An American interceptor just landed itself in the middle of a frozen field. In February 1970, an F-106 Delta Dart entered an uncontrollable spin high above Montana during a mock dogfight.
As the aircraft spiraled violently toward the ground, First Lieutenant Gary Foust exhausted every recovery option before ejecting from the cockpit at the last possible moment. Everyone watching assumed the supersonic interceptor would crash seconds later. Instead, something impossible happened.
The moment Foust ejected, the F-106 suddenly stabilized on its own. The pilotless aircraft leveled out, descended slowly over the snow-covered countryside, and performed a near-perfect belly landing in an empty field with its engine still running and radar systems still active. When officials finally reached the aircraft, the cockpit was empty… but the jet was almost intact.
The Air Force would later nickname it the “Cornfield Bomber.”
But the self-landing incident was only one chapter in the strange history of the F-106 Delta Dart. Originally designed during the Cold War as America’s ultimate defence against Soviet nuclear bombers, the interceptor was built around extreme speed, advanced radar systems, and the massive SAGE defence network that could guide pilots toward enemy aircraft from thousands of miles away. Armed with nuclear-tipped Genie rockets and capable of flying above Mach 2, the F-106 represented one of the most advanced interceptors of its era.
The Convair F-106 Delta Dart is an all-weather interceptor aircraft designed and produced by the American aircraft manufacturer Convair, a division of General Dynamics.
The F-106 was designed as part of the 1954 interceptor program. Envisioned as an imagined “Ultimate Interceptor”, it was a development of the F-102 Delta Dagger, and commenced as the F-102B prior to being redesignated by the United States Air Force (USAF). The F-106 was designed without a gun or provision for carrying bombs, instead carrying its AIM-4 Falcon air-to-air missiles within an internal weapons bay; its clean exterior was beneficial to supersonic flight.
Major differences from the F-102 included the adoption of the more powerful Pratt & Whitney J75 turbojet engine, heavily redesigned air inlets along with a variable-geometry inlet duct to suit a wide range of supersonic speeds, and a general increase in size. On 26 December 1956, the first prototype performed its maiden flight. After flight testing demonstrated lesser performance gains than anticipated, the USAF only ordered 350 of the planned 1,000 F-106s.
A two-seat F-106B trainer variant of the New Jersey ANG
Becoming operational in June 1959, the F-106 was the primary all-weather interceptor aircraft of the USAF through much of the Cold War era; it ended up being the last specialist interceptor to be used by the service to date. It never saw combat and none were ever exported. During the 1960s, a competitive evaluation between the F-106 and the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II determined the latter to be marginally superior, yet the type continued to be operated for a further two decades due to extensive demand for the F-4 in other roles.
Convair proposed various improved models of the F-106, typically focused on the radar, communications, and other avionics, but none of these schemes were pursued. In one incident over Montana on 2 February 1970, an unpiloted F-106 recovered from a flat spin after its pilot had ejected, belly landing relatively intact in a snow-covered field; it was recovered and continued to be flown for years afterwards.
The F-106 was gradually withdrawn from USAF service during the 1980s as the arrival of newer air superiority fighters, particularly the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle, had made the role of dedicated interceptor obsolete. Numerous F-106s were operated for a time by the Air National Guard. Many withdrawn aircraft were converted into target drones and redesignated QF-106 under the Pacer Six program, which were used up in 1998.
A handful of F-106s were operated by NASA for experimental purposes, such as the Eclipse Project, until 1998.
Top Photo: An F-106A Delta Dart aircraft passes over the Mojave Desert while en route to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz., where it will be used in the QF-106 drone program. The aircraft, which was the second-to-last F-106 in active service, had been used as a safety chase aircraft in the B-1B aircraft production acceptance flight test program.
Sources: YouTube; Wikipedia