Korean War era

Sign On San Diego: Korean War era
The Navy was somewhat marginalized immediately after World War II. The government decided to invest heavily in the Air Force and its ability to drop atomic bombs. Attention also turned away from carriers because they struggled to handle the new, fast, heavy jets coming into service. But the carriers quickly steamed to Korea at the start of the war and projected air power while the Air Force waited for a more favorable situation on the ground before establishing forward bases. In fairly quick order, the carriers also underwent the technical modifications that made it practical to operate jets from flattops. As it had done in World War II, naval aviation proved that it was essential to national defense.

Aircraft: F9F Panther
The Navy had been experimenting with jets since World War II, but they didn’t come into wide use until the Korean War, when the carrier-based F9F Panther emerged as the Navy’s top close-support strike aircraft. The plane flew more than 78,000 sorties and also performed well in aerial combat. A Panther was responsible for the Navy’s first air-to-air kill during the war, downing a North Korean Yakovlev Yak-9 fighter.

Aviator: Tom Tompkins (now 84)
A former enlisted sailor, Tompkins earned his wings in 1951, in time to fly AD Skyraiders off the aircraft carrier Essex during the Korean War. After one bombing run, white smoke began streaking from his engine. Enemy fire had punched a hole in the oil cooler. Tompkins steered his single-seater over the water, where he’d radioed a request for a Navy cruiser to create a “slick,” or a smooth spot in the swells, for him. He eased the Skyraider down on its belly in the water, stepped out on the wing and jumped into the drink. A helicopter picked him up. “The plane was perfectly controllable. I’m not going to jump out of an airplane I can fly,” recalls Tompkins, who now lives in downtown San Diego. “The whole thing happened so slowly, I didn’t really get panicked. I knew what I had to do.”

Innovator: T. Claude Ryan (1898-1982)
Ryan founded the San Diego company that built the Spirit of St. Louis, the airplane Charles Lindbergh used in May 1927 to make the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris. Although Ryan had sold his interest in the company by the time of Lindbergh’s flight, he reconstituted the firm and did pioneering work as a builder and experimentalist. He introduced the Ryan FR Fireball, a propeller-and-jet-driven aircraft that the Navy introduced late in World War II. The plane wasn’t used in combat, but it helped the military transition to jets, which were widely used for the first time during the Korean War. Ryan also did groundbreaking work in Vertical and Short Takeoff and Landing (V/STOL), a field that produced aircraft that rose like helicopters and flew as planes. Starting in the early 1950s, Ryan also began producing the Firebee, a family of aircraft that included target drones and some the first unmanned aerial aircraft made for the military