Douglas A-3 Skywarrior
The Douglas A-3 Skywarrior is a twin-jet carrier-based bomber built by the Douglas Aircraft Company, first flown on 28 October 1952 and in U.S. Navy service from 1956 to 1991. Designed under Ed Heinemann as the Navy's carrier-based nuclear strike aircraft, it was the largest and heaviest aircraft ever designed for regular operation from an aircraft carrier, and its crews nicknamed it "the Whale". Douglas built 282. When ballistic-missile submarines took over the nuclear deterrent in the early 1960s, Skywarriors were converted in numbers to tankers and to electronic-warfare and photographic-reconnaissance aircraft, and served as trainers and testbeds; those second careers carried the type through the Vietnam War to the 1991 Gulf War, and contractor-operated testbeds flew on until 2011.
Why It Mattered
The Skywarrior began with a 1947 U.S. Navy requirement for a carrier-based strategic attack bomber. Douglas's design team, led by Ed Heinemann, produced an aircraft bigger and heavier than any designed before it for regular operation from an aircraft carrier. Its bulk earned it the fleet nickname "the Whale". It was built as a strategic nuclear bomber, and for a time it was the Navy's critical element in the United States nuclear deterrent. When effective ballistic missiles pushed that mission aside in the early 1960s, the type did not fade with it: the airframe proved adaptable enough to stay in service for three more decades.
Design Notes
Where rival proposals aimed at a maximum take-off weight of 100,000 pounds, Douglas held its design to 68,000 pounds, light enough for the Navy's existing Midway-class carriers. Weight was cut wherever it could be, and the most serious cut was the ejection seats: the three crew escaped through a chute in the fuselage floor, and read the designation A3D as "All Three Dead". The prototype flew with Westinghouse J40 engines, but the J40 failed, and production aircraft received Pratt & Whitney J57 turbojets in underwing nacelles. Its wing was swept at 36 degrees; for stowage below deck the wings folded outboard of the engines and the fin folded to starboard. Weapons were carried internally, in a fuselage bomb bay that could hold up to 12,000 pounds of weaponry, nuclear weapons among them. Production ceased in 1961; 282 aircraft had been built.
Operational History
The Skywarrior entered squadron service with the U.S. Navy on 31 March 1956, joining the heavy attack squadrons in the nuclear strike role. Within months it was showing its reach: on 31 July 1956 one flew 3,200 miles nonstop, from Hawaii to New Mexico, in five hours and forty minutes. In 1957 it made its first extended deployment, aboard Forrestal, the country's first supercarrier. Redesignated A-3 in the 1962 designation overhaul, the bomber was by then yielding its deterrent mission to the Polaris missile submarines. A-3Bs did fly conventional bombing and mine-laying missions over Vietnam between 1964 and 1967. The conversions served longer: KA-3B in-flight-refuelling tankers and EKA-3Bs, which combined tanker and electronic-countermeasures work, both flew in the Vietnam War, and the KA-3Bs later served with the Naval Reserve. RA-3Bs flew photographic reconnaissance, while EA-3Bs flew electronic reconnaissance from carrier decks and from shore, supplementing the larger Lockheed EP-3. The EA-3B was the longest-serving version, still operational into the 1980s, and it was still in Navy service when the type took part in the Gulf War in 1991.
Afterlife
The last U.S. Navy Skywarriors left service on 27 September 1991. Navy research and test units at Point Mugu and China Lake tried to keep their test aircraft, but the plan failed and the retirement stood. Unconverted bombers had gone earlier: aircraft that were never converted to special-mission work were sent to storage at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, the "Boneyard", in the 1960s. Civilian contractors had flown the type as a testbed for years, Hughes among them, and after the Navy retirement Raytheon's operation continued to fly A-3s from Van Nuys Airport in California. The final flight came on 30 June 2011, when the last flyable EA-3B arrived at Naval Air Station Pensacola for display at the National Naval Aviation Museum. Other survivors are on display at museums around the United States; the Pima Air & Space Museum at Tucson, for example, holds a YEA-3A electronic-countermeasures conversion.