“I start the aggressive [6.5-G] pull into the vertical—and the aircraft explodes… Any F-100 pilot who hears a loud ‘BANG!’ automatically thinks, ‘compressor stall,’” Merrill A. “Tony” McPeak F-100 Thunderbird pilot
The F-100 was the first production aircraft in history to surpass the speed of sound in level flight, reaching 760 mph. It was developed as an upgrade to the F-86 Sabre, which saw action in the Korean War. On May 25, 1953, at Edwards Air Force Base in California, the prototype, the YF-100A, took off for its first flight. More Ds than any other series combined made up 1,274 of the 2,294 F-100s produced until production ended in 1959. In Vietnam, the Super Sabre made its combat debut and saw extensive deployment as a fighter bomber in ground-support missions that included attacking troop concentrations, bridges, and road junctions.
The F-100C was flown by the US Air Force “Thunderbird Flight Demonstration Team” from 1956 to 1964 when they switched to the F-105. But before the 1964 demonstration season, they had to change back to the F-100 (D variant) due to issues with the F-105.
According to Ted Spitzmiller’s story in Century Series: The USAF Quest for Air Supremacy 1950–1960, on October 20, 1967, a Thunderbird F–100D experienced an in-flight airframe failure while performing over Laughlin Air Force Base, which is close to Del Rio, Texas. Flying solo in position #6, the pilot was Merrill A. “Tony” McPeak, the future Chief of Staff of the Air Force. According to him (from “Tony McPeak Story”):
“…We approach the climax, the signature Bomb Burst. My job is to put ‘pigtails’ through the separating formation, doing unloaded, Max-rate vertical rolls… I start the aggressive [6.5-G] pull into the vertical, and the aircraft explodes… Any F-100 pilot who hears a loud ‘BANG!’ automatically thinks, ‘compressor stall,’ and unloads the jet to get air traveling down the intake in the right direction… SO INSTINCTIVELY, the explosion causes me to relax stick pressure to unload the airplane… [but—] That’s no compressor stall!!…
“In retrospect, the airplane had already unloaded itself, making my remedy superfluous, but there was some pilot lore at work here. No matter what else happens… fly the airplane. Forget all that stuff about lift and drag and thrust and gravity, just fly the damn airplane until the last piece stops moving. Good old 55-3520 has quit flying. But I have not.
“Now there’s fire, and I don’t mean just a little smoke. Flames fill the cockpit. I have to eject. I grab the seat handles and tug them up, firing the canopy and exposing ejection triggers on each side of the handles. I yank the triggers and immediately feel the seat catapult into the slipstream. …”
Despite having a damaged parachute, he landed safely even though he lost his helmet during the high-speed bailout. He talked to Mike Miller, Thunderbirds narrator, who said, “maybe we should leave ‘that thing, whatever it is,’ out of the show sequence.”
McPeak: “That’s when I learned I’d pulled the wings off the airplane.
“After I jumped out, my aircraft continued on a ballistic trajectory, scattering parts and equipment along the extended flight path. Most of the engine and the main fuselage section impacted about 2 miles downrange from my initial pull-up spot. All the bits and pieces landed on government soil, and there was no injury or property damage. My aircraft was destroyed—I signed a hand-receipt for $696,989—but if there is a good kind of accident, this was it. Nobody was hurt, and all the scrap metal was collected for post-game analysis.
“The F-100’s wings mate into a box at the center of the fuselage, the strongest part of the airplane. When my aircraft’s wing center box was inspected, it was found to have failed. North American Rockwell, the manufacturer, tested the box on a bend-and-stretch machine, and it broke again at an equivalent load of 6.5 G for the flight condition I was at when the wings departed.
“Later, specialists discovered considerable fatigue damage in the wing center boxes of other Thunderbird aircraft. USAF immediately put a 4 G limit on the F-100 and initiated a program to run all the aircraft through depot modification to beef up the wing center box. My accident almost certainly saved lives by revealing a serious problem in the F-100 fleet.”
From July 1964 to November 1968, the Thunderbirds flew the D series until upgrading to the F-4E Phantom II.
Century Series The USAF Quest for Air Supremacy 1950-1960 is published by Schiffer Publishing and is available to order here.
Photo by U.S. Air Force