"America's Manned Missile - the F-101" Topic

America's Manned Missile – The F-101 Voodoo.

Originally designed as a bomber escort, it morphed into a supersonic nuclear fighter-bomber once the Russians developed nuclear weapons, and then quickly got tapped to be the premier nuclear-missile armed interceptor, since the latter were deemed to be much more important than strategic bomber escorts.

The F-101B Voodoo was integrated with the American SAGE air defense system, and ground controllers could direct and/or directly control the jets to the locations needed to intercept Russian strategic bombers intruding into Canadian or US-controlled airspace.

The F-101Bs were armed with Genie nuclear-tipped, unguided, short-range rockets.

With a speed of almost Mach 2, it was one of the fastest aircraft of the late 1950s and early 1960s and set a number of performance records of the day.

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Here's more info on the Genie, rocket it carried to knock down Soviet bombers:

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There's a Voodoo mounted on a base outside of the USAF Reserve offices near Joint Base Lewis McChord. It's such a cool plane.

Neat.

Thanks for sharing.

I was not aware of that.

It is a great looking aircraft, and apparently a "wonder-weapon" of its time with such incredible performance AND such high-tech innovations as a working datalink, internal missile/rocket storage, etc..

The forerunner to it (F-88 Voodoo) was on the drawing boards immediately after WWII, which is also remarkable – 1946 design requirements established, 1947 design completed, and in 1948 the first aircraft flew.

Really remarkable given today's 2 – 3+ decades to bring a new type of military aircraft from initial design to production variant – F-35 and V-22 Osprey.

As a teen in the '70s I attended a few airshows and the Vodoo was the loudest thing I ever heard.

Never heard one of those, but the Concorde supersonic jetliner was impressively long at takeoff.

I recall the Recon version from my time 70-74. Very loud, very interesting aircraft taking off on burners but not as bad on your hearing as compared to a Vulcan spooling up and as I recall, when they were water balancing the engines on Looking Glass aircraft, that was fairly loud as well. Not that the SP's on or near the flight line had ear protection in the early 70's.

Thanks for posting. There is one in a park near where I live. I will have to give it a visit soon.