Vought F7U Cutlass — History, Specs & Stories

Vought F7U Cutlass tailless swept-wing US Navy carrier fighter in flight
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Vought F7U Cutlass
“Gutless Cutlass”

A radical tailless, twin-jet carrier fighter a decade ahead of its shape — and one of the most dangerous aircraft the US Navy ever put to sea, which killed about 25 of its pilots and lost roughly a quarter of the fleet to accidents.

TaillessNo horizontal stabiliser · twin fins
~1 in 4Airframes lost in accidents
~320Aircraft built
1948–1959First flight · retirement
Photo: US Navy · Public domain
RoleCarrier-based fighter & fighter-bomberEraCold War · 1950sMotor2 × Westinghouse J46OriginUSA · Chance VoughtStatusRetired (1959)Want to fly a fighter jet yourself?
A História

The radical jet the Navy loved to hate

In the years just after World War II, Chance Vought set out to give the US Navy a fighter unlike anything that had flown from a carrier deck: a tailless, swept-wing twin-jet with no horizontal stabiliser at all, controlled in pitch and roll by elevons and steadied by two fins mounted midway out on the wing. Design work began in 1945 under chief engineer Rex Beisel, and the shape was so unconventional that it is still often linked to wartime German aerodynamic research — the tailless projects of Arado and Alexander Lippisch — captured at the end of the war.

That link should be hedged: Vought maintained the Cutlass was its own work, and how much German data actually shaped it remains debated. What is certain is the result. The prototype XF7U-1 first flew on 29 September 1948, and the definitive F7U-3 reached the fleet in 1954 looking like a machine from the next decade — a low, wide delta-like planform sitting on a spindly, enormously tall nose leg that held the pilot some 14 feet above the deck.

The trouble was that the airframe had outrun its engines. The Cutlass was chronically underpowered by its unreliable Westinghouse J46 turbojets, demanding to fly and unforgiving to land, and it earned two of the bleakest nicknames in naval aviation: the “Gutless Cutlass” and the “Ensign Eliminator.” Roughly a quarter of the ~320 built were destroyed in accidents, and about 25 pilots died flying it. Yet it was also a genuine pioneer — among the first carrier fighters designed from the outset to carry guided missiles — before being retired, after barely five years of service, in 1959.

The airframe was a decade ahead of its time. The engines were years behind it.The Cutlass paradox — a visionary jet undone by its powerplant
01The Vought F7U Cutlass’s origins: the tailless gamble and the German-research question

The Cutlass grew out of a 1945 Vought study for a radical carrier fighter that dispensed with the tail entirely, using a broad swept wing with twin fins and elevons for control. It is one of the most-repeated claims in aviation history that the design drew on captured German tailless research — the wartime work of Arado and of Alexander Lippisch, pioneer of the delta and of the rocket-powered Me 163 Komet.

The truth is murkier and worth hedging. Vought’s chief engineer Rex Beisel and his team insisted the Cutlass was an independent American design, and while German aerodynamic data was widely circulating among US manufacturers after 1945, no clean documentary line proves it was copied into the F7U. The honest position: the Cutlass shared a family resemblance and design philosophy with German tailless work, but the extent of direct influence is genuinely contested.

Design & Engineering

What makes it special

01

No tail at all — a true tailless carrier jet

The Cutlass had no horizontal stabiliser. Its broad, swept wing carried large trailing-edge “ailavator” elevons that did the work of both ailerons and elevators, while two fins stood up from the wing about a third of the way out. For a carrier aircraft — which must fly a precise, low-speed approach to the deck — deleting the tail was an extraordinarily bold gamble, and it made the Cutlass handle like nothing else in the fleet.

02

The very tall nose gear — and the “praying mantis” stance

To set the wing at a high angle for take-off and landing, Vought fitted an extraordinarily long nose leg that reared the aircraft’s nose skyward on the ground and put the pilot roughly 14 feet above the deck. The spidery, nose-high stance earned it the tag “praying mantis,” but the height badly hurt forward visibility on approach and the slender strut was prone to failure and collapse under hard carrier landings.

