During the production run, the Navy decided to move the Chance Vought factory from Stratford, Connecticut to a much larger facility in Dallas, Texas which had been vacant since the end of World War II; this badly disrupted the production of the Pirate. The airframes were built in Stratford and trucked to Dallas where government-furnished equipment, such as the engines and afterburners, were installed. The completed aircraft were then taxied around the new plant's airfield, but the runway was deemed too short to handle jets. The aircraft had to be disassembled and trucked to an abandoned airfield at Ardmore, Oklahoma with a runway long enough for acceptance testing.

The first production F6U-1 performed its initial flight on 29 June 1949, and 20 of the aircraft were provided to VX-3, an operational evaluation squadron based at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. The judgment from the evaluation was that the Pirate was unacceptable for operational use. Naval aviators disparagingly called the F6U the "groundhog". On 30 October 1950, BuAer informed Vought of the Navy's opinion of the Pirate in terms both bureaucratic and scathing: "The F6U-1 had proven so sub-marginal in performance that combat utilization is not feasible."

The aircraft ended up being used primarily to develop arresting gear and barriers, but were used operationally for a short time by at least one Texas-based United States Navy Reserve squadron as they transitioned to jets. Between them, the 30 production aircraft had only a total of 945 hours of flight time, only 31.5 hours each. Some aircraft flew only six hours which was enough for little more than their acceptance flight and the flight to their ultimate disposition.

Sources:
Wikipedia