Grumman F8F Bearcat
The Grumman F8F Bearcat was an American single-engine carrier fighter, Grumman's last piston-engined fighter, built as the successor to the F6F Hellcat. Grumman designed it around climb: a smaller, lighter airframe than the Hellcat's, wrapped around a Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp, so it could rise quickly to meet attackers. It first flew in August 1944 and its first squadron was operational in May 1945, but the Second World War ended before it saw combat in American service. Grumman built 1,265 before production ended in 1949. The Bearcat fought later with France in Indochina and served with Thailand and South Vietnam, then found lasting fame as an air racer: modified Bearcats broke the piston-engine speed record and dominated racing at Reno.
Why It Mattered
The Bearcat was Grumman's last piston-engined fighter, designed late in the Second World War as the successor to the F6F Hellcat in the United States Navy's carrier fleet. Its design began with a conversation: in 1942, veteran Wildcat pilots told Grumman's vice president that the one quality a new fighter needed above all was a superior climb rate, and that demand became the focus of the whole design. Grumman answered with a fighter smaller and lighter than the Hellcat but faster, praised from the start for how quickly it climbed and how well it manoeuvred. The first squadron was operational in May 1945 — too late: the war ended before the Bearcat saw combat in American service. It remains, in Vintage Aviation News' judgement, one of the finest naval fighters ever built, a piston-engined peak reached just as jets arrived to displace it.
Design Notes
Grumman began development in late 1943, under the company designation G-58, and the prototype was ordered that November. It flew on 21 August 1944, only nine months later. The recipe was a big engine in a small airframe: a Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp, in the F8F-2 the 2,250-horsepower -30W version, wrapped in a structure kept as light as carrier duty allowed. The payoff was climb: in 1946 a production Bearcat set a climb record at 6,383 feet per minute, and the mark stood until a jet fighter broke it in 1956. The F8F-2's armament was four 20 mm cannon, supplemented by rockets and up to 1,000 lb of bombs.
Operational History
Production aircraft reached the Navy from February 1945, and VF-19, the first squadron, was operational by 21 May 1945. Japan surrendered that August, and the Bearcat never saw combat in American service during the Second World War. Its real career was postwar: the Bearcat became a key Navy and Marine Corps fighter, equipping twenty-four Navy fighter squadrons. In August 1946 the Blue Angels, the Navy's demonstration team, converted to the Bearcat and introduced the famous diamond formation. But jets were already taking over: the Panther and the Banshee replaced it in front-line service, and by the Korean War the Bearcat was mostly kept in the United States as a trainer. Grumman built 1,265 Bearcats before production ended in 1949, and the last American examples were withdrawn in 1952. The combat the type had missed in 1945 came abroad instead: French Bearcats fought in the First Indochina War, used successfully as fighter-bombers in a ground-attack role. Surviving French aircraft were handed to the Republic of Vietnam Air Force, and the Royal Thai Air Force also flew Bearcats bought from the Navy.
Afterlife
Surplus Bearcats were powerful, available and cheap, and their second career was air racing. From 1965 the Unlimited class at Reno was dominated by Bearcats flown by Darryl Greenamyer. His racer Conquest I, its wings clipped and fitted with a Skyraider propeller, won the Unlimited championship six times and on 16 August 1969 broke the thirty-year-old speed record for piston-engined aircraft, reaching 483 mph. Greenamyer donated the aircraft to the Smithsonian in 1977, and it is on display today at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia. The other great Bearcat racer, Lyle Shelton's Rare Bear, was rebuilt from a wreck that had sat in two pieces in Indiana for six years, around a larger Wright R-3350 in place of the original R-2800. Smithsonian Magazine records that Rare Bear holds the three-kilometre speed record at 528.33 mph, making it, in the magazine's judgement, the fastest piston-powered, propeller-driven aircraft in the world. A little over a dozen Bearcats still fly, some restored to military configuration and others as modified racers, and Planes of Fame flies an example at Chino assembled from parts of several aircraft around the fuselage of a 1947 civilian G-58A.