The Crusader was referred to in its day as " The Last Gunfighter" since it represented for its time the last major US. fighter aircraft to have cannons as an important part of its weapon's load. The future supposedly belonged to missile-only fighters like the McDonnell F4 Phantom, who's sophisticated sensors and radar-guided missiles would make cannons useless and dogfighting a lost art. Some people like British Defense Minister Sandy Duncan went so far as to say that armed combat aircraft would be obsolete and unnecessary. Banished from protecting the sky's by a new generation of robotic sentinels! Well it didn't work out that way.

In reality air combat in Vietnam and the Middle East showed that missiles were nothing more than just another tool in a nation's arsenal of weapons, and not the magic bullets that their prophets had proclaimed them to be. Deadly yes. Forced development of new tactics and technology to deal with them. Yep. But time after time pilots found that there was no substitute for gun when air-combat got to knife-fighting ranges.

While the F8 Crusaders glory days were in the 50's and 60's, the type in service with US Navy until 1987 as a Photo-Recon bird. It served as the French Navy's main carrier-borne interceptor well into the 1990's.