Flight characteristics of the F-4 Phantom

[Oldman731]

You sir are correct!!  It was the only reason

If you were going to do anything in the Turkey, you had better have looked cool doing it!!!!

Good lord, it's Duke.  Dude!

- oldman

[Puma44]

  Go out on a training sortie and completely screw it up by the numbers and it'll get worked out in the debrief.  Coming into the pattern and up initial, ya dang well better look good because EVERYONE on base will be watching and critiquing it.  Screw that up and look anything other than "way cool" and you'll hear about it for a month. 

[bozon]

"way cool" is nailed on that one 

[Gman]

Speaking of that B2 strike (military dailies/etc said it was 500lb JDAMs used), one of the sites confirming the strike/weapons posted this vid of a B2 dropping 80 500lb JDAM in a test.  Wow, pretty crazy effects, even without explosives, seeing what that plane can do to a large area with various targets in a blink of the eye...

[Gman]

Beautiful Phantom video.

https://theaviationist.com/2017/01/25/this-video-will-literally-bring-you-to-the-paradise-of-phantoms/

[Devil 505]

Skuzzy,

It's semantics at this point, but the broad approach I was taught dealt with wing design almost like a series of families or categories of wing shapes.  Straight unswept without taper would in general behave like *this*, swept would behave like *this*, add taper to the chord and *this* happens, thin the airfoil out towards the tip to address *this* performance drawback which results in *this* other thing...  A "delta" wing was merely a roughly triangular shape that would have basic characteristics that were similar and predictable to all "delta" shapes.  So you could either pick a generic planform based on the performance characteristics you wanted when you were designing a plane, or if you had an existing design you were trying to test or characterize, you could predict various performance and behavior modes just by looking at the shape and airfoil, and make some assumptions as you started collecting hard data to refine the predictive models, come up with stability augmentation laws, or whatever.

I can look at the planform of any opponent's fighter, and just from looking at the planform view make a good guess as to how I want to fight it, what its good at, and what it sucks at.  Without anyone telling me, I can look at a mirage 2000 and know it has one awesome bat-turn that would be deadly at the merge, and it can probably cruise very fast and efficiently with a fairly heavy loadout.  But in a sustained turn I can probably out rate it unless I get way too slow as well.  The mig-21 has great low speed handling so don't try to win a flat scissors against one, because he can roll faster than I can at low speeds and he can probably get some good AOA to point the nose even when slow, but he'll be bleeding speed fast if he keeps pulling.

Just look at the differences between a spitfire with elliptical wingtips and a cropped-tip spitty.  The elliptical planform has very low drag and good handling up to the stall, but the stall almost immediately makes the ailerons useless because of where the flow separation begins on that kind of wing.  Crop the tips and you get a completely different (and predictable) set of behaviors in various flight regimes.  Adding winglets is another way you can have a very wide variety of wingtip shapes, but they all do things like change the lift distribution across the span and increase loading on the outboard wing, in addition to reducing wingtip vortice drag.  The exact shape doesn't matter when considering what ought to happen, you get certain performance changes almost no matter what the actual winglet looks like.  The shape DOES matter when you need to know how much things have changed, but only in terms of how much each aero characteristic is changed by the presence or absence of the wingtip device.

And that's because wing shapes can be understood in terms of very broadly defined categories, and you can make a good guess as to how it'll fly in general.  Knowing this, you can even predict what happens when the general shape is modified in some way.  Like putting swept and cropped wingtips on an F-15 for the area that has the ailerons, you get some behaviors of a delta wing but the wing will have some of the airflow characteristics of a swept wing over just the ailerons and wingtips.  They started with a delta wing shape, and modified it to achieve certain behaviors.

Does that make any sense or are we talking in circles still?

This was very informative. Are there any flight characteristics based on how high on the fuselage the wings are placed? IE: F-4's are low wing, F-16's are mid wing, and F-15's are high wings.

[bustr]

In 1965 were any of you F4 drivers the ones who would take off from Kelley AFB with your after burners. From all of the boys at Winston Elementary School 3rd grade, we salute you. We lived for your takeoffs to rattle the windows and rumble the floors while we were in class. The B52's were the warmup show.

[Puma44]

Beautiful Phantom video.

https://theaviationist.com/2017/01/25/this-video-will-literally-bring-you-to-the-paradise-of-phantoms/

Thanks Gman!  That brings back so many vivid sensory memories.  I can even smell the JP-4 and burnt rubber.   

