SKYHAWK FIRST FLIGHT = 22-JUNE-1954
On June 12, 1952, the U.S. Navy contracted with Douglas Aircraft Company of
El Segundo, California, to build one prototype XA4D-1 Skyhawk attack aircraft.
The first Skyhawk flight, flown by Douglas test pilot Robert Rahn,
took place at Edwards Air Force Base, California, on June 22, 1954.
Literally "hand built," XA4D-1, BuNo 137812, was the first of an eventual
2,960 Skyhawks to roll off the Douglas Aircraft Company assembly line. Powered
by a Curtiss-Wright J65-W-16A engine, it had a one-piece windscreen, no tailhook
or refueling probe, and the "sugar scoop" exhaust baffle was not yet conceived.
| "Douglas Test Division" Photo Page. |
"History of the Last A-4 Built" Page. |
Major Skyhawk Variants.
"Why A-4s Rule the Furball!"
"There's hardly a combat mission that the A-4 Skyhawk hasn't flown, making it, in its new role, one tough old bird.
Every single person I've ever fought in one of these airplanes has died the first time I fought him.
Every... single...one." Randy Clark brandishes a model of the A-4 Skyhawk and tells me how
the half-century-old design can whup far newer aircraft: F/A-18 Hornets, F-14 Tomcats-maybe
someday even F/A-22 Raptors and F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.
I need no convincing. In the 1970s, I'd flown in an A-4 variant, the two-seat TA-4J,
at the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School at Maryland's Patuxent River base. As an engineering student
learning how to size up a fighter's combat performance, I'd experienced first-hand how this
machine could out-hassle pretty well anything in the sky."
The Hotrod Squad by Graham Chandler
"Why A-4s Rule the Furball!"
June/July 2004 Issue of Air and Space Magazine
|
|