Warbirds Illustrated 027 – F-4 Phantom

On the facing page is a photograph of a remarkable aircraft, the 5,000th McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II, and along its fuselage are the flags of eleven of the twelve nations that fly F-4s. For any modern fighter to reach these milestones, in an age when each of a fighter’s missiles can cost as much as a Second World War combat aircraft, is quite amazing. Yet the Phantom is an aircraft that almost never was. The McDonnell Aircraft Company had been successful in supplying jet fighters to the US Navy since 1946, but by 1953 its future was looking rather bleak. The new F3H-1N Demon was seriously underpowered and seemed on the verge of cancellation, and the company’s proposal for a Demon successor had lost to a Vought design (the F8U Crusader) in the competition to become the Navy’s next-generation fighter. On its own initiative, however, McDonnell submitted a scries of revised proposals in September 1953 for an entirely new single-seat, all-weather tactical fighter. Although the Navy had no current requirement for the type, the timing proved to be right: by June 1954, the Bureau of Aeronautics had evolved a tentative requirement for just such a machine, and McDonnell found itself on course for a development contract. Nevertheless, the future was still far from bright for the new design, some inside the company feeling that the two-aircraft contract awarded in October 1954 was a sop to the loser of the big prize the year before. To compound matters, the Navy was having difficulty deciding just what role it wanted the new aircraft to play. The original designation, AH-1 (indicating an attack aircraft), was revised to become F4H-1 in June 1955 and the mission changed to fleet defence. In September, the contract for two AH-1s was replaced by one calling for five RTD&E F4H-ls, evidence of greatly increased official interest in the new project.
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