beans_again?
Palm Springs California Air Museum F-4 Phantom II 2022 01
It would be great if humankind gave up industrialized killing, also known as war, and used the left-over resources to pay off debt and solve problems of the 21st century. In the meanwhile, we're stuck with having at least some level of ability to protect ourselves against crackpots or people who have some legitimate, or illegitimate, grudge against the US.
Its prototype was created in the late 1950s. I have no idea where my long-time appreciation of the F-4 started. I always liked the idea that the US Navy, Marine Corps aviation, and the US Air Force would live up to Secretary McNamara's ideal and use the same damn airframe. There are a lot of potential savings and efficiency gains. But the use cases are very different. For example, you can't use the same landing gear on an Air Force aircraft as you would use on a Navy aircraft. So it was a tricky proposition that worked at least this once.
I think there was a theory that air-to-air combat was going to be a stand-off affair when these were being created. So the early models did not have a cannon. When you use all of your missiles, this makes you unarmed. That's not good in an air-to-air battle. Later models were fitted with a cannon. They crammed a lot of capabilities into these things. In Vietnam, for instance, they were a significant improvement over older machines. Those antennas under the "Rescue" sticker and below/left of the "USS Midway" have always been interesting. Whatever they connect to was also installed on F-111s.
The J79 [jet engines] used enormous volumes of air: an F4H-1 standing on the flight ramp at full throttle, as the crew safety manuals described it, could suck in a two-hundred-pound man from twenty-five feet away.
— Glenn E. Bugos
Source: Bugos, Glenn E., "2: Development," Engineering the F-4 Phantom II: Parts into Systems, (Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 1996) pp.50.
Journalism grade image.
Source: 4,200x1,100 16-bit TIF file.
Please do not copy this image for any purpose.
Palm Springs California Air Museum F-4 Phantom II 2022 01
It would be great if humankind gave up industrialized killing, also known as war, and used the left-over resources to pay off debt and solve problems of the 21st century. In the meanwhile, we're stuck with having at least some level of ability to protect ourselves against crackpots or people who have some legitimate, or illegitimate, grudge against the US.
Its prototype was created in the late 1950s. I have no idea where my long-time appreciation of the F-4 started. I always liked the idea that the US Navy, Marine Corps aviation, and the US Air Force would live up to Secretary McNamara's ideal and use the same damn airframe. There are a lot of potential savings and efficiency gains. But the use cases are very different. For example, you can't use the same landing gear on an Air Force aircraft as you would use on a Navy aircraft. So it was a tricky proposition that worked at least this once.
I think there was a theory that air-to-air combat was going to be a stand-off affair when these were being created. So the early models did not have a cannon. When you use all of your missiles, this makes you unarmed. That's not good in an air-to-air battle. Later models were fitted with a cannon. They crammed a lot of capabilities into these things. In Vietnam, for instance, they were a significant improvement over older machines. Those antennas under the "Rescue" sticker and below/left of the "USS Midway" have always been interesting. Whatever they connect to was also installed on F-111s.
The J79 [jet engines] used enormous volumes of air: an F4H-1 standing on the flight ramp at full throttle, as the crew safety manuals described it, could suck in a two-hundred-pound man from twenty-five feet away.
— Glenn E. Bugos
Source: Bugos, Glenn E., "2: Development," Engineering the F-4 Phantom II: Parts into Systems, (Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 1996) pp.50.
Journalism grade image.
Source: 4,200x1,100 16-bit TIF file.
Please do not copy this image for any purpose.