Imagine a fighter that crashes one in every four times it tries to land on a carrier. A fighter whose engines flame out so often the squadron commander tells his pilots to assume both have failed before every approach. A fighter so universally hated that the deck crews who handled it pinned a hand-painted nose plate to its airframe: Ensign Killer.

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 were stacked in twin nacelles. 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 was supposed to deliver 6,000 pounds of thrust. It barely managed 4,600. The Cutlass with its J46s was chronically underpowered. Pilots reported takeoff runs of over 1,200 metres at full afterburner — alarming in itself, terrifying when the Cutlass was operating from carriers with 250-metre flight decks.

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 at a 14-degree nose-up attitude — far steeper than any other carrier jet. 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 Aviation News magazine, in 1956, gave the Cutlass a formal nickname: Gutless Cutlass. The pilots who actually flew the aircraft used a darker one.

A Mercifully Short Career

Twelve squadrons received Cutlasses between 1951 and 1955. Almost all of them lost aircraft in their first six months of operations. By 1956 the Navy was actively trying to retire the type. By 1959 every Cutlass had been replaced by the F-8 Crusader — a vastly safer, faster, and better-loved aircraft.

Five F7Us survive in museums. 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 equally disastrous J34 — folded entirely in 1959. 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: US Naval Aviation News (1956), Vought type history, Naval Air Systems Command accident reports.