Super Sabre Introduced
On May 25, 1953, North American Aviation test pilot George Welch — a veteran of Pearl Harbor who had been one of the few American pilots to get airborne and engage Japanese aircraft on the morning of December 7, 1941 — pushed the prototype YF-100 Super Sabre through its maiden flight at Edwards Air Force Base in California and in doing so broke the sound barrier in level flight, making the Super Sabre the first aircraft in history to exceed Mach 1 on its very first flight.
The achievement was not entirely a surprise: the F-100 had been designed from the outset as a supersonic successor to the celebrated F-86 Sabre, incorporating a 45-degree swept wing, a low-slung air intake, and a powerful Pratt and Whitney J57 afterburning turbojet that gave it performance far beyond anything in the existing American fighter inventory. The Super Sabre represented a generational leap from the transonic fighters that had fought in Korea, and its ability to exceed the speed of sound in level flight — rather than only in a dive, as earlier aircraft had required — marked a genuine threshold in the history of military aviation.
North American Aviation, which had already given the Air Force the P-51 Mustang and the F-86 Sabre, had once again produced a machine that set the standard for its era. The F-100 Super Sabre entered United States Air Force service in 1954 as the first operational supersonic fighter in American history and the first aircraft in the so-called Century Series of high-performance jet fighters that would define American air power through the late 1950s and 1960s.
A total of 2,247 aircraft were delivered across multiple variants, serving not only in the air-to-air role for which it was originally designed but increasingly as a ground attack aircraft as its limitations against newer Soviet fighters became apparent. It was in the ground attack role that the Super Sabre compiled its most extensive combat record, flying more missions during the Vietnam War than any other aircraft in the early years of the conflict, with Air National Guard units operating it in Southeast Asia until its retirement from frontline service in 1972.
The F-100's combat career in Vietnam was both distinguished and costly — its pilots flew close air support missions at low altitude against heavily defended targets with exceptional bravery, absorbing significant losses to ground fire — and the lessons learned from those operations directly influenced the design requirements for the aircraft that would succeed it, including the A-10 Thunderbolt II and the F-16 Fighting Falcon. George Welch, who had demonstrated the Super Sabre's potential so dramatically on that May morning in 1953, did not live to see its full operational career: he was killed in the crash of an F-100 during a high-g test maneuver in October 1954, one of the many test pilots who gave their lives advancing the boundaries of aviation in the dangerous and consequential years of the early jet age.