03

Underpowered and unreliable: the Westinghouse J46

The F7U-3 was built around two Westinghouse J46 afterburning turbojets of only about 6,000 lb thrust each — far too little for a 31,000-lb fighter, a thrust-to-weight of roughly 0.45. Pilots joked the engines put out less heat than a Westinghouse toaster. Worse, they were unreliable: flameouts were common, and firing the cannon could snuff the engines. The airframe’s ambition had simply outrun the era’s jet technology.

02The F7U Cutlass’s engine problem: why it earned the name “Gutless Cutlass”

The Cutlass was designed around the promise of the Westinghouse J46, an engine that never delivered what was advertised. In the production F7U-3 the two J46s gave only around 6,000 lb of thrust each even in afterburner — leaving the 31,000-lb fighter with a woeful thrust-to-weight ratio near 0.45 and sluggish acceleration exactly when a carrier pilot needed instant power to wave off a bad approach. Compounding the shortfall, the engines were unreliable and prone to flameout, and the aircraft’s complex 3,000-psi hydraulic system — twice the pressure of other Navy jets — suffered chronic failures. Together these traits produced the mordant fleet nickname the “Gutless Cutlass.”

03The F7U Cutlass as a missile pioneer: one of the first carrier fighters built for the Sparrow

For all its faults, the Cutlass was a genuine step into the future. The F7U-3M was among the very first carrier fighters designed from the outset to carry guided air-to-air missiles — four Sparrow I (AAM-N-2) beam-riding missiles under the wings, alongside its four 20 mm cannon. When Attack Squadron VA-83 deployed aboard USS Intrepid in March 1956, it was recognised as the first US Navy squadron to take guided missiles to sea. In that sense the troubled Cutlass helped point the way to the missile-armed fleet fighters — the F-8 Crusader and the F-4 Phantom — that followed it.

Technical Data

Full specifications

Figures are for the definitive production F7U-3. Sources differ slightly on a few values — these are the most commonly cited; contested figures are flagged.

Airframe & Performance

Equipe
1
Comprimento
~13.5 m (44 ft 3 in)
Envergadura
~12.1 m (39 ft 8 in)
Altura
~4.3 m (14 ft 7 in)
Peso vazio
~8,260 kg (18,210 lb)
Max takeoff weight
~14,350 kg (31,600 lb)
Max speed
~Mach 0.9–1.0 · ~680 mph (1,094 km/h)
Teto de serviço
~40,000 ft (~12,200 m)
Faixa
~660 mi (~1,060 km)

Propulsion, Armament & Cost

Engines
2 × Westinghouse J46-WE-8B turbojets
Thrust (each)
~6,000 lb (~27 kN) with afterburner
Armamento
4 × 20 mm cannon + up to 4 Sparrow I (F7U-3M)
First flight
29 September 1948 (XF7U-1)
Service
1954–1959
Number built
~320 (all variants)
Unit cost
Not reliably documented
Cost per flight hour
No reliable public figure
04The F7U Cutlass’s operating costs: why no reliable figure exists

The Cutlass was an early-1950s US Navy programme retired in 1959, long before the era of published life-cycle cost data, and no consistent period flyaway unit price appears in the open record. Any precise dollar figure attached to the type today should be treated as an estimate rather than a sourced number. There is likewise no reliable cost-per-flight-hour figure for the F7U in open sources — unsurprising for an aircraft that left service more than sixty years ago and was, in any case, notoriously expensive in a currency harder than dollars: airframes and lives.

Timeline

From bold prototype to cautionary tale

1945

Design begins

Chance Vought, under chief engineer Rex Beisel, starts work on a radical tailless carrier fighter — a shape often linked to captured German research.

1948

First flight

The XF7U-1 prototype makes its maiden flight on 29 September, one of the most unconventional aircraft ever offered to the US Navy.

1950–52

Prototypes lost

The early F7U-1 development programme is plagued by crashes; all three XF7U-1 prototypes are eventually destroyed in accidents.

1954

F7U-3 enters service

The redesigned, more powerful F7U-3 — the only version to see real fleet use — begins reaching Navy squadrons.