[Puma44]

In 1965 were any of you F4 drivers the ones who would take off from Kelley AFB with your after burners. From all of the boys at Winston Elementary School 3rd grade, we salute you. We lived for your takeoffs to rattle the windows and rumble the floors while we were in class. The B52's were the warmup show.

I was still in grade school then but, remember the constant rumble and sonic booms of Phantoms over the Tularosa Basin while growing up.  I still remember the first time a four ship buzzed the neighborhood around my elementary school.  I was instantly hooked and knew that's what I wanted to do some day.  A dream come true.  Never stop chasing your dreams!

[eagl]

This was very informative. Are there any flight characteristics based on how high on the fuselage the wings are placed? IE: F-4's are low wing, F-16's are mid wing, and F-15's are high wings.

Not really sure. There are lifting body aircraft with all 3 wing positions so I'm not sure the exact benefit.  I do know that the high wing does permit carriage of larger payloads on wing pylons...

[Vraciu]

Indeed, but Vraciu insists that the "pure" delta can't turn worth a damn.

After mastering the Lightning  and Tornado, the RAF’s Ian Black volunteered to fly France’s hottest fighter, the superb Mirage 2000. Black explains what is was like to fly the ultimate Mirage, and how it fared in dogfights against the most formidable fighters of the 1980s. Ian flew the Mirage 2000 from 1993-97.

Is it easy to fly?

“Yes and no. It’s easy to fly once you get the hang of it but the delta wing takes a unique approach to flying – it’s not like a conventional wing. It generates huge amounts of lift but also an enormous amount of drag – great for a ‘Bat Turn’ but you always end low on energy afterwards.

What is the hardest thing about flying the Mirage 2000- any quirks?

“As mentioned, the delta wing could catch you out, it would give you 9G+ performance but at a penalty...

How would you compare the aircraft to an F-16?

“I’d say the F-16 has the edge – whilst the M2000 evolved from the RDM – RDi to RDY versions they were pretty small upgrades in terms of airframe performance – The latest Block F16s are a world apart from the original F-16As. Part of the Mirage 2000’s problem was the arrival of Rafale, which pretty much stopped any further development.”

(Edit In: This is in line with my buddy "Jihad" who was an F-16 FW Instructor.   His verdict: A [properly flown] big mouth F-16 should have no trouble against a Mirage 2000.   The following F-16 FW Instructor concurs.)

_______________

Lt. Col. Fred "Spanky" Clifton is one of the most experienced aggressor pilots ever, having flown the F-15, F-5, F-16 and the notorious MiG-29. He's been in dogfights with pretty much every fighter out there and is a graduate of the prestigious Fighter Weapons School. Now he's here to share his expertise with you.


Over the years you have flown against so many different fighters from around the globe, what foreign fighter aircraft surprised you as to their capabilities, or lack thereof, during dissimilar air combat training events (fighting against a different fighter types)?

    Probably the most I've ever been surprised by a DACT adversary was flying against Mirage 2000s from the French Air Force when I was flying the MiG-29. I had read all kinds of glowing reports about the Mirage. The few times I did fly against them, either the jet isn't all it's cracked up to be or we were flying against the worst Mirage 2000 pilots in the French Air Force. I was not impressed.

...

F-16C/D: The Viper is, in my opinion, what a fighter should be. It is small, nimble, accelerates like a bullet and is a pure joy to fly. Instead of loading it down with bombs, the radar should have been improved to give it Eagle-like capabilities and the jet should have taken more of an air-to-air role. While I said that the F-15 is like a Mercedes, The F-16 is like a Formula One race car. The cockpit is tight and it gives you more of the sensation that you're actually wearing the jet than actually sitting in it. The side-stick controller takes about as much time to get used to as it takes to read this sentence.

I've flown all the C/D versions – Blocks 25, 30, 32, 40, 42, 50, 52. The Pratt-powered Blocks 25, 32 and 42 are good performers, but not great. The GE-powered Blocks 30, 40 and 50, plus the Pratt-powered Block 52 are absolute beasts. The GE-powered fleet is flown by the active-duty F-16 squadrons while Air National Guard and Reserve squadrons operate a mixed bag of GE-powered and Pratt-powered Vipers. I've never flown a jet that will out accelerate the GE-powered F-16. At low altitude, GE Vipers will step out to its airspeed of 810 knots indicated airspeed like nobody's business. The limit is based on the polycarbonate canopy and not the engine. At higher speeds the canopy starts to get warm due to air friction. At some point the canopy will start to deform if the jet gets much faster. At high altitude, I've had the jet out to Mach 2.05. This limit is due to the fixed air inlet and opposed the F-15's variable geometry inlet.

