, but they are better thought of as separate aircraft from a common ancestor. What began as a straightforward adaptation became, in effect, a new design — a reminder of how different the Navy’s carrier world and the Air Force’s land-based world really were.

One of the most significant differences between the Destroyer and the Skywarrior was a matter of life and death. The Navy’s A-3 famously lacked ejection seats, its crews relying on a bail-out hatch that was notoriously hard to use in an emergency — a shortcoming that earned the aircraft a dark nickname among the men who flew it.

The Air Force would not accept that. The B-66 was fitted with ejection seats for all three of its crew, giving them a real chance of escape if the aircraft was hit or failed. In an era when the electronic-warfare mission would take the Destroyer into the most heavily defended airspace on earth, that decision mattered enormously, and it stands as one of the clearest distinctions between the two related designs.

The version that gave the aircraft its designation — the pure bomber, the B-66B — was in fact the smallest part of the family. A modest number were built as tactical bombers, capable of carrying conventional or nuclear weapons in an internal bomb bay, intended to strike battlefield and interdiction targets in a European war.

In the event, the bomber role was overshadowed almost from the start by the reconnaissance and, later, electronic-warfare versions. The Destroyer is one of those aircraft whose name reflects its original intent rather than its actual career: designated a bomber, it is remembered far more for reconnaissance and, above all, for jamming.

From the beginning, reconnaissance was arguably the Destroyer’s most important role. The RB-66B was a dedicated photographic-reconnaissance aircraft, and it was built in the largest numbers of any version — carrying cameras for day and, notably, night photography, using photo-flash equipment to illuminate targets in darkness.

This gave the Air Force a fast, jet-powered tactical reconnaissance capability at a time when knowing what lay over the next ridge, or behind enemy lines, was vital. For much of its early service the Destroyer earned its keep not by dropping bombs but by bringing back film, and the RB-66 was the backbone of US tactical photo-reconnaissance in the later 1950s.

Alongside the camera-carrying RB-66B came a very different, more secretive version: the RB-66C, a specialised electronic-reconnaissance and intelligence aircraft. Instead of cameras it carried receivers and analysis equipment, and a larger crew of electronic-warfare operators, to detect, locate and study enemy radar and electronic emissions.

The RB-66C was the aircraft that first turned the Destroyer decisively toward the electronic mission. Gathering the electronic order of battle — mapping where enemy radars were and how they worked — was essential intelligence in the Cold War, and it laid the groundwork for the jamming role the type would take on in Vietnam. These aircraft were the ancestors of the EB-66 jammers.

The Destroyer family even included a weather aircraft, the WB-66D. Fitted with meteorological equipment, these aircraft gathered weather data over potential operational areas — information that was crucial for planning strike and reconnaissance missions, since weather could make or break an operation.

The WB-66D is a reminder of how versatile the basic airframe proved to be. A design conceived as a tactical bomber was adapted into photo-reconnaissance, electronic-reconnaissance and weather roles, each drawing on the aircraft’s range, speed and internal volume. The weather version was a small part of the fleet, but it rounded out a remarkably broad family of variants.

The Destroyer’s defining role emerged as the science of electronic warfare matured. The aircraft’s spacious airframe, generous power and reconnaissance heritage made it an ideal platform for the bulky, power-hungry jamming equipment of the era. Reconnaissance aircraft were converted and capability was expanded to create the EB-66 series — dedicated electronic-warfare and countermeasures aircraft.

The EB-66 carried powerful jammers designed to swamp enemy radar with noise, along with equipment to detect and analyse threats. Its job was not to destroy the enemy but to blind him — to deny his radar operators a clear picture and his missiles a clean lock. As American involvement in Vietnam deepened, this capability would prove not merely useful but essential.

North Vietnam assembled one of the densest and most modern air-defence systems the world had yet seen: layered radar-guided guns, interceptors and, most dangerous of all, the Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile. Into this the United States had to send waves of strike aircraft, and the EB-66 became one of their key protectors.

Flying with the strike force or orbiting at stand-off range, the EB-66s jammed the enemy’s early-warning and missile-guidance radars, degrading the defences and buying the strike crews time and warning. In the cat-and-mouse of measure and countermeasure that followed — as the North Vietnamese adapted their tactics and the Americans adapted their jamming — the Destroyer sat at the heart of one of the most intense electronic-warfare campaigns in history.

The EB-66 rarely worked alone; it was woven into the strike “package” — the carefully organised formation of bombers, fighters, defence-suppression aircraft and support aircraft that went into North Vietnam together. The Destroyer’s jamming was one layer of protection among several, coordinated with the flak-suppressing “Wild Weasel” aircraft and the fighter escort.

