Vought F6U Pirate The Vought F6U Pirate was the Vought company ' s first jet fighter , designed for US Navy during the mid - 1940s . Although pioneering the use of turbojet power as the first naval fighter with an afterburner and composite material construction , the aircraft proved to be underpowered and was judged unsuitable for combat . None were ever issued to operational squadrons and they were relegated to development , training and test roles before they were withdrawn from service in 1950 . Design and development . A specification was issued by the U . S . Navy ' s Bureau of Aeronautics ( BuAer ) for a single - seat , carrier - based fighter powered by a Westinghouse24C ( later J34 ) axial turbojet on 5 September 1944 . Chance Vought was awarded a contract for three V - 340 ( company designation ) prototypes on 29 December 1944 . The XF6U was a small aircraft with tricycle landing gear and with straight wings and tail surfaces . The wings were short enough that they did not need to fold . In order to fit more aircraft into crowded hangars , the nose gear could be retracted and the aircraft ' s weight would rest on a small wheel attached by the ground crew . This raised the tail up so that it could overlap the nose of the aircraft behind it . The jet engine was mounted in the rear of the fuselage and was fed by ducts in each wing root . The most unusual feature of the aircraft was its use of " Metalite " for its skin . This was made of balsa that was sandwiched between two thin sheets of aluminum . " Fabrilite " was also used for the surfaces of the vertical stabilizer and rudder ; this was similar to Metalite , but used fiberglass instead of aluminum . Two fuel tanks were fitted in the center of the fuselage . The forward tank , ahead of the wing , contained and the rear tank , . These were supplemented by two jettisonable tip tanks . The cockpit was well forward and was provided with a bubble canopy which gave the pilot good visibility . He was provided with a Mk 6 lead - computing gyro gunsight . Underneath the cockpit were four 20 mm ( 0 . 79 in ) M3 autocannon . Their 600 rounds of ammunition were carried behind the pilot . The empty casings of the two upper guns were retained in the aircraft , while those from the two lower guns were ejected overboard . After a company - wide contest to name the aircraft , the initial prototype , received the name , " Pirate " , and made its first flight on 2 October 1946 . Flight testing revealed severe aerodynamic problems , mostly caused by the airfoil section and thickness of the wing . The vertical stabilizer also had to be redesigned to smooth out the airflow at the intersection of the horizontal and vertical stabilizers . Other changes included the addition of dive brake s on the sides of the fuselage and the replacement of the Metalite panels near the engine ' s exhaust with stainless steel ones . The first XF6U - 1 prototype was powered by a Westinghouse J34 - WE - 22 turbojet with 3 , 000 lbf ( 13 . 34 kN ) thrust , one third of the weight of the aircraft . To help improve the underpowered aircraft ' s performance , the third prototype , which first flew on 10 November 1947 , was lengthened by to use a Westinghouse J34 - WE - 30 afterburning engine of 4 , 224 lbf ( 18 . 78 kN ) thrust , the first United States Navy fighter to have such a powerplant . Operational history . In 1947 , before the flight testing of the prototypes was completed , 30 production aircraft were ordered . They incorporated an ejection seat and a redesigned vertical stabilizer as well as two auxiliary fins , one towards the tip on each side of the tailplane in an attempt to improve the directional stability of the aircraft . The fuselage was lengthened to fit additional equipment and the wing had fillet s added at the rear junction with the fuselage . During the production run , the Navy decided to move the Chance Vought factory from Stratford , Connecticut to a much larger facility in Dallas , Texas which had been vacant since the end of World War II ; this badly disrupted the production of the Pirate . The airframes were built in Stratford and trucked to Dallas where government - furnished equipment , such as the engines and afterburners , were installed . The completed aircraft were then taxied around the new plant ' s airfield , but the runway was deemed too short to handle jets . The aircraft had to be disassembled and trucked to an abandoned airfield at Ardmore , Oklahoma with a runway long enough for acceptance testing . The first production F6U - 1 performed its initial flight on 29 June 1949 , and 20 of the aircraft were provided to VX - 3 , an operational evaluation squadron based at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland . The judgment from the evaluation was that the Pirate was unacceptable for operational use . Naval aviators disparagingly called the F6U the " groundhog " . On 30 October 1950 , BuAer informed Vought of the Navy ' s opinion of the Pirate in terms both bureaucratic and scathing : " The F6U - 1 had proven so sub - marginal in performance that combat utilization is not feasible . " The aircraft ended up being used primarily to develop arresting gear and barriers , but were used operationally for a short time by at least one Texas - based United States Navy Reserve squadron as they transitioned to jets . Between them , the 30 production aircraft had only a total of 945 hours of flight time , only 31 . 5 hours each . Some aircraft flew only six hours which was enough for little more than their acceptance flight and the flight to their ultimate disposition . Survivors . Although the F6U had a very short operational career , one example remains intact ( 122479 , Vought production number 2 ) and has undergone restoration by the Vought Aircraft Heritage Foundation , at the Vought plant in Grand Prairie , Texas . , the aircraft is currently at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola Florida .