When the airplane was operational—one of its unflattering nicknames was the “Beast”—those who flew and maintained the SB2C Helldiver would have said that the best place for an SB2C Helldiver was at the bottom of a lake. However, in 2010, with only a handful of surviving examples of the more than 5,100 Helldivers manufactured during World War II, the pulling of the
wreck of one of these planes out of the Otay Reservoir in California is generating much excitement around the museum, the plane destined to fill a hole in the collection created when the SB2C-5 Helldiver on loan to the museum for many years was recalled by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum for display in its new Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.
The story of this airplane begins in 1938, when with war clouds on the horizon in Europe and the Pacific, the Curtiss-Wright Corporation responded to a Navy request for proposals for a new scout bomber. As was traditionally the challenge for designers of aircraft meant to operate from a ship, the sea service pressed for increased speed, range, and payload within restrictive size and weight parameters. Curtiss-Wright’s submission was the XSB2C-1, which was eventually christened with the name “Helldiver,” one that had been used on a previous company scout bomber.
On May 15, 1939, the Navy placed an order for a single XSB2C-1, a move that came less than four months before the German invasion of Poland launched World War II and amidst a time of great expansion for the Navy. Fleet commanders were pressing for aircraft, Naval leadership responding by deciding to place production contracts for some of the new models even before the respective prototypes had first taken to the sky. Thus, on November 29, 1940, Curtiss received an order for 370 production SB2C-1 Helldivers, which represented a tremendous boost in production output for the entire company that would soon require the construction and outfitting of a new factory for Helldiver production located in Columbus, Ohio.
The plane that would roll off the assembly lines at the new plant was ready for its maiden flight on December 18, 1940. Its appearance, as described by an observer at the time, was “fairly elongated and streamlined [with a] rather blunt and stubby nose [and] high rounded fin and rudder.” Beneath the surface, the XSB2C-1 was one of the most complex carrier planes ever built up to that time, with many untried systems, most notably its hydraulics, which controlled everything from folding the wings to operating the dive brakes.
The lack of wisdom behind ordering the aircraft into production prior to its first flight became readily apparent as company test pilots put the prototype through its paces. With the original Navy specifications for the scout bomber requiring that two of them be able to fit on an aircraft carrier elevator at one time, the XSB2C-1’s fuselage was short and Curtiss-Wright engineers struggled to design a tail surface that provided longitudinal stability for the aircraft. At the same time, early flights also revealed structural problems, one of which was revealed with catastrophic results on December 21, 1941, when a wing failure during a dive test caused the crash and destruction of the XSB2C-1. The loss of the lone test aircraft, coupled with the problems associated with starting up a new factory to work on a problematic aircraft, delayed production. Thus, the SBD Dauntless for which the Helldiver was designed as a replacement shouldered the scout bombing mission, its legend solidified at the Battle of Midway.