Classic Alfa Forums

WELL, i'm not the oracle, but I was quite an old fart when I first flew it - you know, been around a bit. Flew the Phantom before the Lightning, which was unusual in itself (long story)
The Lightning was what they used to call a pilot's aircraft, in that was both powerful and docile. Docile means you could mishandle it to a surprising extent for a Mach 2 plus machine and still get away with it, as long as you knew the spin recovery actions, that is. You had to be quite ham-fisted to spin it anyway, unless for some reason your machine wasn't carrying the two missiles. Normally dummies with sensor heads, these enormous rockets weighed a lot, so they kept your centre of gravity comfortably forward and made the aircraft much less likely to spin. If you were going to lose control of your Phantom or your Lightning, it was probably because you were trying to make it turn harder than it was able to at the lower end of the speed range. At higher speeds, hard turns mean high g, so you tend to be a bit careful about overstress. During the displays i did, I used the whole envelope of the aircraft in speed and g, and it was very hard on the airframes. More modern military aircraft are much stronger, and don't have fatigue issues to speak of.

Evening John

Interesting about the weight of the missiles moving the CG of plane. Not surprised about fatigue on the airframes. A carbon Kevlar lightning .Now that would be interesting you didn't do the 88 airshow at manston did you?
The phantom's I've heard mixed reports on them . Underpowered because of the engines . Wasn't the specs we signed up for or something?
What was the sea vixen like to fly ?

Were the Phantoms underpowered? I thought the UK variants were re-engined with Rolls Royce Speys - I know for a fact that a RN Phantom held the transatlantic speed record until 1974, when an SR-71 took the crown on its way to Farnborough (I remember seeing it on the news, or was it John Craven's Newsround???).

Interesting to hear that the Lightning was quite docile - it goes against much of the accepted wisdom that it was an unreliable, unforgiving aeroplane to fly. It certainly outlived its contemporaries, how many Super Sabres, Delta Darts or Daggers were still in service when the Lightning was retired? OK, there were a few F104s still about I suppose...

Speaking of Starfighters, surely the most shocking story to come out of 1950s British aviation was the cancellation of the SR177 in favour of the F104 for the German air force. Lockheed later admitted they won the contract through unfair practices and that the aircraft was not suitable for the role, and as a result the F104 is forever remembered as the "widow maker".

Lauren

A few things to think about for me. The Phantom was a great machine, and don't let anyone tell you different. We were supposed to be buying the F111 with a stand-off missile, but when the missile was cancelled by the Americans, we cancelled our order. The F4 was bought as a stop-gap machine, and the government wanted to maximise the British content. This was done by installing a reheated version of the Rolls Royce Spey. The Spey was a first generation turbofan -an airliner engine- and of bigger diameter than the J79. When finally made to work, the Spey Phantom had more thrust at low level than the original, but more drag with the bigger intakes. At Max speed at low level, you were burning 1,000 lbs - half a ton of fuel a minute. Out of reheat at low level, the aircraft was slightly more economical than the original. But at altitude, the original was much better that the Spey, having less bypass air, the J79 was very similar to the Avon in the Lightning. And the original F4 had smaller intakes and thus less drag. When you stripped all the external stores off the F4, and made it clean wing, it was great fun to fly, and would turn with the Lightning and outrun it at low level. But the Lightning only had one bloke in it (me, me, me!) and was even nicer to handle. Out of interest, the airframe max speed limit was 750 knots on the F4 and 650 on the Lightning. But there's a lot more to that than meets the eye, as poor Kevin will testify.
A word about the F104, in which I cadged a ride once. It was one of the few aircraft ever built for military service with a truly supersonic wing profile. How it flew at low speed was just the same as a flat plate flies if you give it angle of attack. The two-seater I rode in was clean-winged and went like stink. Half the size and weight of a Lightning, it was monstrously fast, and without wing stores would turn pretty well too. I didn't think it was a death trap at all.

Yeah that's it. With upgrades of the rolls Royce engines . It created the problems you just said . Interesting insights . Cheers John . Keep them coming

I think the starfighter is quite maligned , as I understand it (and I'm no expert) it was used primarily for a purpose it wasn't designed for. My pal (the one I mentioned earlier) his dad in his latter years in the raf used to train the Luftwaffe to fly the starfighter, I'm guessing in the early 80's. He used to tell us it was Great fun. I think they remedied the ejector seat in the end too?

