Escort Fighter - Cold War

Cold War

The successes of the P-47N and P-51 gave the impression that the escort fighter was a concept worth continuing after the end of the war. The high fuel use of early jet engines made such aircraft difficult to design, and a number of experimental designs were tried that used mixed power, typically a turboprop and jet, but these failed to meet performance requirements. A new concept, the XF-85 Goblin microfighter, planned to act as a parasite fighter for the Convair B-36, was tested with a B-29 Superfortress and found to be utterly impossible to use operationally. Later the FICON project attempted a similar solution, docking jet fighters with heavy bombers via a trapeze mechanism or their wingtips.

Whilst projects for dedicated escort fighters such as the XF-85 Goblin came to nothing, the advancement of technology and the nature of warfare of the wars being fought allowed the role of fighter escort to gradually merge with fighter types, so the term fell out of use. In Korea, the F-80 Shooting Star and later the F-86 Sabre escorted B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers and F-84 Thunderjet strike fighters.

Although the XB-70 Valkyrie, North American Aviation's Mach 3 bomber, was intended to be immune to enemy attack as a result of speed, NAA very briefly proposed the XF-108 Rapier interceptor for the escort role.

With the development of guided missiles, particularly surface-to-air missiles, plans for dedicated escort fighters designed to escort nuclear bombers gradually faded from the scene. Missile technology meant that interceptors would rarely engage bombers directly, if ever, and the escorts could do little against missiles. As of bombers themselves, the advancement of land and submarine-based ballistic missiles relegated them to a lower importance—they became just a single element of the nuclear triad. Furthermore, with the concept of mutally assured destruction high on the political agenda throughout the Cold War, a nuclear exchange became ever less likely, leaving existing fighter designs more than adequate for their protection in the wars being fought. In Vietnam for instance, F-4 Phantom IIs and sometimes F-8 Crusaders escorted the American bombers such as B-52 Stratofortresses and F-105 Thunderchiefs. In some cases the missions of F-4 were "mixed", when some F-4 were equipped with bombs, and some F-4 acted as escorts (similar cases occurred with F-8).