This made the EB-66 a force multiplier: a single jammer could help protect many aircraft at once. But it also tied the Destroyer’s fortunes to the package it served — it had to be there, in the danger zone, when the strike went in. The electronic-warfare crews flew some of the most demanding and least visible missions of the air war, their success measured in the strike aircraft that came home.

Because the EB-66 was so valuable, the North Vietnamese did their utmost to destroy it, and the mission took the aircraft into the most dangerous airspace of the war. Some Destroyers were lost — to the very SA-2 missiles they were built to counter, and at least one to a MiG interceptor. The electronic-warfare aircraft, for all its power, could not always protect itself.

The most famous loss came in 1972, when an EB-66 was shot down and the effort to rescue its sole survivor grew into one of the largest and most costly search-and-rescue operations of the whole war, later recounted in books and on film. Many aircraft and aircrew were risked, and lives were lost, in the days-long attempt to bring one downed airman home. The episode is remembered with great respect, and it stands as a stark measure of the risks the Destroyer’s crews accepted.

The Destroyer was powered by two Allison J71 turbojets, mounted in underwing pods. They gave the aircraft respectable range and a top speed of around Mach 0.8 — subsonic, in keeping with a tactical bomber and reconnaissance aircraft of its generation rather than a fighter.

The J71 was not the most celebrated of engines, and the Destroyer was never a high-performance aircraft. But raw speed was not the point. Its worth lay in its payload, its sensors and, above all, its jammers. In the electronic-warfare role the EB-66 needed endurance and electrical power far more than it needed speed, and the aircraft delivered what its mission actually demanded.

The B-66’s career was relatively short. Only around 294 were built across all versions, and by the mid-1970s the surviving aircraft were worn out and increasingly outclassed. They were retired as newer electronic-warfare and reconnaissance aircraft took over the mission, ending the Destroyer’s two decades of service.

A number of Destroyers are preserved today, all in the United States — the only country ever to operate the type. Examples can be seen in American aviation museums, including the National Museum of the United States Air Force, where they represent an aircraft whose importance far outran its fame: the tactical bomber that became one of the most important electronic-warfare aircraft of the Vietnam War.

The Destroyer family was small in numbers but broad in role. The B-66B was the pure bomber; the RB-66A and RB-66B were photographic-reconnaissance aircraft; the RB-66C was an electronic-reconnaissance and intelligence version with a larger crew; and the WB-66D was a weather-reconnaissance aircraft. The largest single batch was the camera-carrying RB-66B.

Later, many of the reconnaissance aircraft were converted into the EB-66 electronic-warfare series — the B, C and E jamming variants that saw such intense use over Vietnam. This progression, from bomber to reconnaissance aircraft to dedicated jammer, traces the Destroyer’s evolution from its intended role to the one for which it is actually remembered.

As with most 1950s military aircraft, there is no single reliable, transparent public figure for the B-66’s unit cost, cost per flight hour or total programme cost. It was procured through Air Force contracts in the mid-1950s, and consistent lifetime cost data for a type produced in modest numbers and repeatedly reconfigured is not available in a usable form.

Rather than repeat an invented figure, we list the cost fields here as “not reliably recorded.” What can be said is that the Destroyer was a specialised aircraft built in relatively small numbers — around 294 of all versions — and that its later electronic-warfare conversions represented a further significant investment in capability that proved its worth many times over in Vietnam.

The B-66 and the A-3 Skywarrior are frequently confused, and understandably so — they share a designer, a basic layout and a strong family resemblance. But they are separate aircraft. The A-3 was a US Navy carrier-based strategic bomber; the B-66 was a US Air Force land-based tactical aircraft, and it was redesigned so heavily that it shared few actual parts with the Navy machine.

The key practical differences: the B-66 had different engines, structure suited to land rather than carrier operation, tactical mission equipment and, crucially, ejection seats for all its crew — which the A-3 lacked. Think of them as close cousins rather than the same aircraft in different colours. The Navy flew the Skywarrior; the Air Force flew the Destroyer.

Because the type was built in modest numbers, retired decades ago and flown only by the United States, surviving Destroyers are relatively rare and are found in American museums. Preserved examples — including electronic-warfare and reconnaissance variants — can be seen at US aviation collections, among them the National Museum of the United States Air Force.

These survivors are valuable precisely because the aircraft was never famous. They preserve the memory of a type that did essential, largely unseen work — the reconnaissance flights, and above all the electronic-warfare missions over Vietnam that helped so many other aircraft survive. For anyone wishing to see a Destroyer, the United States is the place.