Able Dog: Was the AD Skyraider the Best Attack Bomber Ever Built?

By E. R. Johnson | Aviation History  | 5 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

In truth, Heinemann wasn’t wholly unprepared. He and his top staff members, Leo Devlin and Gene Root, had for several weeks been sketching out ideas for a totally new design. Their latest conception had virtually nothing in common with the earlier BTD. Though using the same Wright R-3350 power
plant, it was a far simpler design, featuring a conventional tailwheel layout and straight-tapered, low-mounted wings beneath which all ordnance would be carried on external racks. For dive-bombing, rather than the common split-flap arrangement, the design called for three board-type speed brakes, which extended from the fuselage sides and belly. Gun armament consisted of two wing-mounted 20mm cannons.

After only a few hours’ sleep, Heinemann, Devlin and Root left the hotel early, giving themselves extra time to have blueprints made from the drawings. The presentation was over by late morning, and the three men were told to keep their seats and wait. By noon they got an answer: Douglas was authorized to cancel the BTD program and fund construction of 25 preproduction examples of the proposed model, the XBT2D-1. BuAer gave them exactly nine months to get the plane in the air. When Heinemann returned to the El Segundo plant, his instructions to his staff and employees were terse: “Nothing must interfere with the completion of this aircraft on schedule.”

Despite the successful conclusion of the BuAer meeting, Heinemann was conscious of the fact that he had committed his company to a risky game of catch-up. The Curtiss and Kaiser-Fleetwings prototypes were falling behind schedule, but Martin, with B-26 production winding down, was moving fast, and, indeed, got its R-4360-powered XBTM-1 flying by late August 1944. Martin’s plane, named the Mauler, had thus far achieved impressive performance—a maximum speed of 367 mph combined with the ability to lift a phenomenal payload of 8,500 pounds—but also exhibited unacceptable handling characteristics that would oblige the company to return it to the factory for time-consuming modifications. Even with its flaws, BuAer gave Martin a war­time order for 750 BTM-1s in hopes the major problems could be resolved before the plane was actually tooled for production.

The Mauler’s delays gave Douglas exactly what it needed most—a little more time. On March 19, 1945—almost nine months to the day from Heinemann’s meeting in Wash­ington—the first XBT2D-1 lifted off the runway at El Segundo. Such was the rush that the plane had flown with landing gear struts and wheels borrowed from a Vought Corsair and an older version of the R-3350 engine that didn’t produce the specified power. Even so, the XBT2D-1’s basic design proved to be excellent in every way: Empty weight was 10,093 pounds (4,200 pounds less than Martin’s XBTM-1), maximum payload was 7,400 pounds (73 percent of empty weight compared to the XBTM-1’s 59 percent) and flight trials indicated above-average handling qualities. Its 374 mph top speed was similar, but more notably, the XBT2D-1 was less complex overall, and thus cheaper to build and easier to maintain. Two months after the plane flew, BuAer was sufficiently impressed with Douglas’ efforts to award a wartime order for 548 BT2D-1s. The Curtiss XBTC-1 and the Kaiser-Fleetwings XBTK-1 both flew in the spring of 1945, but no orders were forthcoming. Heinemann’s gambit had so far paid off.

The huge government cutbacks that followed the end of World War II resulted in the Douglas contract being reduced to 277 BT2Ds and Martin’s to 149 BTMs. Further dampening their prospects was the latest notion that both designs were fast becoming obsolete. Influenced by recent technological advances, BuAer officials believed that the next generation of naval attack aircraft would be jet-propelled; therefore, BT2Ds and BTMs would be limited to their initial production batches and serve only until replaced by jets.

Development of both types continued as planned, and in the spring of 1946 BT2D and BTM preproduction models were delivered to the Naval Air Test Center (NATC) for evaluation. Around the same time, the BT designation was dropped in favor of “A,” for attack, so that the BT2D-1 became the AD-1 and the BTM-1 the AM-1. Earlier, Heinemann and his staff had provisionally named their new plane the Dauntless II (after the SBD), but in line with the newer Douglas policy of giving planes names preceded by “sky,” the AD-1 was officially christened Skyraider.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to

Tags: Aerial Combat, Aircraft, Flight Technology, Korean War, Military Technology, Vietnam War

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.