Off the deck of the Langley

On 17 October 1922 a small biplane trainer rolled down the wooden deck of USS Langley, America’s first aircraft carrier, and lifted into the air. The pilot was Lieutenant Virgil Griffin; the aeroplane was a Vought VE-7. It was the first take-off from an American carrier, and it set the pattern for the next half-century. The company behind it had been founded five years earlier in Astoria, New York, by the aviator Birdseye Lewis and Chance Vought, a former chief engineer of the Wright Company. From the start, its customer of choice was the US Navy, and no American firm would be more closely tied to carrier aviation.

A pioneer dead at 40

Chance Vought renamed the firm after himself when Lewis retired in 1922, and in 1927 the Navy ordered the O2U, the first aircraft to carry the name Corsair. Two years later the company was bought by the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, alongside Boeing and Pratt & Whitney. Vought did not live to see what came next: he died of sepsis in July 1930, aged 40. The company moved to East Hartford and then, in 1939, to Stratford, Connecticut, where United Aircraft merged it with Sikorsky. For a few years the two names were joined — and it was as Vought-Sikorsky that Igor Sikorsky’s VS-300 made its first tethered flight in September 1939, the ancestor of the practical helicopter.

The bent-wing bird

The bent-wing bird came out of Stratford. Rex Beisel’s team wrapped a fuselage around the most powerful engine available, Pratt & Whitney’s R-2800, and gave it an inverted gull wing so its enormous propeller would clear the deck. In October 1940 the prototype XF4U became the first US single-engined fighter to exceed 400 mph. It was hard to land on carriers, earning the nickname Ensign Eliminator, but once tamed it was lethal: US Navy and Marine Corsair pilots claimed 2,140 air victories against 189 losses. More than 12,500 were built by Vought, Goodyear and Brewster, and the last rolled out for France in January 1953 — the longest production run of any American piston fighter.

Moving a factory to Texas

In 1949, pushed by a Navy uneasy about having its main suppliers clustered on the East Coast, Vought moved its entire operation to a former North American Aviation plant in Dallas. It shifted 27 million pounds of equipment and 1,300 employees in 14 months, a record industrial move for its time. Not every Texan design was a triumph. The tailless F7U Cutlass was so unforgiving that pilots called it the Gutless Cutlass; Vought’s own 1957 analysis found that a quarter of the fleet had been lost in 78 accidents. Earlier still, the company had built the V-173 and XF5U, disc-shaped Flying Pancakes that looked like science fiction and never entered service.

The last gunfighter

Then came the Crusader. First flown on 25 March 1955, the F-8 became the first American jet fighter to pass 1,000 mph, and in July 1957 a Marine major named John Glenn flew a photo-reconnaissance version from California to New York in three hours, 23 minutes — the first supersonic transcontinental flight. Over Vietnam, Crusader pilots claimed 19 kills for three losses, the best ratio of any American type in that war, and the F-8 became known as the last gunfighter. A shortened, subsonic redesign became the A-7 Corsair II, which flew from 1965, fought from Vietnam to Desert Storm and served in Greece until 2014.

Ling, Carlyle, Triumph

Corporate life was less heroic. Independent again from 1954, Vought was swallowed by James Ling’s conglomerate Ling-Temco-Vought in the early 1960s, became the Vought Corporation in 1976, and was sold in 1992 to Northrop and the Carlyle Group. Carlyle revived the name in 2000 as Vought Aircraft Industries, by then an aerostructures supplier building fuselage sections for Boeing’s 747 and 787. Boeing bought its 787 plant in South Carolina in 2009 for 580 million dollars, and in June 2010 Triumph Group bought the rest for about 1.44 billion dollars. The name lives on as a Triumph division, and in the Corsairs still flying at air shows.

Заводы

• Astoria and Long Island City · New York — First works, 1917–1930
• East Hartford · East Hartford, Connecticut — Home from 1930
• Stratford · Stratford, Connecticut — Shared with Sikorsky from 1939; birthplace of the F4U
• Dallas / Grand Prairie · Dallas, Texas — Former North American Aviation plant, occupied from 1949; closed after the Triumph takeover
• North Charleston · South Carolina — 787 aft-fuselage plant, sold to Boeing in 2009
• Nashville · Nashville, Tennessee — Airbus wing-component site, joined in the 2003 Aerostructures merger

Люди

• Chance M. Vought · co-founder, designer — Former Wright Company chief engineer; designed the VE-7; died 1930
• Birdseye Lewis · co-founder — Aviator; retired in 1922
• Rex Beisel · chief engineer — Led the F4U Corsair design team
• Charles H. Zimmerman · engineer — Designer of the V-173 and XF5U Flying Pancakes
• John Glenn · US Marine pilot — Flew an F8U-1P coast to coast in 3 h 23 min in 1957
• James Ling · industrialist — Absorbed Vought into Ling-Temco-Vought

Рекорды и первые достижения

• First take-off from a US aircraft carrier, VE-7, USS Langley, 17 October 1922 (v5)
• First US single-engined fighter to exceed 400 mph, XF4U, 1940 (v3)
• Longest production run of any US piston fighter, F4U Corsair, 1942–1953 (v3)
• First US jet fighter past 1,000 mph: F8U, 1,015 mph, 21 August 1956 (v4)
• First supersonic transcontinental flight, F8U-1P, 16 July 1957, 3 h 23 min 8.3 s (v4)