Took this a few years ago at Bruntingthorpe.
Fantastic looking plane and so small.
Thanks for the stories John, wish you had come to my school for careers advise in the 80's

i'm sure he won't mind me saying, apart from feeling a bit awkward, but i'd be the same keithy. his tales are funny and inspiring


told me on Wednesday afternoon when we went to collect the 205 that the only job he's had outside of aviation was as a plumbers mate but wasn't much cop at it, setting fire to a customers lace curtains with a blow lamp maybe didn't help





ask him about the flying displays

Before I tell too many tales, I ought to say that the idea of dogfighting went out to some extent with the development of air-air missiles, which were expected to negate the need for manoeuvre in their most advanced form. Sort of fire and forget.
But Vietnam showed the West what a bad idea that was. Hard turning older aircraft like the MiG 17 would see off the F4 in a turning fight. So the F4 crew had to keep the speed high, shoot at long range, and resist the urge to turn with the MiGs.
Lightnings and clean-winged F4s could sustain a max turn rate at low and medium altitude of about 17 degrees/second. The F16, designed in the '70s from lessons learned in Vietnam, could manage at least 25-28 degrees/second. Later fighters do even better, but the F16 was a game changer, a terrific piece of kit. Had a go in one and loved it. Dogfighting involves vertical manoeuvring too, where you get maximum heading change for minimum effort - this about pulling to the vertical, doing a quick 180 degree roll and coming back down heading the other way...

Evening chaps

Interesting insights. I knew about Vietnam with the reinvention of dogfighting. Funny enough it's mentioned in topgun f16 is another faverate of mine . Great plane . I've seen footage of pilots blacking out as they pull to much g . One did a great display at manston . Dc10 had taken off before his display. Circling round to gain height . He just took off .Went vertical and leveled out next to them . At 10000 feet . Great to see .

I've been to Waddington a few times, the way the typhoon just reaches for the sky must be something else in the cockpit.

to be so good at something like flying must have been something special, know John made a fine career out of it

as much as he tries to brush it off, not many people get to do something so special for so long. great stuff

Yeah agree . One of my mates has a single prop engine pilots license. The stuff he had to learn was crazy. So to be a fighter pilot . Another level. Amazing job

Hey Johnboy,

You could fly a faggot in the Czech Republic for 2750 euros. You can fly a Starfighter in the US but it's $30,000 USD!

Brgds
Simon

Morning
Yeah I've seen adds like this before . Not about faggot's planes . You could fly mig 29 if remember. But it was loads of money . But then these planes aren't cheap to keep running.
Mike beachy who owns the only flying lightning in the world .Said it could empty a family size cars fuel tank in 8 seconds love it

Someone mentioned Manston, I think. I did the Lightning display there in '86, and put on a real Fred Karno performance. In the Lightning, you quite often would get starter problems, which was one of the many reasons why we took our own ground crew to displays. A spare aircraft was also often useful.
Anyway, you couldn't risk starting too soon before your display slot, 'cos if both engines did start first pop you'd too low on fuel before you got airborne. On that day, part of a really hyper Battle of Britain display weekend, we couldn't get the first engine to go (it wasn't the engine, always the wacky isopropyl nitrate liquid explosive self-contained bleedin' starter system), despite the attentions of Binbrook's best engine fitter.
So I quickly unstrapped and jumped down to get in the spare. Unfortunately, I failed to disconnect the rescue beacon tag from my the seat pack, so it fired in my lifejacket as I climbed down the ladder. I noticed the SAR helicopter starting up at the same time as one of the lads said there was a funny noise coming from my lifejacket. Nooo! I stripped off the jacket, but I had to get the beacon tuned off before I got the the other lifejacket on. Then it was a mad rush to strap in and start (faultlessly) and just make the slot. I did a full show under encroaching high cloud, and finished with my usual rush past and pull to the vertical to disappear upwards. Manston had a reserved hole in controlled airspace right over them so there were no civvies around. As I went into cloud in a vertical climb at about eight thousand feet, I remembered what I should have remembered before I'd even jumped into the spare, 'cos I was suddenly finding it hard to breathe. The pilot of the spare had told me that it had a bit of an oxygen leak. The aircraft is pressurised, but only a bit, so best get down again, John. No-one was watching, of course, 'cos I'd disappeared into cloud...
I don't think they actually launched the SAR.

Hi John
Yes it was me . manstons about 3 miles from me .Sadly as manstons closed now. The airspace has changed.over head . But there's a company fighting to open it again fingers crossed.
Great story by the way . I was probably there that day

Great story John, living on the edge.
I can only imagine it is like lighting a fuse and once a sequence is set in motion you have to go through with it. So once in flight could you not connect to oxygen or had it run out? Is that one of the jobs your crew have to do for you or can you as the pilot do it?
Great stuff.
Keith.

Some great stories in this thread - always good to hear about aircraft from first-hand experience, unlike yours truly, who can't see beyond her nose without glasses. Frustrated pilot

So it would appear that the Spey Phantoms superiority was down to tub-thumping PR, and the F104 is perhaps unnecessarily maligned. If I'm honest, the SR177 certainly wasn't as nice to look at, and who knows how it would have performed had it gone beyond a full-size mock-up.

