HISTORY

• On New Year's Day, 1945, the navy ordered 100 straight-wing jet fighters from North American Aviation. The new aircraft was designated FJ-1 Fury. The Fury's performance was disappointing and the contract was cancelled after only 30 aircraft were delivered.
• The North American engineers literally went back to the drawing board. They slimmed down the FJ-1's portly fuselage and, using data captured from the Germans at the end of World War II, added swept wings and tail surfaces. The result was the Air Force's classic F-86 Saber. When the Korean War broke out in 1950 the Navy's front-line jet fighters, the F9F Panther and F2H Banshee, were outperformed by the MiG 15. As a result, the navy asked North American to build a carrier-based variant of the F-86. The resulting aircraft, the FJ-2, was essentially an F-86E with a lengthened nose gear strut, an arrester hook and attach points for a catapult bridle.
• Some 200 FJ-2's were built; all were delivered to the Marine Corps. The museum's Fury is an FJ-3, one of 538 built at North American's Columbus, Ohio plant. The FJ-3 featured an enlarged air inlet for its Wright engine. FJ-3s were delivered between September 1954 and August 1956. Some 80 aircraft were modified to carry the new AIM-9 Sidewinder heat-seeking missile. Most Furies were retrofitted with an in-flight refueling probe. A subsequent ground attack version, the FJ-4, was capable of carrying a nuclear weapon. Furies served into the early 1960s, and although they flew combat air patrols during the 1958 Lebanon Crisis, no Fury ever saw combat and none ever served with a foreign power.
  
  
  

SPECIFICATIONS