__NOTOC__ The Vought FU was a

biplane A biplane is a fixed-wing aircraft with two main wings stacked one above the other. The first powered, controlled aeroplane to fly, the Wright Flyer, used a biplane wing arrangement, as did many aircraft in the early years of aviation. While ...

fighter aircraft Fighter aircraft are fixed-wing military aircraft designed primarily for air-to-air combat. In military conflict, the role of fighter aircraft is to establish air superiority of the battlespace. Domination of the airspace above a battlefield ...

of the

United States Navy The United States Navy (USN) is the maritime service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. It is the largest and most powerful navy in the world, with the estimated tonnage ...

in service during the late 1920s.

Design and development

Pleased with the company's VE-7, in 1926 the Navy gave

Vought Vought was the name of several related American aerospace firms. These have included, in the past, Lewis and Vought Corporation, Chance Vought, Vought-Sikorsky, LTV Aerospace (part of Ling-Temco-Vought), Vought Aircraft Companies, and Vought Ai ...

a $459,709 contract for 20 convertible land/sea fighters. Vought already had a two-seat observation plane, the UO-1, basically a VE with additional fuselage streamlining and a Wright J-3 radial engine. This was made into a fighter simply by covering over the front cockpit of the observation plane, mounting machine guns in that area, and upgrading to a Wright R-790 Whirlwind with a

supercharger In an internal combustion engine, a supercharger compresses the intake gas, forcing more air into the engine in order to produce more power for a given displacement. The current categorisation is that a supercharger is a form of forced induct ...

. With the help of the supercharger, the newly designated FU-1 was able to reach a speed of at . The FU-1s were delivered to

VF-2B Strike Fighter Squadron 2 (VFA-2) also known as the "Bounty Hunters" is a United States Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet strike fighter squadron based at Naval Air Station Lemoore, California. Their tail code is NE and their callsign is "Bullet". They a ...

based in

San Diego, California San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United States ...

. With their float gear mounted, one was assigned to each of the

battleship A battleship is a large armored warship with a main battery consisting of large caliber guns. It dominated naval warfare in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The term ''battleship'' came into use in the late 1880s to describe a type of ...

s of the Pacific Fleet, where these observation seaplanes were launched from

catapult A catapult is a ballistic device used to launch a projectile a great distance without the aid of gunpowder or other propellants – particularly various types of ancient and medieval siege engines. A catapult uses the sudden release of stored p ...

s. They spent eight months in this role, but as the squadron went to

aircraft carrier An aircraft carrier is a warship that serves as a seagoing airbase, equipped with a full-length flight deck and facilities for carrying, arming, deploying, and recovering aircraft. Typically, it is the capital ship of a fleet, as it allows a ...

operations, the further-aft cockpit proved to have a visibility problem when maneuvering around a carrier deck. In response, the forward cockpit was re-opened, the resulting aircraft being designated FU-2. By this time they were obsolescent, and the two-seaters served primarily as trainers and utility aircraft.

Operators

; * Peruvian Air Force - Two aircraft. *

Peruvian Navy The Peruvian Navy ( es, link=no, Marina de Guerra del Perú, abbreviated MGP) is the branch of the Peruvian Armed Forces tasked with surveillance, patrol and defense on lakes, rivers and the Pacific Ocean up to from the Peruvian littoral. Addit ...

- Two aircraft. ; *

Specifications (FU-1)

Vought_UO-1_3-view_Aero_Digest_July_1926

References

Notes

Bibliography

* Jones, Lloyd S. ''U.S. Naval Fighters''. Fallbrook CA: Aero Publishers, 1977, , pp. 53–54. * Swanborough, Gordon and Bowers, Peter. ''United States Navy Aircraft since 1911''. London:Putnam, Second edition, 1976. .

External links

{{USN observation aircraft F01U Vought F01U Single-engined tractor aircraft Biplanes Floatplanes