The Grumman F3F had the dubious honor of not only being the last biplane fighter to embark aboard a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, but it was also the last such fighter to enter service with any branch of the U.S. military. With monoplanes on the horizon and the clouds of war gathering, Leroy Grumman’s robust Flying Barrel (as the type was affectionately known) served honorably in the years just prior to America's entry into WWII. History records the F3F as being Leroy Grumman’s third fighter design, but the type could easily have emerged simply as a new variant of his previous effort - the F2F. Indeed, the F3F featured only a few minor modifications to address the F2F-1’s stability problems and excessive proclivity for spinning. Sadly, the prototype XF3F-1 (BuNo.09727) crashed on March 22, 1935, just two days after its first flight; company test pilot, Jimmy Collins, lost his life when the aircraft broke apart during dive tests. A second prototype was built, and oddly - perhaps prophetically - assigned the same BuNo, as it too was lost (on May 15, 1935) when its pilot, Lee Gehlbach, was forced to bail out during an unrecoverable a flat spin. Thankfully the third prototype (again bearing the same service number as the first two XF3F-1s) successfully completed its terminal velocity dive tests; the U.S. Navy formally took delivery of the fighter on July 10, 1935.