A4 Skyhawk EDF

About

The Douglas A-4 Skyhawk is the work of Ed Heinemann, Douglas Aircraft's legendary chief engineer, who set out in the early 1950s to design a small, lightweight, simple jet attack aircraft for U.S. Navy carrier operations. Heinemann's design — affectionately called "Heinemann's Hot Rod" by Navy pilots — first flew on June 22, 1954, with Douglas test pilot Bob Rahn at the controls. The Skyhawk entered Navy service in 1956 and went on to be one of the most successful carrier-based attack aircraft of the Cold War era.

The A-4's design philosophy was deliberately minimal. Compact, single-engine, with a wing small enough that it didn't need to fold for carrier stowage — saving weight and complexity. The result was an aircraft that weighed roughly half as much as comparable Navy attack jets, cost less to produce, and proved extraordinarily versatile across two decades of front-line service. A-4 Skyhawks flew thousands of strike missions over Vietnam from carriers offshore, served in Israeli, Argentine, and many other foreign air forces, and were the first aircraft of the U.S. Navy's "Top Gun" Fighter Weapons School aggressor squadrons. The Blue Angels Navy demonstration team flew Skyhawks from 1974 through 1986.

Total production reached approximately 2,960 airframes between 1954 and 1979. The unmistakable Skyhawk silhouette — small delta wing, single-engine intake on each side of the fuselage, distinctive bullet fairing above the cockpit — is one of the most-modeled Navy attack-jet subjects in modern RC EDF scale flying.

In the simulator

A demanding light-attack jet scale subject with the responsive handling of a real A-4. Use it for jet pattern flying with the visual character of one of the most successful naval attack jets of the twentieth century. A natural sibling of the A-6 Intruder and A-7 Corsair II in CV Planes Pack 1 — three Vietnam-era Navy attack subjects.