The deck crew on USS Hancock froze as the Cutlass approached from astern, its twin vertical fins silhouetted against a Pacific sunset in the summer of 1955. Lieutenant Commander Jay Alkire lined up his approach, but the underpowered Westinghouse engines couldn’t generate the thrust he needed. The jet drifted left, descended too fast, and slammed into the ramp at the stern of the flight deck. The airframe disintegrated in a fireball. Alkire was killed instantly. It was one of dozens of fatal accidents that would earn the F7U Cutlass the most terrifying nicknames in naval aviation history: the “Gutless Cutlass” and the “Ensign Eliminator.”

Born from Nazi Research

The F7U Cutlass began its life in 1945, when the U.S. Navy launched a competition for a new carrier-capable day fighter capable of 600 mph and 40,000-foot ceilings. At Chance Vought, chief designer Rex Beisel — the man who had designed the first fighter built specifically for the Navy back in 1922 — assembled a team that included a rather significant consultant: former Messerschmitt senior designer Woldemar Voigt, who had supervised the development of swept-wing jet fighters in Nazi Germany, including the radical Messerschmitt P.1110 and P.1112 projects.

The result was unlike anything the Navy had seen. Designated V-346 internally, the design featured a tailless configuration with broad-chord, low-aspect-ratio swept wings and twin vertical fins mounted on the wings rather than a conventional tail. It was America’s first tailless production fighter, the Navy’s first swept-wing jet, and the first designed from the start with afterburners. The Navy was intrigued enough to order three prototypes.

The Engine Problem That Ruined Everything

On September 29, 1948, Vought test pilot J. Robert Baker took the first prototype aloft from NAS Patuxent River. The aircraft flew — but barely. The pair of Westinghouse J34 turbojets produced so little thrust that pilots would later joke they “put out less heat than Westinghouse’s toasters.” The engines delivered considerably less power than Westinghouse had promised, yet they were the only powerplant that could fit the Cutlass airframe without a complete redesign.

The later F7U-3, which became the main production variant with 288 built, received the improved Westinghouse J46-WE-8B engines. But even with afterburners producing 6,000 pounds of thrust each, the engines were woefully inadequate for an aircraft that weighed over 31,000 pounds fully loaded. The resulting thrust-to-weight ratio of just 0.45 made the Cutlass one of the most underpowered fighters ever to serve on a carrier deck.

“I considered the F7U-3 to be accident prone and a widow maker.”

Wally Schirra — NASA Astronaut and Navy Test Pilot

Carrier Landing Nightmares

The Cutlass’s design created a cascade of problems on the carrier deck. Its tailless configuration meant it needed an extremely high angle of attack for takeoff and landing, which required an absurdly long nose landing gear strut that elevated the pilot 14 feet above the flight deck. This created visibility problems — the pilot could barely see the deck during approach. The high stresses of barrier engagements and side-loads during carrier landings frequently caused the nose gear’s internal down-locks to fail, resulting in nose gear collapse and severe spinal injuries to pilots.

The problems went even deeper than the landing gear. The F7U’s hydraulic flight control system operated at 3,000 psi — twice the pressure of any other Navy aircraft at the time. The system proved hopelessly unreliable. Many components had actually been designed for lower-pressure systems and failed at an alarming rate. On top of all this, firing the 20mm cannons could cause the engines to flame out — a problem discovered during flight testing by none other than future astronaut John Glenn.

The Deadly Statistics

By 1957, when Chance Vought finally analyzed the accident record, the numbers were damning: 78 major accidents across just 55,000 cumulative flight hours, with a full quarter of all airframes destroyed. Four test pilots and 21 operational Navy pilots had been killed. The Cutlass had the worst accident rate of any swept-wing fighter in U.S. Navy history. And unlike other aircraft, Cutlass accidents tended to be more severe — when something went wrong, it typically went catastrophically wrong.

The stories from the fleet were harrowing. During VF-124’s single 1955-1956 deployment aboard USS Hancock, the squadron lost five of its sixteen Cutlass pilots. After pilot George Millard was killed in a landing accident — his malfunctioning nose gear triggered the ejection seat, launching him 200 feet into the tail of a parked A-1 Skyraider — the captain of the Hancock ordered every single Cutlass off his ship. The squadron spent the rest of its Pacific cruise grounded at the Atsugi naval air station in Japan.

Even the Blue Angels Said No

Perhaps the most telling indicator of the Cutlass’s problems came in 1953, when the Blue Angels reluctantly flew two F7U-1s as a side demonstration during their show season. Political pressure from senior officers and senators had pushed the Navy to promote the aircraft. The result was a public relations disaster. During the demonstration tour, the team experienced landing gear failures, hydraulic failures, engine fires in flight, and — in one memorable incident — a landing gear door that fell off and crashed into a spectator grandstand. Through sheer luck, no one was injured. The Blue Angels promptly abandoned the Cutlass and went back to the Grumman F9F Panther.

Vice Admiral Harold M. “Beauty” Martin, air commander of the Pacific Fleet, had seen enough. He ordered the Cutlass replaced with the Grumman F9F-8 Cougar, and an outstanding order for 250 more Cutlass variants was cancelled. By March 1959, the last Cutlass was retired — replaced by Vought’s own far superior creation, the F-8 Crusader, which would become one of the most successful Navy fighters of the Cold War era. Only seven Cutlass airframes survive today, silent monuments to one of aviation’s most ambitious — and deadly — experiments.