In 1963, the US Navy's Light Armed Reconnaissance Aircraft (LARA) competition asked for something nobody had built: a counter-insurgency (COIN) airplane that could take off in 800 feet from a jungle clearing, loiter for five hours, carry 2,400 pounds of ordnance, survive ground fire, and operate from a carrier deck. Nine companies bid. North American won with the OV-10 Bronco. Convair lost with the Model 48 Charger — an aircraft that, by every measurable metric in the flight test data, was the better airplane.

The Charger first flew on 25 November 1964 at Convair's San Diego plant, piloted by John Knebel. It was a twin-boom, twin-turboprop pusher-puller... wait, no — twin tractor configuration, with two Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A-20 turboprops (650 shp each), a high wing with full-span double-slotted flaps, and — crucially — boundary layer control (BLC) blown across the flaps using bleed air. This was the trick. The Charger could fly controlled at 55 knots. It took off in 475 feet. It landed in 460 feet. The OV-10 needed 740 feet to take off and couldn't fly slower than 65 knots clean.

Top speed was 320 mph — 35 mph faster than the Bronco. Ferry range was 1,650 miles. It could carry five 500-lb bombs, four 7.62mm machine guns, and rocket pods on six hardpoints, or six paratroopers in the cargo bay aft of the cockpit. Sergei Sikorsky himself flew it and reportedly told a Convair engineer the STOL performance was "indecent."

So why don't you know its name? On 19 October 1965, on the 196th test flight, pilot J.D. McEachern brought the Charger in for landing at NAS North Island. He was distracted by a radio call about traffic, ran through the pre-landing checklist mentally, and convinced himself he'd already lowered the gear. He hadn't. The Charger belly-landed on the runway at about 70 knots. Nobody was hurt. The damage was repairable — the props were bent, the lower fuselage was scraped, the BLC ducting was crushed. Convair estimated repair at $1.2 million and four months.

Convair's board, looking at a contract they'd already lost to North American and a parent company (General Dynamics) hemorrhaging cash on the F-111 program, refused to fund the repair. The sole prototype was scrapped in early 1966. The tooling was destroyed. The OV-10 Bronco went on to serve in Vietnam, Desert Storm, and is still flying today in 2026 with the Philippine Air Force and a handful of US contractors.

Here's why the Charger deserves a second look in 2026: the COIN mission is back. The US Air Force's OA-1K Skyraider II (the Air Tractor AT-802U) entered service in 2024 to fill exactly this gap — armed overwatch, austere field operation, long loiter. It cruises at 200 mph and lands in 750 feet. The Charger beat it by 60 years on every spec. Modern materials (composite booms, FADEC turboprops at 1,100 shp, BLC replaced by distributed electric propulsion across the wing) would push STOL numbers below 300 feet. The PT6A-20 is now the PT6A-67, which puts out 1,200 shp at the same weight. You could build a Charger today with twin Pratt PT6E-67XPs and have an airplane that takes off from a 250-foot strip carrying 3,000 pounds of ordnance — exactly the mission Special Operations Command keeps writing requirements for.

The Charger lost not to a better airplane, but to an embarrassed checklist.