Visitors to the flight line behind the museum’s restoration hangar are treated to an array of airplanes of all shapes and sizes, but as the tour trolley makes its way between the rows of aircraft, those looking out the windows cannot help but take a double take sometimes. Three of the airplanes bear a striking family resemblance, their separate pathways to the museum beginning in 1950. On January 20th of that year, the Navy invited aircraft manufacturers to submit designs for a new carrier-based antisubmarine aircraft. As is often the case in making decisions on carrier aviation, the genesis behind this effort was efficiency, the Navy since the end of World War II having operated pairs of AF Guardians in hunter-killer teams. One aircraft, the hunter, carried the detection equipment, while the other, the killer, carried the necessary weapons to attack an enemy submarine. Combining the two roles into one aircraft would save critical space in the limited confines of a carrier deck and make for more efficient flight operations.
Eighteen different manufacturers submitted a total of twenty-four proposals, with the one from Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation ultimately winning out. It was fitting, for aircraft the company designed, the F4F Wildcat and TBF Avenger, had formed the arsenal for escort carriers that waged a campaign against German U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic during World War II. Called the S2F Tracker, the piston-engine aircraft packed much equipment and a four-man crew into a plane whose overall length was actually one inch less than the AF Guardian it was designed to replace. Its pug-nosed fuselage was flanked by mammoth engine nacelles, the fuselage not encumbered by a large radome like that fitted beneath that of AF-2W Guardians. Instead, the antenna for the AN/APS-33G search radar fit into a much smaller radome and the airplane also boasted a retractable tail boom for magnetic anomaly detection (MAD) gear. An internal weapons bay was located on the port side of the fuselage and there were also racks for wing-mounted ordnance.
The prototype S2F Tracker first flew on December 4, 1952, with carrier suitability testing occurring on the largest (
Coral Sea (CVA 43)) and smallest (
Mindoro (CVE 120) of carriers then in service. The airplane entered operational service with Antisubmarine Squadron (VS) 26 in February 1954, with Grumman eventually producing four production models of the plane, which pilots affectionately nicknamed the “Stoof” after the airplanes acronym S2F. The final version was the S2F-3S (redesignated S-2E in 1962), which was delivered to the U.S. Navy and Royal Australian Navy between 1962 and 1967. Among the 252 examples that rolled off the assembly line was the museum’s S-2E (Bureau Number 151647), which was accepted by the Navy on March 25, 1964. Assigned first to VS-28 and then to VS-24, the plane made deployments on board three different antisubmarine warfare carriers—
Wasp (CVS 18),
Essex (CVS 9), and
Randolph (CVS 15). It later joined VS-34 briefly at Naval Air Station (NAS) Quonset Point, Rhode Island, before transferring to NAS Glenview, Illinois, where it spent the final five years of operational service in VS-73, a Naval Air Reserve squadron. The plane arrived at the museum in 1975.