However they did it, it looks like the same group of design engineers came up with superb historic aircraft, which then proceeded to provide air supremacy forthwith.

Some of the same pilots too, I’ll wager.

Tip o’ the hat to North American and USAF.

Naval Aviators, too, althought we expect nothing less from them.

I pullled my copies of Lloyd S. Jones’ U.S. Fighters (Aero Publishisher, Inc: Fallbrook, CA, 1975) and U.S. Naval Fighters (Aero Publishers, 1977) off the shelf and opened them to the sections on the P-51 and the FJ-1 respectively. With the schematic drawings side by side one can definately see similarities between the two designs.

Jones wrote in his section on the FJ-1:

“One of the major advantages of the jet was that it could be used with current design technology. It did not require a radical departure from existing aircraft engineering to build a jet fighter with noticeably better performance than the piston types then in use. This was seen when the Russians successfully adapted their piston-powered Yak-3 into the jet-engined Yak-15, substantially increasing its performance. The characteristics of the powerplant itself were largely responsible for this since the jet generally had less frontal area and a higher power-to-weight ratio; and its location in the middle of the fuselage permitted more efficient streamlinging. For this reason, the first generation of American Navy jet fighters looked very much like conventional airplanes, with without the propellers.”

The look is similar, but the wings aren’t the same.

The P-51 used a NACA 45-100 airfoil,
while the FJ-1 used a NACA 64-112 airfoil (both had the same airfoil shape from root to tip).

They’re from the same airfoil series and they’re both laminar-flow wings, and I’d bet that the structural design of the wings is mostly the same, but they didn’t just take the wings off a P-51 and put them on their new jet.