Sometime in the early summer of 1956 an F-100A Super Sabre landed at a half-finished airfield near Trabzon, Turkey. This might seem like a totally normal occurrence, albeit in a slightly unusual location. And it would have been were it not for the fact that the rear end of this F-100 looked like it been attacked with a blow torch. The titanium fuselage was full of scorched holes.

How this Super Sabre’s pilot came to melt through the aft section of his plane’s fuselage is an interesting story. It involves an illegal intrusion into Soviet airspace and a three hour game of cat and mouse with a dozen interceptors from the Soviet Air Defence Forces. It is also a subject so secret at the time that very little has emerged about it to this day.

The Slick Chick was the first super secret supersonic spy plane built for the USAF to penetrate into the Soviet Union. It only flew for around a year and undertook a handful of missions but those missions remain so classified that the aircraft remains a mystery.

This one is a great story and one that I really enjoyed researching.