1956

Missiles go to sea

VA-83 deploys the Sparrow-armed F7U-3M aboard USS Intrepid — recognised as the first US Navy squadron to take guided missiles on an overseas cruise.

1955–56

The deadly cruises

Squadrons suffer a punishing accident rate; VF-124 alone reportedly loses five of sixteen pilots on one deployment, cementing the “Ensign Eliminator” name.

1957

Blue Angels pass

The Navy flight-demonstration team briefly evaluates the Cutlass and rejects it after repeated failures — a telling verdict on the type.

1959

Retirement

After barely five years of front-line service and a grim safety record, the last Cutlasses are withdrawn in March, replaced by far safer, faster jets.

Stories & Eyewitnesses

Twelve Cutlass stories

Design

A fighter with no tail

The Cutlass deleted the horizontal stabiliser entirely — radical for a carrier jet.

Read the full story
The most striking thing about the F7U was what it lacked: a tail. Vought’s designers gave it a broad swept wing with twin fins and large trailing-edge elevons that combined the jobs of ailerons and elevators, and no horizontal stabiliser at all. For a land-based experimental type that would have been daring; for a carrier fighter that had to fly a slow, exact approach onto a pitching deck, it was close to reckless. The layout gave the Cutlass its unmistakable, faintly menacing silhouette — and much of its trouble.
Origins

The German-research question

The tailless shape is forever linked to captured Arado and Lippisch work — but the link is contested.

Read the full story
Almost every account of the Cutlass mentions that its tailless planform drew on German wartime research, especially the delta and tailless projects of Arado and Alexander Lippisch, seized in 1945. It is a great story, and German aerodynamic data certainly circulated widely among American manufacturers after the war. But Vought insisted the F7U was an independent design by Rex Beisel’s team, and no clean paper trail proves direct copying. The honest verdict: a shared philosophy, not a proven blueprint.
Nickname

Gutless Cutlass

Underpowered engines gave the F7U its most famous, most damning nickname.

Read the full story
The Cutlass’s airframe was ambitious; its engines were not up to the job. The production F7U-3’s two Westinghouse J46s mustered only about 6,000 lb of thrust each even in afterburner, leaving the heavy fighter chronically short of power. Fleet pilots, never gentle, dubbed it the “Gutless Cutlass” and joked that the engines put out less heat than a Westinghouse toaster. Sluggish acceleration in a carrier aircraft — where a fast wave-off can save a life — was not merely embarrassing; it was dangerous.
Nickname

Ensign Eliminator

A grim second nickname captured the human cost of the type.

Read the full story
If “Gutless Cutlass” mocked the engines, “Ensign Eliminator” named the tragedy. Junior pilots — ensigns — posted to Cutlass squadrons faced an aircraft that was demanding to fly, unforgiving to land and quick to punish a mistake. Over its short career the F7U cost the Navy about 25 pilots killed, including four test pilots, and destroyed roughly a quarter of all airframes built. Few aircraft have ever carried a nickname so bleakly earned.
Landing gear

The praying mantis

An enormous nose leg gave the Cutlass a weird, nose-high stance — and poor visibility.

Read the full story
To sit the wing at a high angle for take-off and landing, Vought gave the Cutlass an extraordinarily tall nose gear that reared its nose toward the sky on the ground. The spidery, nose-high stance earned it the tag “praying mantis,” and it perched the pilot about 14 feet above the deck. That height, combined with the long approach angle, badly restricted the view forward exactly when a carrier pilot most needed it — lining up on the deck — and the slender strut was prone to collapse under hard arrestments.
Handling

Behind the power curve

The Cutlass was famous for flying “on the wrong side” of the power curve on approach.

Read the full story
Carrier pilots dreaded the Cutlass approach. With little thrust in reserve and a wing that needed a high angle of attack to make lift at low speed, the aircraft often flew “behind the power curve” — a regime where pulling the nose up to arrest a sink actually increased drag and made things worse, and where the underpowered engines could not spool up fast enough to recover. Get slow and low behind the ship and there was frequently no way out. It demanded constant, precise energy management from men who were often very junior.
Systems

Hydraulics at 3,000 psi

A pioneering high-pressure hydraulic system was also a constant source of failures.

