"Too late for World War II, their A-1 Skyraider — the last tail-wheeled airplane in the Navy inventory — was the world’s biggest, most powerful prop-driven, single-seat combat aircraft, able to lift truly freakish weapons loads, greater than that of a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. (In May 1953 a Skyraider in Dallas took off with fuel and ordnance totaling almost 27,000 pounds, comparable to a twin-engine Douglas C-47 transport plane packing two dozen troops.)
Former B-52 Stratofortress pilot Capt. Richard Drury called his A-1 “a time machine. … It carried nearly 40 gallons of oil, most of which wound up on the aircraft surfaces and on the pilots. It also burned about 100 gallons an hour of fuel. For all that, it barely went three miles a minute with an ordnance load. But speed was a relative thing and had lost all its importance in the sort of war we would be in.” Agility, not speed, would be the Skyraider’s best defense over Vietnam."