F-80 Shooting Star: A Rising Star That Soon Fell – As famous in earlier 19FortyFive articles on the Messerschmitt Me 262 Schwalbe (“Swallow”) and Gloster Meteor, the United States of America lagged far behind Nazi Germany and Great Britain alike when it got here to the WWII-era jet fighter race.
In a reasonably inauspicious second for “good old American knowhow,” America’s first jet-powered plane, the Bell P-59 Airacomet, by no means even noticed fight, a pointy distinction to its Luftwaffe and RAF counterparts that engaged in air-to-air and air-to-ground fight respectively. It wasn’t till the primary 12 months of the Korean War that an American jet fighter would make up for misplaced time and declare some semblance of wartime bragging rights.
That history-making airplane turned out to be the P-80/F-80 Shooting Star. Let’s now check out the meteoric rise & fall (sure, breaking out the dangerous puns already) of the Shooting Star.
Another Skunk Works Success
The P-80 was one of many many profitable brainchildren of Lockheed’s legendary Chief Engineer Clarence “Kelly” Johnson and his iconic “Skunk Works” program, which had already established a sterling repute as a result of success of the P-3 Lightning prop-driven fighter airplane throughout WWII. (As a sidebar, Johnson’s & Skunk Works’ most memorable creation would develop into the SR-71 Blackbird, which remains to be the world’s quickest air-breathing plane.)
On this explicit undertaking, Mr. Johnson managed to maintain such a decent lid on secrecy that out of 130 Lockheed workers assigned to it, solely 5 even knew the true nature of the airplane that they have been engaged on.
Johnson submitted a design proposal in mid-June of 1943 and promised that the prototype could be prepared for testing in 150 days. True to kind for a no-nonsense straight-shooter of Kelly Johnson’s nature, he and his decided Skunk Works crew didn’t merely maintain this promise, they really completed every week forward of schedule, i.e. the 143-day mark.
So it was that the prototype of the Shooting Star made her maiden flight on 8 January 1944. A complete of 1,715 airframes ended up being constructed. The airplane was formally adopted for USAAF service in March 1945, however didn’t get to see WWII fight. Tragically, on 6 August 1945 —the identical day that the primary atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima —America’s “ace of aces,” Major Richard Ira Bong, was killed in a P-80A check flight.
On a extra optimistic observe, P-80s a number of information in-between WWII and Korea. For starters, on 27 January 1946, Col. William Haldane Councill flew a P-80A nonstop throughout the U.S. to make the primary transcontinental jet flight; his itinerary lined the gap from Daugherty Field (Long Beach Airport), California, to overhead LaGuardia Airport, New York, in 4 hours, 13 minutes, and 26 seconds. For good measure, on 19 June 1947 — 4 months earlier than Chuck Yeager grew to become the primary man to interrupt the sound barrier — a specifically modified Shooting Star set a pace file of 624 mph (1,004 kph/Mach 0.81).
Meanwhile, from a semantics standpoint, when the Air Force grew to become an unbiased department of service on 18 September 1947, it eradicated the P (for “pursuit”) prefix in favor of F (“fighter”), ergo its P-80s have been re-designated as F-80s.
Killing — And Getting Killed — Over Korea
As spectacular as these interwar accomplishments have been, it was in the course of the lethal air battles of the Korean War that the Shooting Star made its most important historic impacts.
Kelly Johnson’s jet fighter deployed to the “Land of the Morning Calm” armed with six nose-mounted Browning M-2 “Ma Deuce” .50 caliber machine weapons. After lacking out on the possibility to combat Luftwaffe and Imperial Japanese warplanes throughout WWII, the Shooting Star drivers would lastly get to check their battle mettle by duking it out with Communist pilots.
The F-80s scored their first aerial victories towards North Korean prop-driven Yakolev Yak-9s and Ilyushin Il-10s. Most considerably, on 8 November 1950, USAF Lt. Russell J. Brown was formally credited with taking pictures down a North Korean — or was it Soviet-piloted(?) —MiG-15 “Fagot” on the earth’s first jet-versus-jet air battle. Soviet information dispute this declare, insisting that the MiG pilot truly survived the engagement. As the saying goes, “The first casualty of war is truth,” so I’ll depart it as much as our readers to resolve for themselves who was telling the reality right here.
In any occasion, F-80 pilots have been credited with taking pictures down a complete of six MiG-15s in the course of the battle. But it quickly grew to become readily obvious that the then-revolutionary swept-wing MiG-15 completely outclassed not solely the Shooting Star however each different anti-communist UN Coalition warbird in service on the time. Hence it took the pressing creation and deployment of the F-86 Sabre to reestablish American air superiority over the Korean Peninsula.
Shooting Stars for the Students
Though the F-80 discovered itself rendered obsolescent for jet-to-jet fight by the MiG-15 and F-86 alike lower than a 12 months into the Korean battle, that didn’t sign the top of the Shooting Star’s service life by a protracted shot. Instead, the warbird discovered a brand new lease on life as a two-seater scholar pilot coach variant, the T-33A, serving faithfully till April 1997.
A good variety of these history-making planes survive at present. Arguably essentially the most noteworthy survivor is “Lulu-Belle,” the XP-80 prototype that made the aforementioned maiden flight again in 1944; this venerable previous girl (so to talk) is at the moment is storage with the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.
Christian D. Orr is a former Air Force officer, Federal regulation enforcement officer, and personal navy contractor (with assignments labored in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo, Japan, Germany, and the Pentagon). Chris holds a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California (USC) and an M.A. in Intelligence Studies (focus in Terrorism Studies) from American Military University (AMU). He has additionally been printed in The Daily Torch and The Journal of Intelligence and Cyber Security. Last however not least, he’s a Companion of the Order of the Naval Order of the United States (NOUS).