Read the full story
The Cutlass ran its flight controls on a 3,000-psi hydraulic system — roughly double the pressure of other Navy jets of the day — an advanced choice that anticipated later practice. But the technology was immature, and components failed with alarming regularity. Because the tailless aircraft depended utterly on its powered elevons, a hydraulic failure could be catastrophic. It was another case of the F7U reaching for the future faster than 1950s engineering could safely follow.
Armamento

Guns that killed the engines

Firing the Cutlass’s own cannon could flame out its engines.

Read the full story
The F7U carried four 20 mm cannon, but using them could be its own hazard: the gun gases and pressure pulses from firing could disturb airflow into the engines and cause them to flame out. In a fighter already short of thrust and prone to flameouts, an armament that could shut down the engines was a bitter irony. It was one more item on a long list of quirks that made the Cutlass a machine pilots respected, feared and rarely loved.
Missiles

First to take the Sparrow to sea

For all its faults, the Cutlass was a real missile pioneer.

Read the full story
The one unambiguous triumph in the Cutlass story is the missile. The F7U-3M was among the first carrier fighters designed from the start to carry guided air-to-air missiles — four Sparrow I under the wings. When VA-83 sailed aboard USS Intrepid in March 1956, it was recognised as the first US Navy squadron to deploy overseas with guided missiles. The troubled Cutlass thus helped open the door to the missile-armed fleet fighters, the Crusader and Phantom, that soon replaced it.
Verdict

The Blue Angels said no

Even the Navy’s own demonstration team rejected the Cutlass.

Read the full story
In the mid-1950s the Blue Angels briefly evaluated the Cutlass as a potential display aircraft. After a run of failures and difficulties, the team declined to adopt it — a quietly damning verdict from the very pilots meant to show the Navy’s best face to the public. If the aircraft could not be trusted to perform reliably in front of crowds, its future in the fleet was already written.
People

Wally Schirra’s Cutlass time

A future Mercury astronaut was among the test pilots who flew the F7U.

Read the full story
The Cutlass programme drew in some of naval aviation’s most capable aviators — men good enough to wrestle with a difficult, dangerous aircraft. Among those associated with Cutlass testing was Wally Schirra, later one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts. That the Navy put pilots of that calibre on the type, and still lost so many, is itself a measure of how demanding the F7U truly was.
Legacy

A noble failure

Short-lived and dangerous, the Cutlass still pointed toward the future.

Read the full story
The F7U Cutlass was retired in 1959 after only about five years of front-line service, remembered mainly for its accident record and its unhappy nicknames. Yet it was also a genuine pioneer: a tailless, missile-armed, high-pressure-hydraulic carrier fighter that reached for ideas the rest of naval aviation would not master for years. It failed — expensively, and at real human cost — but it failed while trying to do something genuinely new. Vought would get it spectacularly right with its next fighter, the F-8 Crusader.
Gallery

The Cutlass in pictures

A Vought F7U-3 Cutlass in flight, c1955 the tailless, twin-finned planform that made it unmistakable.
A Vought F7U-3 Cutlass in flight, c1955 — the tailless, twin-finned planform that made it unmistakable.Photo: US Navy · Public domain
F7U-3 Cutlasses of squadron VF-81 in formation, 1954 the broad swept wing and twin fins.
F7U-3 Cutlasses of squadron VF-81 in formation, 1954 — the broad swept wing and twin fins.Photo: US Navy · Public domain
An F7U-3M Cutlass launches from USS Intrepid, 1954 underpowered engines at full thrust.
An F7U-3M Cutlass launches from USS Intrepid, 1954 — underpowered engines at full thrust.Photo: US Navy · Public domain
A Vought F7U Cutlass parked on deck, c1956 the low, wide, tailless carrier fighter at rest.
A Vought F7U Cutlass parked on deck, c1956 — the low, wide, tailless carrier fighter at rest.Photo: US Navy · Public domain
A Cutlass during carrier-approach trials, 1955 the demanding low-speed approach that made it dangerous.
A Cutlass during carrier-approach trials, 1955 — the demanding low-speed approach that made it dangerous.Photo: US Navy / NACA · Public domain
A landing signal officer waves a Cutlass aboard nose reared high on its tall gear, the praying mantis stance.
A landing signal officer waves a Cutlass aboard — nose reared high on its tall gear, the “praying mantis” stance.Photo: US Navy · Public domain
Watch

