Grumman f3f 2

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Title: 1990.130.001

Format: jpeg

Date: 20/07/2010

Description: Right Side View
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990.130.001] Aircraft - 'F3F-2 Aircraft, Bureau Number 0976'

F3F-2 Aircraft, Bureau Number 0976

Accession Number 1990.130.001Accession Date 04/04/1990

Creator Creator Creator RoleManufacturer

Date Created 1937

Object Desciption The museum's F3F-2 was assigned to the Marine Corps at Quantico, Virginia, on 21 December 1937. Serving briefly with Aircraft One (laterMarine Fighting Squadron (VMF) 1), the it soon made its way westward, joining VMF-2 at Naval Air Station (NAS) San Diego on 17 January 1938.

Filling the ranks of this squadron were men destined for greatness in World War II, including Medal of Honor recipients Henry T. Elrod and Bob

Galer. The museum's aircraft spent over two years with this squadron, including their stint performing flying sequences for the movie FlightCommand (though it isn't known whether the aircraft flew for the cameras). Eventually, it wore the numbers 2-MF-16 and was assigned to a

young lieutenant named Milo Haines. As was the case while operating aboard ship, rare was it that pilots flew their assigned aircraft and such

was the case on 29 August 1940, when 1st Lieutenant Bob Galer took the controls of the aircraft to conduct carrier qualification on boardSaratoga (CV 3) off the coast of California. On approach for one landing he switched fuel tanks only to find that his engine quit, leaving him no

choice but to ditch the aircraft. He survived the water landing and was pulled from the water, but the aircraft sank to the depths of the Pacific.

In June 1989 Captain Ed McKellar, USN (Ret.), then the director of the San Diego Aerospace Museum, called National Museum of Naval Aviation

Director, Captain Bob Rasmussen, USN (Ret.), to inform him that at that moment he was looking at a video of a newly discovered Grumman F3F,

the very aircraft Galer had ditched nearly half a century earlier, which the Navy deep submergence vehicle Turtle had uninten tionally happened

upon while searching for another crashed aircraft off the coast of Del Mar, California "It's for real", he insisted, "and it is pretty much intact ingood shape. There is only one little problem and that is the 1,800 of so feet of salt water that sits on top of the aircraft."

Nine months pass with only dead ends in the museum's efforts to come up with the wherewithal to go after this prize. Then a call comes from

Vice Admiral Jack Fetterman, Commander Naval Air Forces, Pacific Fleet offering the museum the opportunity to tag on to the recovery operation

of a UH-1 that had crashed off San Diego. The museum gathered the funds necessary to support its end of the operation and made plans withthe Navy's Superintendent of Salvage. USNS Naragansett set sail from North Island on 5 April 1990, and a short time later she was over the

reported crash site with the ROV in the water searching for the rare bird. The Superintendent of Salvage point man for the operation, Lee

Wolford, knew exactly where the F3F was reported to be, yet it was not there! However, a little debris and an 800-foot trench along the bottomcoupled with a soft sonar contact soon led the searchers to the prize. To their consternation what was originally a near pristine aircraft was now a

tangled mass of wreckage. The fuselage, less the firewall forward, was pretty much intact as were the port wings and empennage, but the

starboard wings were a mess. What happened was anyone's guess. The carefully devised plans to lift a mostly undamaged and intact upright

aircraft were now unusable and a quick scramble for a new operations plan led us to trying to hook on to the left main landing gear (the onlyhard point accessible)as the sole lifting point and trust that Grumman Iron Works was true to its name when it built the F3F.
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After four hours and some intricate maneuvers by the salvage team, they hooked up to the aircraft and a strain was put on the lift. A fewminutes later they knew they had something substantial on the hook, but how much of the aircraft it exactly was remained a mystery, at least for

a while. A little over an hour of anxiety later flood lights illuminated the F3F, crushed wings and all, just barely submerged and dangling by that

one fragile looking landing gear. Minutes later she was aboard. Everything was there except the firewall forward, some bits and pieces of thestarboard wing, tail feathers and canopy, all of which were badly damaged. Soon, the ship was underway for North Island, and she did not ar rive

until the darkness of early morning. Even at that hour, the ship and her rare cargo had a welcoming committee, and a very special one at that in

the person of Bob Galer, the pilot who had flown the F3F into the drink nearly fifty years earlier.

