LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Scout Bomber: Navy Aviation
built 643 days ago
Vought XSB3U-1: This Navy biplane scout bomber was the first biplane built by Vought with retractable gear. Note that his XSB3U-1 has a test boom off the left upper wing. The bomber was at Langley for NACA's investigation of tail loads.
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The first airplane designed specifically as a dive bomber was built by the Curtiss division of the Curtiss-Wright Corporation. Curtiss had been designing aircraft for the Navy since 1911, after Eugene Ely used one of Glenn H. Curtiss' planes to make the first takeoff from a ship--the cruiser Birmingham--on November 14, 1910, followed by the first shipboard landing, on the cruiser Pennsylvania, on January 18, 1911. In 1928, Curtiss redesigned its F8C-1--a Marine version of the Falcon series of two-seat fighter-bombers--with a more compact and robust airframe, and the new 450-hp Pratt & Whitney R-1340 radial engine. In spite of the fact that prototype XF8C-2 crashed on December 3, 1928, just days after its first flight, Curtiss built an identical plane that satisfied the Navy enough to achieve production status as the F8C-4. It was the first of three Curtiss designs to be called Helldiver.
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This was the Navy's first monoplane Scout-Bomber opening up a new generation af Navy Aviation in the 30's. By the time the war had started, the Vindicator was sadly outperformed by the Japanese fighters in the Pacific.
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Thereafter, Nason would be assigned to the Naval Air Station in Opalaka, Fla. near Miami, where he learned to fly a U.S. Navy dive bomber called the scout bomber by Curtiss Aircraft. The plane was known as a SBC or Dauntless.
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Commissioned as a combination scout/bomber aircraft, the Dauntless entered service with the Marines in late 1940, and with the US Navy in early 1941. It is now the Navy's foremost carrier-based bomber.
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