You need to add a Gannett to your carrier list btw.
I had also forgotten how Fugly the Gannett is…
True, but a quite remarkable aircraft as well. AEW, anti-submarine, and torpedo bomber as well, IIRC.
When I worked in publishing, the small company I worked for, Picton Publishing in Chippenham, specialised in Philately and militaria, and I put together several little books on naval aircraft, including the Gannet and the Supermarine Sea Hawk. Sadly I can’t seem to find any of the samples I kept, because they had lots of interesting photos that you just don’t normally get to see. As I was designing the books from scratch, I’d just get a box or folder full of photos and a manuscript, so a treasure-trove of stuff for someone who grew up under RAF Lyneham’s flight-path, plus my dad was in the RAF in the far-east during WW2.
I remember some photos of one Gannet, an early model without the big radome underneath, which had lost both complete wingtips; on a Gannet, with folding wings, that meant approximately 1/3 of each wing had broken off completely. The pilot kept it in the air and returned it to base safely! Shutting down one engine meant they could loiter for hours on a mission. Tony Benn ordered their scrapping, not long before the Falklands war.
Some here might find the photos in this article interesting, in an academic sort of way; there are a bunch of low-level photos of American airforce planes at the main maintenance base, USAFB Tinker, flying with no paint, just a naked airframe, so you can see all the panels, and just how complicated an aircraft skin is.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43677/behold-the-naked-warplanes-of-tinker-air-force-base