Korean War F-86 Sabre Military Jet Fighters, Aviation and Aircraft Art Posters, Prints, Pictures and Gifts.

Fortunately for the United States, the Nazis were stupid enough to chase Edgar Schmued from Germany in 1938 with their policies. The immediate result two years later was the P-51 Mustang, which resulted from a design he had been toying with while working at Messerschmitt - his Mustang was more responsible than any other Allied fighter for the aerial destruction of Nazidom; the further result was that Schmued had no difficulty reading the captured German technical papers which discussed the advantage of the swept wing for jet powered aircraft as a way of delaying the onset of compressibility and therefore increasing speed; he had also been in attendance at the Volta Conference in 1935, and had left with a copy of Buseman's paper on the theoretical superiority of swept wings in high speed flight. The result was the Sabre.

Unofficially, the Sabre was the first supersonic aircraft, achieving a speed just in excess of Mach 1 in a dive two weeks before Chuck Yeager "broke the sound barrier" in the Bell X-1. The two aircraft in many ways were intertwined, because it was the research performed by the Bell X-1 that led to the creation of the "all flying tail," which greatly eased an aircraft's penetration of the sonic barrier; the Sabre was the first operational aircraft to which this was fitted. As a result, the Sabre was faster, and more importantly more controllable at those high speeds, than its Russian opponent, the MiG-15.

The Sabre was first ordered by the Air Force on August 30, 1944. At that time the design had a strong similarity to what would emerge from Republic's design department as the F-84 Thunderjet. Fortunately, in August 1945 Lee Atwood and Ray Rice were willing to listen to Schmued's descriptions of the German papers before they were officially translated. Armed with this information, Atwood went to the Air Force and got a year's delay on the delivery date of the XP-86, time enough to add in the swept wings. It was likely the most useful and important delay in aviation history. Had this not happened - had the F-86 come out of the shop looking like a slimmed down version of its naval counterpart, the FJ-1 Fury - the results of the aerial battles over Korea a few years later would have been very different indeed.

The F-86A Sabre had only been operational for a year when it went to war. The appearance of the MiG-15 over the Yalu River in North Korea in early November 1950 sent shivers through the Air Force - the unknown Russian jet was superior to everything in the inventory other than the possible likelihood of the Sabre. Within a month, the 4th Fighter Interceptor Wing - the descendant of the Eagle Squadrons and the 4th Fighter Group of World War II fame - was flying combat missions out of Suwon, Korea. For the next year, a force of Sabres that was never greater than 35-40 operational aircraft held off a Communist air command of several hundred jet fighters. The F-86A was followed a year later by the F-86E with the "all flying tail," and a bit less than a year after that by the F-86F which had an updated engine and an extended wing leading edge without slats, for upgraded high speed performance.

It is alleged that the Sabre achieved a kill ratio of 12.5:1 against the MiG-15 Faggot . This has since been lowered to around 4.5:1 in the light of access to Soviet records after the end of the Cold War. In fact, the MiG-15 was generally superior to the F-86 above about 38,000 feet and could top out at 50,000 feet, which was superior to the Sabre's operational ceiling; the MiG-15 was always at least the Sabre's equal in climb and turn radius. What won the war for the Sabres was the edge provided by the greater skill and experience of its pilots, many of who were aces of the WW2, and all of whom were better-trained than their Communist opponents.

The first official USAF Sabre "ace" was Captain (later MAJ) James J. Jabara, who achieved his 5th and 6th kills May 20, 1951. In the spring of 1953, Jabara became the only ace to fly a second tour, returning to the 334th FIS of the 4th FIW in late April 1953. The Sabres were "turned loose" on the enemy in May, 1953, at which time an "ace race" began between Jabara, his fellow 334th pilot CAPT Manuel "Pete" Fernandez, and CAPT Joseph McConnell from the 39th FIS, 51st FIW. The race began in May with Fernandez in the lead, followed by Jabara and McConnell who jockeyed back and forth. In the end, it was McConnell by a nose to become the UN Ace of Aces with 16 kills, followed by Jabara with 15 and Fernandez with 14.5.

Several exchange pilots from the USN, USMC, RAF and RCAF flew with the 39th Fighter Interceptor Squadron of the 51st Fighter Interceptor Wing, the second unit to be equipped with the Sabre in Korea (this increase in fighter power was only achieved by a threat from the Commander of the 4th FIW, Colonel Harrison Thyng, to resign his commission and go home to make public the real facts of the air war in the summer of 1952, when there were fewer than 30 operational Sabres in the Korean theatre). It has been alleged that the USAF maneuvered the assignments to keep these exchange pilots from achieving 5 kills, since the Air Force wanted to keep "acedom" in its own ranks. Only one of these pilots, MAJ John F. Bolt, USMC, broke the rule to achieve 6 kills. The second leading Marine pilot was MAJ John Glenn, a pilot who would become well-known in the immediate post-Korean period for a series of speed records, and would become even better known at the end of the decade as the first American to orbit the earth as an astronaut in the Mercury program. Glenn had three kills, which justified his airplane's big gaudy name, "MiG-Mad Marine."