Well Slung

In the shortening days and lengthening shadows of 2022’s high-summer, a CH-47 Chinook from the B/171 Aviation Regiment assigned to the Iowa National Guard safely delivered an historic F-80 fighter jet to the Air National Guard paint facility in Sioux City. There, the venerable aircraft will be repainted in the livery of the 174th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, the predecessor of Sioux City’s 185th Air Refueling Wing.

The F-80 was hoisted from a static display in Des Moines before making a leisurely flight across the state at a velocity a good deal slower than its own stall-speed.

First flown in 1944, Lockheed’s F-80 Shooting Star was arguably the world’s most successful first-generation jet fighter. Appearing on-scene too late to undertake a single WWII combat sortie, the F-80—as well as its T-33 and F-94 Starfire derivatives—would effectively project U.S. military might in the upcoming Korean War.

The P-80, like so many iconic mid-20th Century aircraft, sprung from the fevered genius of Clarence “Kelly” Johnson. In May 1943, the U.S. Army Air Corps issued specifications for a jet-powered high-altitude interceptor built around de Havilland’s Halford H-1 B "Goblin" engine. A scarcely-believable eight-months later, the prototype XP-80 took flight, dazzling USAAC brass and assuring the future of jet-powered flight.

The F-80 was a sleek, streamlined beauty. Her internalized power-plant and elliptical, laminar-flow wings—the leading and trailing edges of which tapered into a curved wingtip with underslung tip-tanks—occasioned a pleasing syncretism of aesthetics and antagonism, and spoke to how the Pentagon might have looked had its designers been of the Art Deco school.

The road by which the air-lifted F-80 came to the Iowa National Guard is a strange one.

When Sioux City’s 174th Fighter Interceptor Squadron was activated in April 1951, its pilots and their state of the art F-84s were summarily shipped off to Korea. When the airmen returned to Iowa, they were reallocated older F-80s on account of their F-84s being plied, still, to the righteous elimination of Communism from God’s Earth. By dint of their aging but airworthy F-80s, the unit maintained pilot currency and proficiency until they were allocated newer aircraft in the post-Korea/pre-Vietnam years.

During its overflight of the Hawkeye State’s verdant vastness, the Air National Guard F-80 was in the capable hands of CH-47 flight engineer Staff Sergeant Jesse Ayala, who asserted sling-loading the aircraft to Sioux City allowed him and his charges to hone their aircraft recovery skills. “What we did today is great practice for the real-world mission we have to do,” Sgt. Ayala remarked.

Upon completion of its new paint-job, the storied F-80 will be placed back on static display at Camp Dodge, where it will educate and inspire generations of Americans whose heartland freedoms were protected, and are protected, still by brave aviators in brilliant machines.

FMI: www.185arw.ang.af.mil