New Planes

"Everybody who sees an airplane flying overhead," Assistant Navy Secretary for Air Jack Floberg once said, "thinks it's an Air Force plane." This week, to prove that naval aviation is in the game too, Floberg went on TV with models of four secret new planes the Navy had been keeping under wraps. All four, said Floberg, had been tested and ordered into production. The planes:

P: Grumman's F9F6 "Cougar," a much faster, swept-wing version of the old Grumman Panther now with the fleet.

P: North American's FJ-2 "Fury," another swept-wing jet fighter capable of near sonic speeds. An older sister, the FJ-1, first flown in 1946, was taken over by the Air Force, and became the F-86 Sabre jet of Korean fame.

P: Douglas' A3D (unnamed), a swift twin-jet attack bomber which can operate from carriers, drop anything from torpedoes to tactical A-bombs.

P: Bell's HSL helicopter, a huge, tandem-rotored affair powered by a 2,400 h.p. engine and carrying a crew of four. The new whirlybird's job will be to protect U.S. convoys from enemy attack by hovering over the ocean, dunking a special sonar buoy into the water to listen for subs.

Floberg also showed his audience two more new shipborne jets in production--a bat-winged interceptor called the Douglas F4D "Skyray," and a needle-nosed fighter named the McDonnell F3H. "Demon"--and announced that all six planes would be on duty with the fleet within a few years.

The new planes would give Navy air a much-needed shot in the arm. Today the Navy has only a thin crust of modern planes, and too many of its squadrons still fly obsolete World War II models. Current production is so slow that it cannot even make up the deficit in Korean losses, training accidents, and normal wear & tear. The situation is so bad, said Floberg, that the Navy actually has 1,000 planes fewer than it did 20 months ago when the Korean war began.

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