The McDonnell XF-85 Goblin was one of the most unusual fighters ever built—a tiny jet designed to live inside the bomb bay of America’s massive Convair B-36 and launch only when enemy fighters appeared.
During the early Cold War, the U.S. Air Force faced a problem no conventional aircraft could solve: no fighter had the range to escort strategic bombers across continents.
The solution was a radical “parasite fighter” that would detach in flight, defend the bomber, and then reconnect to a trapeze beneath the mothership before returning home. But turning that vision into reality proved far more dangerous than expected.
Test pilot Edwin Schoch repeatedly battled violent turbulence beneath the carrier aircraft, shattering his canopy during one docking attempt and surviving multiple emergency belly landings after failed recoveries. Although the Goblin ultimately failed, its revolutionary concept inspired later experiments like Tip-Tow and FICON, paving the way for modern drone carriers and air-launched unmanned systems.
This is the remarkable story of the McDonnell XF-85 Goblin, the tiny jet with no landing gear, the daring pilots who risked their lives to prove the concept, and the ambitious Cold War experiment that was decades ahead of its time.
The McDonnell XF-85 Goblin is an American prototype fighter aircraft conceived during World War II by McDonnell Aircraft. It was intended to deploy from the bomb bay of the Convair B-36 bomber as a parasite fighter. The XF-85’s intended role was to defend bombers from hostile interceptor aircraft, a need demonstrated during World War II. McDonnell built two prototypes before the Air Force (USAF) terminated the program.
The XF-85 was a response to an Army Air Forces (USAAF) requirement for a fighter to be carried within the Northrop XB-35 and B-36, then under development. This was to address the limited range of existing interceptor aircraft compared to the greater range of new bomber designs. The XF-85 was a diminutive jet aircraft featuring a distinctive potato-shaped fuselage and a forked-tail stabilizer design. The prototypes were built and underwent testing and evaluation in 1948.
Flight tests showed promise in the design, but the aircraft’s performance was inferior to the jet fighters it would have faced in combat, and there were difficulties in docking. The XF-85 was swiftly canceled, and the prototypes were thereafter relegated to museum exhibits. The 1947 successor to the USAAF, the United States Air Force (USAF), continued to examine the concept of parasite aircraft under three related projects following the cancellation: MX-106 “Tip Tow”, FICON, and “Tom-Tom.”
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