As a former Navy photographer’s mate, the big aerial cameras under the long, windowed nose of the dark blue straight-wing jet drew me to the McDonnell F2H-2P photo Banshee. It was the Navy’s first photoreconnaissance jet. And the airplane on display was the last example, the sole survivor.
But that’s not what got my attention. The explanatory placard said that this airplane, its wing and fuselage filled with concrete, after a barge ride down the Indian River in 1959, spent nearly 30 years as a kiddie-climber at Pocahontas Park in Vero Beach, Florida. The National Museum of Naval Aviation didn’t acquire the airplane until 1988! And then it spent thousands of hours chipping out the concrete and carefully piecing the airplane back together using period parts.
Top dead center of the panel is the pilot’s viewfinder. He used it to sight his subject and to rotate the cameras from the vertical (straight down) to horizontal (oblique) positions. At night, two under-wing stores carried 20 flash bombs. With its electric heat, the windows in the camera bay did not frost up at altitude. And it could get up there. The long-legged (1,475 miles) jet had a maximum operational ceiling of 48,500 feet, and its speed (535 mph at 10,000 feet) made it a hard target for other Korean-era jets to catch.
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