The F8F Bearcat: What Might Have Beeh

THE F8F BEARCAT
What Might Have Been

Barrett Tillman
Aviation students and enthusiasts often debate which was the finest fighter aircraft of World War II. The usual candidates are America’s P-51 Mustang, Britain’s Supermarine Spitfire, and Germany’s jet-propelled Messerschmitt 262. Each has a claim to the title among aircraft committed to combat.

A far smaller sample involves impressive aircraft that arrived too late to fly combat missions. These include the Army Air Force’s P-80 Shooting Star jet and the U.S. Navy’s spectacular F8F Bearcat carrier-based fighter.

First flown in August 1944—one year before VJ Day—the Bearcat was a pure fighter-interceptor with exceptional speed and rocket-like rate of climb. In fact, it could outclimb most early jets. The first F8F squadron received its new fighters in May 1945 and was headed for the Pacific when Tokyo surrendered. Therefore, with end of the war, barely 1,200 were manufactured, and the type’s only combat occurred in the obscure backwater of French Indochina during the 1950s.

With a 2,200-horsepower engine in an airframe smaller than the F4F Wildcat’s, the F8F was a potential world beater. But its primary arena was the post-war air racing community, and in 1969 a modified Bearcat took the world’s piston-aircraft speed record from a Messerschmitt prototype that had clinched the record 30 years earlier.

This article provides a rare look at one of aviation history’s greatest “might-have-been” subjects of all time.