The Cutlass in motion

A curated video feature for the Vought F7U Cutlass is coming soon. In the meantime, explore the photo gallery above and the operator map below.

Operations

Where the Cutlass flew

Combat Record

Where the record stands

The F7U Cutlass never saw combat. It reached the fleet in 1954 and was gone by 1959, and in that short window it fought only its own reputation. Its defining statistics are not kills but losses: roughly a quarter of all airframes destroyed in accidents, and about 25 pilots killed. The Cutlass’s real legacy is as a missile pioneer — the first US Navy type to take guided air-to-air missiles to sea — not as a warrior.

~1 in 4Airframes lost to accidents
~25Pilots killed — incl. 4 test pilots
0Air-to-air combat kills

Compare the combat record of every military aircraft. Figures as of July 2026.

Questions & Answers

Everything people ask about the F7U Cutlass

Can I fly in an F7U Cutlass?
No — the Vought F7U Cutlass was retired in 1959 and survives only as a handful of static museum exhibits. There are no airworthy examples anywhere in the world, and the single-seat fighter had no passenger variant, so no rides are possible. You can, however, fly in several genuine military jets today — see migflug.com/flights-prices/.
Why was it called the “Gutless Cutlass”?
Because it was badly underpowered. Its two Westinghouse J46 turbojets produced only about 6,000 lb of thrust each even in afterburner — far too little for a 31,000-lb fighter — giving a thrust-to-weight ratio near 0.45 and sluggish, dangerous acceleration on a carrier approach.
Why did the F7U Cutlass have such a bad accident record?
A combination of causes: underpowered and unreliable engines, a demanding tailless design that flew badly at low speed, an extremely tall and failure-prone nose gear, poor forward visibility on approach, and immature high-pressure hydraulics. Roughly a quarter of the ~320 built were destroyed in accidents and about 25 pilots died — hence the grim nickname “Ensign Eliminator.”
Was the F7U Cutlass really tailless?
Yes. It had no horizontal stabiliser at all. A broad swept wing carried large elevons (combined ailerons and elevators) for pitch and roll control, with two fins standing up from the wing. It is one of very few tailless aircraft ever operated from carriers.
Was the Cutlass based on captured German research?
It is often said to be, linked to the wartime tailless work of Arado and Alexander Lippisch. That claim should be hedged: German aerodynamic data circulated widely in the US after 1945 and the Cutlass shared a design philosophy with it, but Vought maintained the aircraft was its own independent design, and direct copying has never been cleanly proven.
Did the F7U Cutlass ever see combat?
No. It served only from 1954 to 1959 and never fired a shot in anger. Its historical importance is as a pioneer — among the first carrier fighters designed to carry guided missiles, taking the Sparrow to sea with VA-83 aboard USS Intrepid in 1956.
Where can I see an F7U Cutlass today?
A few survive in US museums, including the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida. None are airworthy; the type is preserved only as static exhibits.
The part of the collection you can touch

You can’t fly the Cutlass.
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Related Aircraft

Continue the tour

Vought’s RedemptionF-8 CrusaderThe fighter Vought got spectacularly right after the Cutlass — fast, conventional and beloved, everything the F7U was not.Read the F-8 storyThe Delta RivalF4D SkyrayThe other radical 1950s US Navy delta — Douglas’s bat-winged interceptor, born of the same German-influenced tailless thinking.Read the Skyray storyThe Safe ChoiceF9F PantherGrumman’s straight-wing carrier jet from the same era — dependable and combat-proven, the Cutlass’s conventional opposite.Read the Panther story
Sources & Further Reading

Every fact, checked