In his book, Sierra Hotel: Flying Air Force Fighters in the Decade After Vietnam, Col C.R. Anderegg, USAF (ret), former F-15 pilot and F-4 Fighter Weapons School graduate, wrote this about the F-16: "The pure joy of the F-16, though, was in the furball (complex dogfight with many aircraft), where the aircraft had the edge over the F-15 and a significant edge over everything else. With the F-16's incredible agility and power, the pilot could get close and stay close. He was less a viper than a python gradually squeezing the fight closer while beating down his victim's energy and resistance until the time came for a mortal blow. Chaff might spoof a radar missile or flares might decoy a heat-seeker, but as one pilot said, 'The gun is stupid. You can't jam it and you can't fool it.' The F-16 was a superb gunfighter, and in the furball it was the top cat."

[Vraciu]

Go out on a training sortie and completely screw it up by the numbers and it'll get worked out in the debrief.  Coming into the pattern and up initial, ya dang well better look good because EVERYONE on base will be watching and critiquing it.  Screw that up and look anything other than "way cool" and you'll hear about it for a month. 

That's a beautiful photo.

Funny thing about the Six that sticks in my mind...   The F-4 was supposed to replace it with ANG but it soldiered on until the F-16 did instead.    Could be a faulty memory but that's how I recall it.

[PR3D4TOR]

After mastering the Lightning  and Tornado, the RAF’s Ian Black volunteered to fly France’s hottest fighter, the superb Mirage 2000. Black explains what is was like to fly the ultimate Mirage, and how it fared in dogfights against the most formidable fighters of the 1980s. Ian flew the Mirage 2000 from 1993-97.

Is it easy to fly?

“Yes and no. It’s easy to fly once you get the hang of it but the delta wing takes a unique approach to flying – it’s not like a conventional wing. It generates huge amounts of lift but also an enormous amount of drag – great for a ‘Bat Turn’ but you always end low on energy afterwards.

Let's not quit there, let's quote Ian some more:

"DACT was interesting in the M2000 – if your opponent was new to fighting a delta it could make his eyes water! At the merge the initial 9G+ turn was eye-watering, despite having a single engine it could still reach heights other fighters like the F-16 couldn’t. It also possessed, in my opinion, a far more sophisticated fly-by-wire system – it was in effect limitless. I managed to put a Mirage 2000 into the vertical whilst being chased and held the manoeuvre a few seconds too long – when I looked into my HUD I was in the pure vertical at 60 knots and decelerating ! As we hit Zero the aircraft began to slide backwards and the ‘burner blew out. My heart-rate increased. As the aircraft went beyond its design envelope, the nose simply flopped over pointing earthwards – with a few small turns the airspeed picked up. As I hit 200 knots I simply flew the aircraft back to straight and level."

How would you rate the M2000 in the following:

 Instantaneous turn rates (at low/medium and high altitudes)

“Stunning – at all altitudes – with its big wing even at 50,000 feet using the leading edge slats it could still turn well.”

Sustained turn rates (at low/medium and high altitudes)

“Sustained turn was still good, especially at low level where you had sufficient energy to maintain speed.”

High Alpha

“The Mirage 2000 was legendary at its low speed high Alpha Passes -120 knots was pretty easy to fly.”

Which three words best describe the M2000?

“Vive La France !  It’s Sexy. It’s French – Dassault make fine aircraft and apart from the ejector seat it pretty much is 100%. Future-Proofed – The M2000 first flew in 1978 and it’s still in service in 2016 – despite its sleek frame it’s built like a tank and can pull 9G all day long.”

How does it compare to the other aircraft you have flown?

“The Mirage 2000 is a fourth generation fighter – and extremely capable in both air-to-air and air-to-ground roles – as well as being highly manoeuvrable even when loaded up. The Tornado was extremely competent at the role of interceptor, but lacked the agility of Dassault’s masterpiece.”

 

[Vraciu]

He is talking about durability, not sustained turn. 

The only way you'll sustain a 9G turn in a Mirage is downhill.  Eventually the ground wins.

[PR3D4TOR]

If you bother to actually read, he's absolutely talking about sustained turns.

Sustained turn rates (at low/medium and high altitudes)

“Sustained turn was still good, especially at low level where you had sufficient energy to maintain speed.”