Seventy years ago today, on March 25, 1955, the Vought F-8 Crusader roared into the skies for the first time, marking the beginning of an illustrious career. Designed in response to the U.S. Navy ...

Vought came up with the F-8 Crusader, which was odd in that it featured high-mounted wings, set atop the fuselage. The new jet was built around a single Pratt & Whitney J57 turbojet engine.

Chance Vought even proposed mounting a rocket motor ... writes Barrett Tillman in his book MiG Master: The Story of the F-8 Crusader. “They were also engaged in sonic-boom intensity studies ...

Navy personnel referred to the F-8 as "Vought's Last Chance," since the Vought ... It was worth the sacrifices though because the Crusader was a total beast. With unit names like the 'Swordsmen ...

But the top result in a Google search for that phrase is the Wikipedia page for a six-decade-old jet fighter, the Vought F-8 Crusader. Adopted by the U.S. Navy in 1957, this single-engine ...

Rather than building a new plane entirely from scratch, NASA chose to convert an existing airframe — a Vought F-8A Crusader obtained ... efficiency of the F-8 by as much as 15 percent and ...

Adopted by the U.S. Navy in 1957, the Vought F-8 Crusader was a single-engine, 1,000 mph dogfighter that downed 19 MiGs during the Vietnam War and served as an accurate, deadly strafer.

In the end, Dallas-based Vought Aircraft Industries Inc. - once a part of industrial giant LTV Corp. - wasn't big enough. "Scale means a lot in this industry," Vought chief executive Elmer Doty ...

the Vought F-8 has been one of the few carrier-based fighters that could outperform most land-based counterparts. Being the first genuinely supersonic naval aircraft, the Crusader, was a single ...

The pair of F-8 Crusaders — called “candy stripers ... South Carolina. Two Vought F-8C Crusader fighters of U.S. Marine Corps fighter squadron VMF-333 Fighting Shamrocks.U.S. Navy photo ...

In the summer of 1959, Marine Corps Lt. Col. William Rankin was flying his Vought F-8 Crusader on a routine mission off the coast of the Carolinas. Rankin and his wingman were soaring at 47,000 ...