An Aviator Remembers
By 1945, the production lines creating naval aircraft and the aviators trained to fly them were in full swing. Day and night, under the guiding hands of tens of thousands of workers, among them the celebrated "Rosie the Riveter," aircraft rolled out of factories, weapons in the "Arsenal of Democracy" that was America during the war years. Such was the enormity of the U.S. manufacturing effort that by 1945 the Navy possessed 81,990 aircraft in its inventory, almost 12 times the number on hand in 1941. Similarly, from training centers at Corpus Christi and Pensacola thousands of young men with new shiny gold wings on their uniforms reported for operational training before joining squadrons that in many instances took them overseas.
Yet, not all aviators' destinies lay in the Pacific or Atlantic, a great number remaining stateside as instructors or test pilots. Others received orders to report for duty as ferry pilots responsible for evaluating factory fresh aircraft and delivering them to their first fleet squadrons. Among these squadrons was Air Ferry Squadron (VRF) 1 based at Naval Air Station (NAS) Floyd Bennett Field, New York. Outside of the great fleet and training concentration centers, the northeast was a hotbed of naval aircraft, with VRF-1 not having to travel very far to climb into the cockpits of the Navy's newest airplanes. The Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation plant in Bethpage, New York, was home to F6F Hellcats and F7F Tigercats, Eastern Aircraft factories in New Jersey produced FM Wildcats and TBM Avengers, and at Stratford, Connecticut, F4U Corsairs, the "Bent Wing Birds," took shape. "My assignment was to go to the various companies and pick up aircraft as they rolled off the assembly lines, test them according to Navy specifications and then ferry them to various destinations for combat," recalled John Oberto of Seattle, Washington, a young lieutenant (junior grade) at the time. "We tested all the functions, including the machine guns. If an aircraft passed all test tests, it was accepted by the Navy. If an aircraft had a problem, we would complete a discrepancy report and return the plane to the manufacturer so corrections could be made."
In this line of work, Oberto had little time to form an attachment to any one aircraft, for rarely did he fly one more than once, the pages of his log book recording scores of different bureau numbers. In March 1945, during just four days of flying, he logged time in 12 different airplanes, averaging five flights per day. On one of those days he climbed into the cockpit of F7F-3 Hellcat (Bureau Number 80373), which now sits on the floor of the museum. His flight, the last of 6 hops on March 26th, lasted 1.5 hours during which he delivered the plane from the Grumman plant in Bethpage to Floyd Bennett Field. That was the last time he ever saw it, but over six decades later tens of thousands of people each year walk past the airplane he delivered that day as it sits on display in the museum’s west wing.
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Ironically, the Navy ordered both the F6F Hellcat and the F7F Tigercat into production on the same day in 1941, but by the time the prototype for the latter aircraft made its first flight in November 1943, the F6F was already in combat in the Pacific. The reason this came to pass was that the F7F was unlike any Navy fighter previously placed in large-scale production, a twin-engine design with a pointed, streamlined nose that sat perched on tricycle landing gear. This contrasted sharply in appearance with the tail-dragger single-engine fighters of the day, their stub noses housing an engine.
The aircraft represented an idea born during 1938 in response to a Navy proposal for the next generation of carrier fighter planes capable of speeds exceeding 300 m.p.h. To reach that figure, officers in the Bureau of Aeronautics included specifications for twin-engine designs. Among those submitted was one from Grumman. Designated the XF5F-1 Skyrocket, the aircraft was built around Wright R-1820 engines, which were fitted on the wing that attached to the Skyrocket’s nose. Not only revolutionary in appearance, the airplane was also the first-of-its-kind for Grumman in that it was the company’s first aircraft to be fitted with folding wings. Once in the air, the XF5F-1 was plagued by mechanical maladies and unfavorable visibility, the death knell for any hope of entering production coming when its competitor, Vought’s F4U Corsair, exceeded 400 m.p.h.
Pictured on this page, the museum's F7F-3 Tigercat on display and an early wind tunnel model of the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation design that developed into the F7F Tigercat.