In 1972, the U.S. Navy faced a problem it wouldn't solve for another 43 years: how to put a supersonic fighter on a small deck. The Sea Control Ship (SCS) program, championed by Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, called for a 610-foot, 14,000-ton mini-carrier that could escort convoys and hunt submarines at a fraction of a supercarrier's cost. It needed a supersonic V/STOL fighter to fly from it. Convair's answer was the Model 200 — and on paper, it was the F-35B, three decades early.

The design was elegant. A single Pratt & Whitney F401 afterburning turbofan (the same engine developed for the F-14B) sat in the tail for cruise and supersonic dash. For vertical lift, two Allison XT701 lift engines were buried behind the cockpit, exhausting downward through louvered doors. Combined with a swiveling main nozzle, this gave the Model 200 a projected top speed of Mach 1.8, a combat radius of 460 nautical miles, and — critically — the ability to launch vertically fully loaded from a 610-foot deck. The Harrier of the era topped out at Mach 0.95 and had to make rolling takeoffs to carry any useful ordnance.

Convair had done its homework. Wind tunnel testing at NASA Langley in 1973–74 validated the aerodynamics. The lift-plus-lift/cruise configuration was the same architecture Lockheed would eventually use on the X-35B and F-35B. The projected empty weight was 17,700 pounds — lighter than an F/A-18. Rockwell submitted a competing design (the XFV-12A, which we've covered — it couldn't lift itself). Convair's Model 200 was the sober, buildable alternative.

Then the politics arrived. Admiral Zumwalt retired in July 1974. His successor, Admiral James Holloway III, was a supercarrier man. The SCS program was killed in FY1975 — Congress zeroed it out, and Spain bought the design instead (it became the Príncipe de Asturias). With no ship to fly from, the Model 200 had no mission. Convair never bent metal. The mockup was scrapped. The F401 engine program was cancelled shortly after when the Navy standardized on the F-14A's TF30.

Here's what stings: every technical obstacle the Model 200 faced has been solved. Lift-plus-lift/cruise works — the F-35B proved it in 2015 with a shaft-driven lift fan instead of dedicated lift engines, but the aerodynamic principle is identical. Modern FADEC engine controls make the multi-engine handoff (which terrified 1970s test pilots) trivial. Composite structures could shave 15% off the empty weight. And the strategic case is stronger now than in 1974: distributed lethality doctrine, the Marine Corps' Force Design 2030, and the reality that supercarriers are $13 billion targets all argue for exactly the SCS concept — small, cheap, numerous decks with real fighters on them.

America Class LHAs already carry F-35Bs. But an F-35B costs $109 million. A modernized Model 200 — clean-sheet design, no stealth requirement, single-role sea control — would come in at maybe a third of that. The Navy could have 400 of them. The 1974 answer was "we don't need this." The 2026 answer, watching China build carriers faster than we can commission destroyers, might be different.