I came across this picture today and immediately thought of the Falcon Flighter.

It's the Douglas X-3 Stilleto.

Click to view attachment

First thing I thought of was the white spy from Mad's "Spy vs Spy"!

I seem to recall something about it being the least-flyable of the X series; unstable in all three axes of control, and possibly several others....

Dunno about the Falcon but it is similar enough to the Titanium T1. This was the first aircraft to use titanium I believe ;-)
The wings became the Starfighter wings and that aircraft's record speaks for itself with respect to stability.

I don't think it's the inspiration for the 50 Falcon, but for the T1, maybe. I mean, they are kind of similar: they both look cool, they both do not work well, they are both made of titanium, and only a limited number of each were produced.

Yeah - I was only alluding to the titanium in my post, didn't think of the practicality of both, but in that sense the T1 was a bit more successful.

Well Falcon is direct successor of the T-1, only with more durable materials used.

Boy, I can certainly believe that! I'm no aviation expert, but those wings sure look too small for that fuselage. I can't believe that they would provide enough lift for that plane, no matter how powerfull the engines were.

The engines were not very powerful at all, in fact they even downsized them because of siz, but added afterburners. I think it did not get supersonic originally except in a dive.
But pretty like the 50 and the T1 (got the former - still to get a titanium one).

Well, F-104 Starfighter also has tiny wings and it works..

From the NASA Dryden website:

"The Douglas X-3, known as the Stiletto, was built to investigate the design of an aircraft suitable for sustained supersonic speeds. The X-3 was intended for sustained flight research above Mach 2, but was hampered by use of underpowered Westinghouse J34 turbojet engines which could not power the aircraft past Mach 1 in level flight.

The X-3 had, perhaps, the most highly refined supersonic airframe of its day as well as other important advances including one of the first machined structures. It included the first use of titanium in major airframe components. Its long fuselage gave the Stiletto a high-fineness ratio and a low-aspect ratio (the ratio of the wing’s span to its chord; in other words, a long fuselage with short and stubby wings). Despite this refined configuration, the maximum speed it attained was Mach 1.21, during a dive. The general consensus was that the aircraft was sluggish and extremely underpowered. The X-3 also demonstrated coupling instability during abrupt rolling maneuvers, which could cause it to go wildly out of control, as happened on a flight on Oct. 27, 1954, with National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) pilot Joe Walker at the controls.

This aircraft flew 20 times between 1954 and 1956."

"The X-3's narrow fuselage was literally designed around the early design specifications for a pair of Westinghouse J46-WE-1 engines, each anticipated to deliver some 4,200 lbs of thrust. Development of the J46 proved to be troublesome, however, and while the X-3 was taking shape, the new engine was not only falling behind schedule, but was growing in size and weight. Douglas was forced to install a pair of smaller J34-WE-17s, yielding only 3,000 lbs of thrust each. It was hoped by all that these engines would prove to be interim only, but the J46 fell ever farther behind schedule and no other engines could fit into the constricted engine bays of the new research plane."

So the basic problem was a lack of high powered engines.

The T-1 appeared some 15 years later and (to me) looks more like a logical progression of the "51"/61 line.

After a fashion-- I know the RCAF calls it "Widowmaker". I'll stick with pens; failures of lateral stability rarely end in flaming doom.

You're right, the pens are safer. Although Bundesluftwaffe used them for years, so they couldn't have been that bad.

I'm not so sure about the "it works" part. Back in the '60s and '70s there was a joke in what was then W. Germany:

Q: How to you get an F-104?
A: Buy a field and wait.

They were essentially a manned missile and required a skilled pilot to keep them in the air. But they sure looked the part of a space-age interceptor. Young boys. like I was at the time, were truly impressed!

-john

I meant they wouldn't use it for quite a long time if it was a piece of junk, would they?

The F-104 was a great plane.
The German Airforce just wanted to advance too quickly when they were re-established and jumped over the second generation of jet fighters (like the F-86) and chose the F-104.
It was a lot of airplane (read as unforgiving and requiring skill and patience to fly) and there was a steep learning curve.

RCAF used it for a LOOOONG time. I'm not positive it's entirely retired from our line-up, actually. It's sort of like having a 1915 toaster around-- you KNOW it's dangerous, and can kill you in many different painful ways... but sometimes, you REALLY want some toast. Now imagine paying hundreds of thousands of dollars/deutschmarks for it. You're damn well going to get some mileage out of it.