Curiosities 20 - The remarkable Little XF-85 Goblin

João Henrique Barboza Jorgetto • Dec 05, 2023

In today's post I'm going talk about an aircraft that looked like it came off a float, the XF-85 Goblin!

At the end of the Second World War, many projects took to the skies. The war was, without a doubt, a great driver for the search for new technologies and through this advancement we arrived at today's flying machines, but not everything went as expected.

In 1945, the final phase of the war, the USA was looking for new strategies to defend its bombers on large and long flights to their targets. Bombing Germany required constant fighter escort to protect the bombers from enemy fighters, but this work was made difficult by the defenders' limited range, which sometimes put the bombers in situations where they were completely defenseless in the middle of the enemy sky. The problem only increased when, still in 1945, new bombers entered service, such as the B-36, a model that had a flight range far beyond what American fighters could follow. Due to this difficulty, the XF-85 Goblin emerged, with a totally different proposal: this would be a parasite fighter!

The idea was simple: a plane attached to the bomber that would be released to combat threats and then return to the bomber. In theory, wonderful, but in practice...

The first Goblin had 4 machine guns in the nose, a completely innovative design, small dimensions and a type of ski for possible emergency landings. The first test only took place in 1948, where the test pilot from the manufacturing company, McDonnell, Edwin Schoch, performed the first free flight and discovered how difficult it was to dock again, due to the ground effect generated between the aircraft and the turbulence generated. by the immense bombers. After attempts, the Goblin crashed into the trapeze mounted below the other plane, damaging the cockpit canopy and even tearing off the pilot's helmet and mask, a situation that forced an emergency landing. Months of study and maintenance led to six more tests, with three more showing serious coupling failures, generating more emergency landings and consequent abandonment of the project, in 1949.

The only two examples manufactured are available at the US Air Force museums in Dayton, Ohio, and Ashland, Nebraska.