Posted: 01 Jul 2006, 01:21
Cheers for that Toby. A couple more pics taken at the world's busiest airport:
Best wishes
Steve P
Best wishes
Steve P
Toby is on the right track about the choice of the Phantom to replace the Lightning.
The Lightning was designed along a similar thought pattern to the F-104. It stays on the ground, launches quickly, gets to the target and fires its missiles and comes home. ( I acknowledge the Lightning's far superior manoevrability to the F-104).
A couple of changes really negated the Lightnings worth. Firstly, the ASM. With a standoff range of a couple of hundred miles, a fighter on the ground is not in an ideal place to deal with that threat. Secondly, the change to low level attack. The Lightnings weapon system offered little to cope with this role. Don't forget as well, that missiles in those days were invariably launched in pairs, due to the failure probability rate of a single missile. The Lightning was in effect a single shot machine, ignoring for now the guns issue, that relied on a controlled intercept. Not a great concept for a force with inferior numbers.
When I was at Coningsby, the ex-Lightning jocks would say that they much prefered to fly Lightnings, but if they had to go to war they wanted to be in a Phantom.