Mystery Airplane Contest – January 2025

The use of aircraft to combat submarines began in WWI with the deployment of flying boats and airships to counter German U-Boats. Similar operations evolved during WWII, but with even longer ranged bombers to challenge the new brand of U-Boats that roamed the oceans world-wide. Land-based aircraft predominated at the beginning of the war, but carrier-based aircraft, using the smaller escort carriers ("jeep carriers") and squadrons of hunter-killer teams, backed up by intelligence gathered about U-Boat operations, won, what Winston Churchill called, the Battle of the Atlantic.

A new Battle of the Atlantic and other seas developed during the Cold War. Soviet diesel boats, with technology derived from German designs, were built in large numbers. Initially, these were shadowed and hunted down during tense operations by hunter-killer squadrons of Grumman Avengers, replaced by pairs of the larger Grumman Guardians, and finally by Grumman's S-2 Tracker, that combined the hunter-killer function in one aircraft. The increased threat of Soviet nuclear-powered submarines demanded a more high-performance search and strike platform. This need was met with the four-seat, turbo-fan powered Lockheed S-3 Viking.

The Navy issued its requirements in 1964, and Lockheed, in collaboration with Vought, produced a proposal that was accepted by the Navy in August 1969. The first Viking was test flown at Palmdale, CA, on 21 January 1972, by John Christiansen and Lyle Schaefer. The first carrier trials were conducted in December 1973 aboard the USS Forrestal. Over 180 were produced. The last Viking was withdrawn from Navy use in January 2009.

The S-3B (Bu-160607) in this Oshkosh 2011 photo served with NASA at its Glenn Research Center, in Cleveland, from 2006 until July 2021, when it was flown to the San Diego Air and Space Museum for display. Registered N601NA, it was the last Viking built and had served with numerous anti-submarine squadrons beginning in 1978. Its retirement from NASA was not due to excessive airframe hours, but to a lack of spare parts. It had been used to research in-flight icing, on earth science missions, for testing communications standards for unmanned aircraft, for the study of airspace communications requirements, and to monitor Lake Erie's algal growth. It also appeared at Oshkosh in 2018.

No mystery here, this month's winner is Tom Kelly of Mesa, AZ. Thanks, "TK." Also naming the Viking were Ronald Pogatchnik, Ed Wells, and Dave Lundgren. Many thanks, guys! All the best for the New Year. Brief well before flying. Blue skies.

"Though I fly through the Valley of Death I fear no evil, for I am at 80,000 feet and climbing."

From a sign at an SR-71 base on Okinawa.