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The US Navy was the largest single operator of the Skyraider flying many variants of the type between late 1946 right through till the late sixties.
Profile – Douglas Skyraider
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Douglas Skyraider
In May, 1967, the Australian destroyer HMAS Hobart was operating with a US naval task unit in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam. It was taking part in Operation Sea Dragon which involved the suppression of enemy coastal traffic and the bombardment of military objectives on shore. On the 17th, an attack was ordered on the True Li ferry complex south of the coastal town of Dong Hoi. As the destroyer moved into position, unknown to the task unit, it was sailing straight into the gunsights of 15 coastal defence batteries. Flying cover over the ships were Douglas Skyraiders from the USS Hancock and it was they who saved the Allied force from suffering heavy casualties. Interviewed afterwards, one of the American airmen, Lt Walter Williams of Gainesville, Florida, recalled: “We spotted the muzzle blasts in time to warn the Aussies and their immediate evasive action enabled them to dodge the shells which erupted ten feet off their midships, right where they had been a few seconds before. We then spotted fire for them and between us, we levelled eleven gun sites. “Yet again the old, piston-engined Skyraiders had proved their worth, this time by saving Australian lives . . .
Back in 1946, when it was just going into production, many believed even then that the aircraft was already obsolete. Ten years later, when production was terminated, 3,180 of them had been built! Twenty years later, the ‘Spads’ as they were now called, were still proving highly effective over Vietnam because of their outstanding weaponload capabilities and long flight endurance. They even became MiG killers!
The Skyraider was born between 7. 00pm and 4. 00am in a room of the Statler Hotel, Washington DC on the night of June 16/1?, 1944. It was here that Ed Heinemann, Chief Designer of the Douglas Aircraft Corporation’s navy plant at Segundo, California, and his design team of Leo Devlin and Gene Root toiled all through the night until at last a new aircraft had evolved, the XBT2D, which would initially be named the Dauntless II. After catching a few hours sleep, at 9. 00am they returned to the old W-Building in Washington where the previous day they had been in conference with the US Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics (BuAer) over the firm’s BTD-1 Destroyer project.
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