The Tiger began life in 1952 as Grumman’s Design 98, an in-house study for a “super Cougar” — a refined version of the swept-wing F9F-6 Cougar then in service. But as the engineers chased supersonic performance the project diverged completely from its parent: a new thin wing, a new slim fuselage, and a single afterburning engine in place of the Cougar’s layout. Little more than the name lineage survived, and the Navy ordered it as a new type.

The decisive design move was the adoption of the area rule — NACA engineer Richard Whitcomb’s discovery that transonic drag is governed by the smooth distribution of a body’s cross-sectional area from nose to tail. Waisting the fuselage where the wings joined it gave the Tiger its distinctive pinched profile and let a relatively modest engine push it through the sound barrier. It was among the first US Navy fighters designed around the principle from the outset.

Grumman knew the J65 was holding the Tiger back, so it built a re-engined version around the far more powerful General Electric J79 — the same engine that powered the F-104 and the F-4 Phantom II. The result, the F11F-1F Super Tiger, was a transformed aircraft: it exceeded Mach 2 and, in 1958, zoom-climbed to a world altitude record commonly cited at around 76,800 ft (about 23,400 m).

It was fast, impressive and, in the end, unwanted. The US Navy had already committed to the Vought F-8 Crusader and, soon after, the Phantom II. Grumman pitched the Super Tiger hard for export — Japan and West Germany both evaluated it — but neither bought, and only two prototypes were ever built. The Super Tiger remains one of the great “what-ifs” of 1950s naval aviation.

The Tiger reached the fleet in 1956–57 and was gone from carrier fighter squadrons by about 1961 — an unusually short run for a new fighter. Three problems compounded each other. The Wright J65 engine was underpowered and unreliable. The aircraft’s range and endurance were short, a serious drawback for ocean operations. And crucially, a superior aircraft arrived at almost the same moment: the Vought F-8 Crusader, nearly twice as fast and far longer-legged, gave the Navy a better single-seat fighter for the same job.

The Tiger was not scrapped, though. Withdrawn from front-line squadrons, surviving aircraft served for years as advanced trainers at Naval Air Training Command until the late 1960s — and, most famously, as the mount of the Blue Angels from 1957 to 1969.

The Tiger was a mid-1950s US Navy programme of only about 200 aircraft, and no dependable public flyaway unit price or cost-per-flight-hour figure survives for it in open sources. Any precise dollar amount attached to the type online should be treated as an estimate rather than a documented figure. What can be said with confidence is that its short front-line life — barely five years before the fleet moved to the F-8 Crusader — made it a poor return on investment as a fighter, even though individual airframes then earned their keep for another decade as trainers and Blue Angels demonstrators.