Sea Dart

If Jules Verne had invented an airplane, it would look like the Convair F2Y Sea Dart.  It’s easy to imagine this small, delta-winged fighter being carried in a water-tight hangar on the Nautilus, ready to launch against any threatening krakens or the Loch Ness Monster.  It is less easy to imagine why the Navy thought they needed this aircraft.  By the end of WWII the US Navy’s fleet of aircraft carriers included two new Midway-class ships (with a third on the way), seventeen Essex-class vessels and a slew of light escort carriers with the first super carrier, the USS United States, on the drawing board.  The aircraft carrier’s dominant role in the battle of the Pacific and the often unsung work of escort carriers in the Atlantic clearly showed the way forward for naval and other military planners.

Or did it?  The Atomic Age brought with it a great deal of uncertainty and argument over exactly what types of weapons and delivery systems would be needed to fight and win the next war, and as a result there were many unusual defense programs that were pursued well beyond the drawing board.  Despite the sometimes bizarre results, these projects were aimed at solving real problems such has how to provide fighter escorts for long-range bombers and how to more safely operate high-speed jet aircraft from ships.  The recognized vulnerability of the aircraft carrier combined with uncertainty fueled by rapid technological advancement must have made the concept of a seaplane fighter tethered to neither a carrier nor a land base an attractive concept.  With the cancellation of the United States only five days after its keel was laid, and the continuing rancor over which branch of the service owned the role of delivering nuclear weapons, the Navy also found it prudent to pursue the concept of a large, fast seaplane bomber capable of delivering a nuclear bomb over long distances.  This resulted in the Martin P6M Seamaster, whose dispersed operating areas might have been protected by its Convair cousin, the Sea Dart.

The Sea Dart began life as Convair’s entry into a 1948 competition for development of an interceptor aircraft.  By 1951 a contract was issued and the first aircraft flew from San Diego Bay on January 14th, 1953.  (Note that by the time the first flight was made, the position of the aircraft carrier was secure and the keels had been laid on the first modern super carriers, the USS Forrestal and USS Saratoga.)  The Sea Dart featured the delta wing that Convair is now well known for, being a feature on most of its post-war designs, and high mounted intakes to avoid water spray and feed a pair of Westinghouse J46 turbojet engines.  Like all other designs dependant on Westinghouse power, the Sea Dart was eventually equipped with alternate engines and suffered from lack of power throughout its lifetime.  Despite this, the F2Y did achieve supersonic speed in a shallow dive.  Sadly, on the 4th of November, 1954, a Sea Dart flown by Convair test pilot Charles Richbourg disintegrated in flight while performing a demonstration for Navy officials and reporters.  By this time, serious interest in the seaplane fighter concept had waned although the program continued until 1957 for its research value.

Ironically, neither nuclear-armed seaplanes nor carrier-borne nuclear strike aircraft–the subject of so much political infighting in the late 1940s–would form the third leg of America’s nuclear triad–the ideal tool for that job emerged as the Polaris-armed nuclear submarine.

For further reading, I recommend Convair Deltas by Bill Yenne.  It contains a short section on the Sea Dart and will give you a great survey of all of Convair’s delta-winged projects.