Hours later the aircraft was off loaded and al ready being washed and stabilized at Naval Aviation Depot North Island, where ironically it had

undergone overhaul fifty-one years earlier. Once this was completed, it was delivered to the San Diego Aerospace Museum for restoration. Just

short of three years later the meticulously restored F3F was delivered (by the Blue AngelsFat Albert) to the museum, a very happy ending to a

complex operation that added a prime example of naval aviation to the museum's collection. It is the only original F3F, not remanufactured fromthe ground up, that you will find anywhere today.

Postscript: When Ed McKellar told Bob Galer that the plane that he put into the drink had been located, Bob asked, "Which one?" Apparently he

had ditched more than one (he actually was shot down four times), but it did not seem to affect his career. He went on to shoot down 13Japanese aircraft, receive the Medal of Honor for heroism at Guadalcanal, and retire as a brigadier general in the Marine Corps. He was blamed

for the crash because he allegedly switched to a dry tank, but this also was not career shattering. Ironically, when the San Diego Aerospace

Museum restoration team disassembled the aircraft they discovered that 1st Lt Galer had selected the correct tank after all, but because of faulty

installation of the valve, the selector handle did not align with the indicated tank. Thus concluded what may be the longest resolution of anaircraft accident on Navy record.

Notes Destined to be the last biplane fighter operated in front-line service by the U.S. Navy, the F3F rolled out of the Grumman Aircraft EngineeringCorporation factory beginning in 1935. The company's successor to the F2F, which had stability problems and a nagging tendency to spin, theF3F was typical of the modest prewar aircraft procurement of the U.S. Navy with only 169 production aircraft produced in four years, a number

that belied the lasting impact the F3F had on naval aviation in the critical years leading up to World War II.

Its introduction to fleet service coincided with the beginning of the Naval Aviation Cadet program, which brought scores of young men into the

ranks of naval aviation, those joining U.S. Naval Academy graduates assigned to fleet fighter squadrons and thus F3F cockpits destined to makelasting impacts in combat during the early-1940s. In addition, following retirement from fleet service in May 1941, surviving F3Fs were largely

assigned as advanced trainers at Naval Air Station (NAS) Miami, Florida, the breeding ground for carrier fighter pilots, thus continuing to providethe air-to-air combat foundations for many a wartime naval aviator.

Specifications for the F3F-2

Manufacturer: Grumman Aircraft Engineering CorporationDimensions: Length: 24 ft., 6 in.; Height: 11 ft., 1 in.; Wingspan: 34 ft., 6 in.

Weights: Empty: 3,076 lb.; Gross: 4,655 lb.Power plant: One 750 hp Wright R-1820-F engine

Performance: Maximum Speed: 207 M.P.H.; Service Ceiling: 22,400 ft.; Range: 365 miles

Armament: Two fixed forward-firing .30-in. guns

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Crew: Pilot

Multimedia
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Title: Cockpit of F3F-2

Format: jpeg

Date: 2008

Description: View of the fuselage area around the cockpit of the F3F-2 on display in the museum.
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Title: Instrument Panel of F3F-2

Format: jpeg

Date: 2008

Description: Instrument panel of the F3F-2 on display in the museum.

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Title: Tail View of F3F-2

Format: jpeg

Date: 2008

Description: Port three-quarter aft view of F3F-2 on display.

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Title: Overhead View of F3F-2

Format: jpeg

Date: 2008

Description: Overhead view showing the engine and cowling of the museum's F3F-2.

Available Sizes:1050x703 (100%)

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Title: Side View of F3F-2 on Display

Format: jpeg

Date: 2008

Description: Starboard side view of the museum's F3F-2 on display.

Grumman f3f 2

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