The F-100 began life inside North American as a private venture to push the Sabre past Mach 1. Engineers stretched and thinned the fuselage, swept the wing to 45 degrees, and hung it on the new J57 — the same class of engine that would power the B-52 and the F-101. The USAF was impressed enough to skip the usual prototype competition and order the aircraft almost off the drawing board.

When George Welch — a Pearl Harbor fighter pilot turned North American test pilot — lifted the YF-100A off Edwards on 25 May 1953 and pushed straight through Mach 1, the Hun instantly rendered the subsonic Century-Series rivals obsolete and set the template for a decade of supersonic American fighters. It entered service with Tactical Air Command in September 1954, barely 16 months after that first flight.

The thin, highly swept wing that let the Hun go supersonic also made it treacherous slow. On approach, if a pilot let the nose rise and the speed decay, the wing could stall from the tips inward while thrust and drag conspired to hold the aircraft in a high-nose, high-sink attitude it could not fly out of — the notorious “Sabre Dance.” Several were captured on film, ending in fatal crashes short of the runway. Combined with adverse yaw and inertia coupling at high speed — the phenomenon that killed test pilot George Welch in October 1954 — the early F-100A was grounded after a run of accidents. North American answered with a taller vertical stabiliser and longer-span wings, taming the worst of the behaviour, though the Hun always demanded respect.

When Soviet-supplied SA-2 surface-to-air missiles began downing US aircraft over North Vietnam in 1965, the Air Force rushed a handful of two-seat F-100Fs fitted with radar-warning receivers into the theatre under the first “Wild Weasel” program. The back-seater hunted the enemy radar while the pilot attacked it — a mission encapsulated by the crews’ unofficial motto about being first in and last out. In December 1965 an F-100F crew destroyed the first SA-2 site attributed to a Weasel. The job was murderously dangerous — the small F-100F force took heavy losses — and was soon handed to the faster, longer-legged F-105F and F-105G Thunderchiefs, but the Hun wrote the playbook that defence-suppression crews still follow.

Contemporary US Air Force figures put the flyaway cost of an F-100D at roughly $700,000 in late-1950s dollars — on the order of $7–8 million today once inflation is accounted for, though such conversions are rough. As a long-retired type the Hun has no meaningful modern cost-per-flight-hour figure in open sources; the handful of airworthy examples today are privately operated warbirds whose running costs are not comparable to a front-line jet. Any precise operating-cost number you see attached to the F-100 should be treated as an estimate.