Long Island aviation history: Republic Airport housed plane that 'set the stage' for high-altitude spy reconnaissance

The old hangar still stands along New Highway, south of the American Airpower Museum, on the grounds of Republic Airport in East Farmingdale.

A gigantic, Quonset hut-style building, now pained by rust and other obvious signs of age and wear, it goes mostly unnoticed by drivers who traverse the two-lane road that runs between the airport and the adjacent cemeteries.

But it is a site anchored deep in the aviation history of Long Island, once home to the Republic Aviation Corporation, founded in 1931 as the Seversky Aircraft Company, and World War II-era builder of the legendary Republic P-47 Thunderbolt fighter plane; later, builder of cutting-edge fighter jets, among them the Korean War-era F-84 Thunderstreak and Vietnam-era F-105 Thunderchief.

Anchored deep, because that hangar also once housed what was then the fastest four-engine propeller-driven plane in the world — an experimental, high-altitude, high-speed photo reconnaissance plane called the XF-12 Rainbow.

Today,  a Google search can find highly detailed satellite photos of your block, your house — maybe even the dog in your backyard.

But in the 1940s, this was groundbreaking technology, and in 1948, the Rainbow, in a demonstration that was the first of its kind, took a continuous series of high-altitude reconnaissance photos, beginning over Muroc Air Force Base, now Edwards, in California, and flying almost seven hours nonstop to Mitchel Field, now home to the Cradle of Aviation and Museum Row in Uniondale.

It was an event so notable it was featured in a photo essay in the Nov. 29, 1948, edition of Life magazine headlined: "Speaking of Pictures ... A 192-Foot Air Photo Shows U.S. Coast to Coast."

Among the photographs featured from the continuous 390-picture series, one photo taken every 66 seconds during the flight, were overhead shots of the Grand Canyon, the Mississippi River, strip coal mines in Pennsylvania and New York City — as seen from a dazzling 8 miles high. Life noted the array constituted a 2,700-mile long, 11.4-mile wide swath of America. In pictures.

"It was," Cradle of Aviation curator and historian Joshua Stoff said last week, "the first time a plane had ever flown coast-to-coast taking photos in one continuous strip. It was big. It was groundbreaking stuff."

As Life wrote: "The pictures, taken straight down, each cover 130 square miles and make familiar landmarks look entirely different" — noting the land between Ventura, California, and Kansas City, Missouri, seemed "almost uninhabited," while the Allegheny Mountains were "reduced to gentle swells" and that New York’s most prominent features were "not its skyscrapers but its 1,000-foot piers."

Watching from 8 miles up

Slender and sleek, the XF-12 Rainbow was Republic’s proposal to fill what was in 1943 a U.S. Army Air Corps request for a dedicated reconnaissance plane that could do high-speed — 400 mph or better — overflights of the Japanese homeland and other potential military targets in World War II.

Prior to the proposal, this type of reconnaissance was done with so-called "camera planes" modified from original use. Planes like the Lockheed F-5, a modified P-38 Lightning, and modified Boeing B-29 four-engine bombers.

Two companies built prototypes: Hughes Aircraft, with its sleek twin-boom, twin-engine XF-11; Republic, with its four-engine XF-12.

The XF-11 had contra-rotating propellers and a top speed of 450 mph. It also almost killed Howard Hughes, the mysterious multimillionaire founder of Hughes Aircraft, during a 1946 test flight that ended in an infamous Beverly Hills crash that destroyed one of the two prototypes, critically injuring Hughes.

Meanwhile, on Long Island, Republic was rigorously testing the XF-12, which had a crew of seven and flew at an unheard of top speed of 470 mph, faster than the fastest propeller-driven fighters in World War II. It could also fly at a remarkable 44,000 feet — still higher than almost all jetliners travel today.

"It was built specifically to carry huge photo cameras," Stoff said, in reference to specially designed Fairchild K-17 and K-22 film cameras, "compared to other modified planes that could only carry smaller cameras. And, it even had its own darkroom on the plane, so the crew could develop photos in flight."

As Ken Neubeck, president of the Long Island Republic Airport Historical Society, said this week of the XF-12: "Like everything that’s an early predecessor, the first guy never really gets the credit. But the XF-12 Rainbow sets in motion this idea that cross country, high-altitude surveillance, can happen, that you can take these kind of pictures like that. ... It set the stage for things to come."

Hopes fall by the wayside

Though groundbreaking, the failure of the XF-12 Rainbow was timing.

"The Rainbow," Stoff said, "is still one of the most beautiful planes ever built. It’s streamlined, with a bullet nose, tapered end-to-end. It’s fast. It does everything it needed to do to win the contract. It’s just a matter of bad timing."

Bad timing because by the time the Rainbow made its maiden flight on Feb. 4, 1946, the war was long over.

And, though Republic also hoped it might sell the plane as an airliner, even mocking up proposed models for KLM and taking preliminary orders from American Airlines and Pan Am, those hopes soon fell by the wayside, too.

This was the dawn of the jet age. Soon, airlines were seeking jets for their long-haul, high-speed passenger fleets.

And the military had its sights set on high-speed, high-altitude jet-powered photo recon planes as well — aircraft like the Lockheed-built U-2 spy plane and SR-71 Blackbird, which soared to more than 85,000 feet at an astonishing Mach 3.2 or 2,193 mph.

Of course, then came satellites built for surveillance, too.

"What the XF-12 Rainbow did," Neubeck, author of a book on the U-2 scheduled for release this March, said, "was set the stage for the U-2 and the SR-71 and also the idea of satellites. It was a nice first step, but things change and it turned out it just wasn’t going to cut it in the long run."

Sadly, Stoff said, today the Republic XF-12 Rainbow lives on only in photographs — and, in a scale-model replica on display at the Cradle of Aviation.

One of the two prototypes crashed in November 1948, killing two crew members — a crash not mentioned in the Life story that ran three weeks later. The second prototype was retired in June 1952, sent to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where it was used for military target practice.

There are no reminders of the XF-12 Rainbow at Republic Airport — other than that hangar, a building now leased by Modern Aviation, used to maintain and house its fleet of executive charter aircraft.

Reached last week for comment, the general manager for Modern Aviation operations at Republic, Aleem Mohammed, said: "I did not know this history."

The odd-shaped hangar door, facing the Airpower Museum, is taller in the center, designed specifically to accommodate the tall tail surface of the XF-12. That hangar door is now slated for refurbishment by Modern, under guidance from the New York State Department of Transportation, as part of a continuing series of projects to modernize the airport and its operational capabilities. Mohammed said the door rehab project should be completed by January.

That said, Neubeck said he hopes a historic plaque might be dedicated as part of the rehab project, to denote the groundbreaking achievements of the XF-12.

"People don’t know," Neubeck said. "But, this is the Model T Ford of what these spy planes became — and that needs to be remembered."