The Voodoo traces directly to the XF-88, McDonnell’s entry in the late-1940s Penetration Fighter competition for a long-range escort to protect Strategic Air Command’s bombers. The XF-88 flew in 1948 and performed well, but the programme was shelved in 1950 as budgets tightened and jet development raced ahead. The Korean War changed the calculus: unescorted bombers were proving desperately vulnerable, and in 1951 the Air Force asked McDonnell to develop a production aircraft from the XF-88. The result was so enlarged and re-engined — with two powerful J57s in place of the XF-88’s smaller engines — that it was effectively a new aircraft, designated F-101. By the time it entered service in 1957 the strategic picture had shifted again, and the escort mission it had been born to fill no longer existed. That the Voodoo went on to a long, varied career anyway is a testament to how much capability McDonnell had built into the airframe.

The Voodoo’s high-set tailplane sat in the wake of the wing, and at high angles of attack the wing’s downwash could rob the tail of control authority. The result was a sudden, violent pitch-up — the nose rearing up uncommanded, often flicking the aircraft into a spin or departure from controlled flight. It was a well-known and feared trait, and it cost aircraft and lives across the fleet. McDonnell and the Air Force fitted an automatic pitch-up inhibitor — a system that shook and then pushed the stick forward to warn the pilot and limit the angle of attack — which reduced the danger without ever entirely curing it. Treat any claim that the problem was “solved” with caution: the accepted history is that it was managed, not eliminated.

As an interceptor the F-101B was meant to stop waves of Soviet bombers over the Arctic, and its weapons reflected the brutal logic of the age. Its internal rotating weapons pallet could carry guided AIM-4 Falcon air-to-air missiles — some infrared, some radar-guided — for conventional engagements. For the worst case it carried up to two AIR-2 Genie rockets, each an unguided weapon tipped with a roughly 1.7-kiloton nuclear warhead. The idea was that precision did not matter if a nuclear burst filled the sky in the middle of a bomber stream. Canadian CF-101s carried the same nuclear-armed Genie under a special dual-key arrangement with the United States — a rare case of nuclear weapons on Canadian-operated aircraft.

As with most 1950s military aircraft, firm cost figures for the Voodoo are scarce and inconsistent. Contemporary sources place the flyaway unit cost of an F-101B very roughly around $1.75 million in late-1950s dollars, but this should be read as an order-of-magnitude estimate rather than an audited price, and it varied by variant and production block. No reliable public cost-per-flight-hour figure exists for the type. What is better documented is that the Voodoo was an expensive aircraft to operate for its era — two thirsty J57 engines gave it speed and range but consumed fuel heavily. Treat any precise dollar figure attached to the F-101 with healthy scepticism.