It is but a few among the aircraft that one’s mind can easily picture, and hence the North American F-100 Super Sabre. It did not come so much as a technological wonder, but as a vehicle of boundless human narrative—the pilots who took it aloft, the technicians who maintained it, and the enthusiasts who to this day still uphold its tradition. The first American. The first supersonic speed Air Force plane to fly straight-and-level, the F-100 itself was a wonder of engineering, slicing into a new frontier of flight.
It was George S. Welch flying the YF-100A on May 25, 1953, on its first flight at Edwards Air Force Base, taking the aircraft past Mach 1.03. It was not mere austere figures–it was an American will-of-the-wisp flight during the hyper-emotional Cold War years, when speed, innovation, and technological supremacy were national security weapons.
Pig-nosed “The Hun,” the F-100 prefigured the traditional “Century Series” fighters that filled the 1950s and 1960s. Swept wing, needle nose, and massive Pratt & Whitney J57 powerplant enabled it to cruise at Mach 1.4, thanks so much more a function of range than to thrust in combat. Super Sabre served duty a couple of years before the age of supersonic flight was reached.
But the F-100 also has its speed and number heritage. It too became a close air support workhorse in its own right. The C and D close air support models were as crucial in some of the early years of the Vietnam War as they made the highest numbers of combat sorties flown by any of the war’s aerial fighters. Pilots such as MAPS Air Museum board member Ken Ramsay recall that the F-100 had flown on so many missions that it was at the heart of flying hundreds of battles.
Dangerous flight. Early test aircraft were flown with enormously unstable flight, and the notorious “Sabre Dance,” an inertial roll coupling mode of flight instability, followed. Test pilots Barty Ray Brooks, George S. Welch, and Geoffrey Dalton Stephenson were killed during testing of the airplane’s limits. They died as a consequence of redesign with distant safety considerations, e.g., yaw and pitch dampers, stabilizing, and smoothing aircraft response.
The one trait perhaps most distinctive to the F-100 is the community of individuals it leaves behind. Pilots, mechanics, volunteers, and collectors all donate hundreds of hours to bring it back to flight. To restore an F-100 is a backbreaking labor of love and takes years.
At such facilities as the Iowa Air National Guard base in Sioux City, volunteer flight crews are matched up with new mechanics so that new life may be brought to these old aircraft, so that they might all live on as living memorials to these men and women who flew and serviced them.
Museums like the Fort Worth Aviation Museum and MAPS Air Museum in Ohio uphold F-100 heritage, not just of the airplane but of pilots who operated them. Personal gear, medals, and even fragments of demonstration aircraft are displayed, the haunting proof of lives that cluster around this lovely airplane. Medal of Honor award winner Colonel George “Bud” Day and the tales of other F-100 legends put history in the viewer’s hands.
Restoration and recovery of F-100s is an achievement in itself. Consider the recent recovery of tail number N418FS in the Mojave Desert in a project that included very meticulous planning and coordination between veterans, engineers, and volunteers. With them, the jet is awesome to us, not as it stands on a museum floor but as a tribute to American determination, ingenuity, and perseverance.
To those flight crews and mechanics who flew and maintained the F-100, it is not metal and rivets but a buddy. Flight crews such as Ken Ramsay remember the love that they had for the airplane—the handling of control, the thrill in the low level, and the flightline boy esprit de corps. Every minute that restoration crews spend putting the plane back in the air is a respect and perpetuation of that kind of tradition.
The F-100 Super Sabre’s legacy is more than gunpowder and brute speed. It’s a legacy of sacrifice, of pioneering, and of a family bound together by love of history. In restored planes, in museum exhibits, and in memory, “The Hun” soars—into the air—not into heaven, but into those which contain its impossibly untamed heritage.
