The new airplane - journalists dubbed it the Skyrocket - looked like nothing seen before or since. The fuselage started just aft of the wing's leading edge and ended in twin vertical tails. Two 1,200-horsepower Wright R-1820-40 Cyclone nine-cylinder engines jutted forward from the uninterrupted wing, and four machine guns - two .50s and two .30s - protruded from the rounded nose. The cockpit, in these days before the plastic bubble, was a raised greenhouse. The Skyrocket grossed nearly 10,000 pounds, climbed at 4,000 feet per minute, and had a maximum speed of 383 mph, a 210-mph cruise, and a service ceiling of 33,000 feet. It could carry 40 light anti-aircraft bombs in the outer underpanels of its wings. It had the performance Blackhawk needed and, with its twin engines, twin tails, and improbable fuselage configuration, it would be pure hell to draw in perspective.
The Skyrocket pushed generic airplanes out of this strip very early in the game. A few months into the series we see the first mofel, with the right fuselage and tail, but . . . hold it, two big generic in-line-engines? This was swiftly replaced by the real thing, a bit more heavily armed, perhaps, sometimes sporting a four-bladed prop, sometimes not. Eventually there are seven operational Skyrockets (as well as an indeterminate number waiting off-stage, to step in as the others pancake-land all over occupied Europe), peeling off to the sound of the Blackhawk battle cry: Hawkaa-a-a-a!
The mystery, of course, is where all the Skyrockets came from. The single SF5F built by Grumman accumulated 155.7 hurs in 211 flights but ended sadly - after a wheels-up landing at Naval Air Station New York in 1944, the airplane was written off and handed over to the fire crews for training. But the type lived on, spectacularly, with the Blackhawk squadron until well after the war had been won.
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