Gray Angels
1940s US Navy air show team
The US company McDonnell Aircraft received a request in 1942 for a jet fighter which could be operated from U.S. Navy aircraft carriers. The eventual result was the FH-1 Phantom, a twin-engined craft that was only moderately faster than the best propeller fighters of the time. The Navy ordered 100 planes (only 60 were actually built), and the first units were delivered in 1947. They were used to equip one Navy and two United States Marine Corps squadrons. They were the first carrier-based pure jet fighters acquired and put into operational service by the Navy.
The Marines used a few of their planes to form an aerial formation-flight demonstration team, dubbed The Flying Leathernecks (which was also the title of a 1951 film starring John Wayne, concerned with Marine aviation activity in World War II).
Three flag officers in the Navy, Admiral Daniel V. Gallery and Rear Admirals Apollo Soucek and Edgar A. Cruise, checked themselves out in the Phantom and made fly-by appearances at the inauguration ceremony of New York City's Idlewild Airport and the 1948 Cleveland Air Races. They referred to themselves as The Gray Angels, a reference to the actual Navy flight-demonstration team known as the Blue Angels (formed in 1945, the Blue Angels' official title was U.S. Navy Flight Demonstration Team, and they were first referred to as Lancers, but within a few months the references were changed to Blue Angels).
The "Grays" flew in various air shows during the summer of 1947, but the team was abruptly disbanded after their poorly timed arrival at a September air show in Cleveland, Ohio nearly caused a head-on low-altitude collision with a large formation of other aircraft.
The public source identifies “Gray Angels” as 1940s US Navy air show team. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Gray, Angels and 1940s.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 17, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5598154. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1942, 1947, 1951 and 1948.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gray Angels” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.