Jet heading for the heavens

Above you see a jet heading for the heavens, which is exactly where it wound up. It is a Grumman F9F, one of the first truly operational combat jets to fly off of US Navy carriers. It was built in two versions, the straight wing jet that flew in Korea called the Panther, and a swept wing version that was developed too late for the Korean conflict called the Cougar, which I thought, as a kid, was one of the best looking aircraft in the sky. I remember both versions flying out of Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. It was always a treat to go to the beach when a pair of these jets would streak low over the water just beyond the breaking surf. Sometimes they would fly over my house at a greater height, and I’d run outside and lay on my back in our backyard and hope that they’d circle so I could get a second look.

Well back to the picture. I think it’s pretty dramatic, but in many ways it’s fake! As it turns out, it’s a model made of balsa and tissue paper and isn’t even a jet since it has a clear plastic propeller on the nose powered by a rubber band motor. If you look closely, you can see the flash of the prop in the upper left of the model. I didn’t expect much from this model, but it out-performed all expectations. We in the Flying Aces Club, fly stick and tissue models competitively, where a flight of two minutes for a rubber powered model is considered an excellent flight. As it happened, I wound up the rubber model for a test flight, and a friend snapped a picture shortly after launch. The F9F demonstrated excellent flight characteristics and continued to gain altitude even after the motor ran out. I couldn’t help noticing that it looked exactly like those F9Fs I watched so long ago. I waited for it to come down, but it was circling in a warm column of air called a thermal. My friend with a camera decided to time the flight, and twenty-four minutes later it was still circling the field. Finally, it was snatched by an upper level cross wind and flew out of sight. The loss of a model that flies out of sight is always bitter sweet. On one hand, one can’t suppress the feeling of the model flying so well that it can be mistaken for the aircraft it represents. On the other hand there is always the sense of loss that such a flight entails.

I set to work that evening building another F9F, and as it frequently happens when building models, the second one flies well, but doesn’t seem to have the perfect moments of its older brother.