Imagine a fighter that destroyed roughly a quarter of its entire production run in accidents. A fighter whose engines were so feeble that pilots joked they put out less heat than Westinghouse’s toasters. A fighter so universally hated that naval aviators gave it a grim nickname: Ensign Eliminator.

That was the Vought F7U Cutlass. The US Navy bought 320 of them. They lost 78 to accidents, killing 25 pilots, and retired the survivors after eight years of service. Today, the F7U is the answer to one of aviation history’s nastier trivia questions: what is the deadliest fighter the United States ever fielded?

A Bold Design That Should Have Worked

The Cutlass’s design lineage was promising. Vought based the F7U on captured German Arado wartime research into tailless aircraft. The two engines sat side by side in the rear fuselage. There was no horizontal tail at all — pitch and roll control came from large elevons on the trailing edges of the swept wings, with two short vertical fins for yaw stability.

The pitch was: lower drag, higher manoeuvrability, better top speed for the same engine power. The pitch was correct in theory. The execution went wrong in almost every other dimension.

The Engines That Could Not

The Westinghouse J46 turbojet was the Cutlass’s first major problem. Designed in parallel with the airframe, it delivered just 4,600 pounds of dry thrust per engine — far less than the heavy airframe needed. The Cutlass with its J46s was chronically underpowered, with a thrust-to-weight ratio of roughly 0.45, and its takeoff and carrier landing performance was notoriously poor.

Worse, the J46 had a habit of flame-out at low engine speeds. Carrier pattern flight — slow approach, high angle of attack, throttle modulation — was exactly the regime where flame-outs occurred. A Cutlass on final, with one engine out and the other unable to spool up fast enough to recover, simply landed nose-down in the sea or piled into the deck.

“You Could Not See the Carrier”

The Cutlass landed in an extreme nose-up attitude — steeper than any other carrier jet of its day, perched on a towering nose gear strut that lifted the pilot 14 feet into the air. Pilots looking out of the canopy saw nothing but sky on final approach. They had to rely entirely on the Landing Signal Officer’s wave-off paddles, and the LSO had to stand back further than usual because the Cutlass’s twin engines blasted hot exhaust over a much wider deck area.

The combination — high stall speed, high landing angle, weak engines, no forward visibility — produced approach accidents at a rate the Navy had never tolerated and never would again. Naval aviators gave the Cutlass a derisive nickname: Gutless Cutlass. The pilots who actually flew the aircraft used a darker one.

A Mercifully Short Career

Thirteen squadrons eventually received the definitive F7U-3, with the first fleet squadron taking delivery in 1954. Few managed a full carrier deployment with the type. By 1956 the Navy was actively trying to retire the type, and the last Cutlass left service in March 1959. Vought’s next fighter, the F-8 Crusader, was a vastly safer, faster, and better-loved aircraft.

Seven F7Us are known to survive. None fly. Vought, which had built the much-loved F4U Corsair and would later build the F-8 Crusader, never quite recovered from the Cutlass’s reputation. The Westinghouse jet engine division — which had also built the disastrous J40 — left the aircraft engine business entirely in 1960. The Cutlass is the rare case in aviation history where a fighter actively destroyed careers, reputations, and entire companies.

It was, in the end, an experiment that proved exactly what it set out to disprove: tailless carrier fighters with weak engines are a bad idea.

Sources: Smithsonian Air and Space Magazine, Vought type history, US Navy accident records.