Korea As A Testing Ground

[Jim Oxley]

I've often wondered why the RAF didn't take the opportunity to test several of it's fighter jets over Korea. Seems very much a missed opportunity.

Only the poor old Gloster Meteor soldiered through the conflict with the RAAF. The Brits had the chance to evaluate the Vampire, Venom, Sea Vixen and Hunter under real combat conditions. All were available at that time, even if in prototype form.

Yes, doing so is a hazard no doubt, but the advantages of gaining first hand experiences against what was seen as a first class opponent (the MiG 15) would far outway the drawbacks. To my mind it's a contributing factor to the decline of British fighter design. The Americans gained enormous information out of the conflict, and went from strength to strength in fighter design.

Anyone have any insight as to why the British forwent such an opportunity?

[JoeB]

But the other side of the coin was risking demonstrating that widely used Western fighter types were not competitive with the MiG-15. This is all that use of Meteors by 77Sdn in the air superiority role in 1951 really accomplished, removed any doubt the Meteor was outclassed in the (then typical high altitude) air superiority role by the MiG. Four Meteors were lost to (Soviet AF) MiG's with no losses of MiG's; the Soviets claimed and their leadership probably at least mainly believed they'd downed a much higher number of Meteors, the UN side believed the Meteors had downed at least one MiG, but it's pretty clearly not the case. As a lower altitude strike a/c later on the Meteor performed creditably as did other straightwing jets (also downing 2 PLAAF MiG's for 1 more Meteor loss to a Soviet MiG), but in the big picture that deployment was a mistake in the mind games of global deterrence, given the Meteor's widespread service.

The same would only have happened by trying to use the Venom or Vampire. Again, in favorable lower altitude engagements they might have done OK, but straight wing jets just couldn't fully compete with the MiG in the high Mach high altitude arena. We can now debate that for straightwing types not used in Korea, only because they weren't...

The Hunter and Sea Vixen might have been a different story, but the latter was in no way ready for Korea. Serious redesign was needed to fix the flaws which caused the fatal crash at Farnborough in 1952; hard to imagine use of the early examples in combat would have ended well. With the Hunter it's conceivable, a small batch in 1953. The Soviets according to some accounts used combat trials quantities of the La-15 in Korea, called 'Type 15' in UN reports.

But I'm not sure I agree with your thesis about combat experience (such as was at all possible with British types) influencing fighter design. The British flew F-86's and scored some victories (and suffered some losses); they had a first hand understanding of the Korean situation and the F-86. And US fighter design after only a fairly few years went in a pretty different direction than the F-86, anyway.

Joe

[Bill Walker]

Another point to consider is that the UK had other priorities: the Cold War stand off in Europe. As the previous post stated, the UK probably knew most of their front line aircraft in Europe were marginal against the latest Soviet aircraft, their only hope in Europe lay in numbers. I think the US faced similar issues, but had a bit more in reserve. Why only B-29s in Korea, not B-50s or B-47s? Same sort of reason, I suspect.

Still, I suspect the Brits learned a fair bit from their US allies, and from UK exchange officers with the USAF in Korea. It is correct that US (and British) fighter design went a different direction than the F-86 after Korea, but this was due to a large extent to the Korean experience. The F-104 was first designed as a high altitude dog fighter, to succeed against what was expected to be the MiG-15 replacement.