I heard that the leading edge of the wings and tail on the F104 were such a small radius that you could cut yourself on them, so they had to have protective covers fitted for ground handling. Of course the F104 was another product of Clarence "Kelly" Johnson's Skunk Works at Lockheed, so it must have excelled in its intended role, just as the later U2 and SR71 were.

I checked out the Youtube videos from the MiG 29 flights. They don't seem to go much higher than 50,000 ft, which is probably the maximum ceiling. 20 years ago you could get a ride in the 2-seater MiG 25, which could sustain flight in excess of 70,000 ft - U2 territory. You'd get togged up in the full Soviet high-altitude gear, pressure suit and space helmet. Now that's my kind of flying!

Lauren

one always breathed oxygen. The regulator mixed it with air depending upon cabin altitude and pilot selection. At high altitude it gave a 75mm positive pressure, so the effort was in breathing out, not in. Pressure jerkins were issued for even higher altitudes in the old days (partial pressure of O2 still not enough) but they weren't used later, as most of the stuff was against low level targets. But when the oxygen ran out, you needed to get down a bit (didn't normally happen - it was always fuel!

The MiG 25 was very fast, mainly because its aerodynamics were optimised for high Mach. The engines then operated as ramjets. Understand it needed most of the Ukraine to make a 180 turn...

The F104 was certainly maligned, but all the Century series fighters and the Lightning were an order less manoeuvrable than their successors. The F16 is fly-by-wire, so doesn't need the ace of the base at the helm to out-turn the old bangers. I got a lot of job satisfaction from getting the Lightning to do its party tricks, like the snatch rotation to the near vertical after take-off...

Wow alot info there john .great stuff . keep it coming

Hi Lauren,
I saw a documentary on Phantoms in Vietnam. Fantastic aeroplane but the Sparrow missiles at that time were awful. 1 kill for every 10 missiles fired.
An RAF Phantom shot down a Jaguar in Germany though - 1 missile, 1 kill but I think he sent a sidewinder up his chuff. This was painted on the nose of the Phantom:
Brgds,
Simon

It would not quite be up his chuff as I recently learnt that sidewinders were set up to kill the crew, rather than the plane,

as they cost more to train than the plane cost.

That's not cricket. Fortunately the Jaguar pilot survived this particular bad day in the office.

I also heard that air-to-air missiles were in their infancy during the Vietnam conflict. At least the F4 retained a cannon, and so did the other high kill fighter in that conflict, the Chance-Vaught F8 Crusader (another personal favourite). Loved the way the wing incidence could be adjusted for carrier take-off.

I bought a Russian ZSH-5 pilot's helmet at an aerojumble some years ago, mainly because it looked like a space helmet (it wasn't the actual GSH high altitude helmet used on the MiG 25). After accidentally setting off the ejector seat pyros on the visor (fortunately while I was wearing the helmet at the time, so I could appreciate the full effect), I discovered that the inflatable cushion at the base of the neck is an occipital cushion, which inflates in high-g turns and keeps the oxygen mask tight. Clever stuff. Like all Soviet stuff, it's a little bit different - headphone impedance doesn't conform to any Western standard and instead of putting the microphone into the oxygen mask, a pair of throat mikes are strapped around the neck.

I was hoping to use the helmet for track days but I gather ex-Soviet aviation gear doesn't comply with modern safety standards...

Marlow Sud wrote:An RAF Phantom shot down a Jaguar in Germany though - 1 missile, 1 kill but I think he sent a sidewinder up his chuff.

...And there was me thinking the Phantoms and Jags were on the same side

I remember when the Jaguar came into service, displacing many of the Lightning squadrons. I was only about 10 at the time, so I couldn't understand why a Mach 2 interceptor was being replaced by a slower, somewhat uglier aircraft, made in France

I would have thought the pilots helmet was just for general driving around town in the Nova ?

The Jaguar didn't replace the Lightning. It was a ground attack/interdiction aircraft optimised for low level. It was intended to replace the F4 in this role, which it did to a great extent. The F4 then replaced the Lightning, though never entirely; the Tornado F1/F3 came along before the last two squadrons of Lightnings finally retired. My mate and I flew the last two RAF Lightnings out of Binbrook as a pair in June '88.

Wow that's a bit of history right there

I'd already known John flew the last Lightnings from Binbrook, funnily enough just a few years before we did some single venue rallies on the RAF site once it was de-commissioned. or was that RAF North Coates? My memory is pants, far worse at remembering stuff that was 25 years ago than Johns' is at something from 50 years back! Know the Bloodhound missile systems had something big at North Coates, a regular Rally there was the bloodhound stages...this was around 1990/91 so probably not all that long since it stopped being operational? John?
North Coates, or North Somercoates as it was known then (?) was one of our favourite venues. Incredibly abrasive sections of old concrete runways though which meant slicks would be shot within 30 miles of running, the sections around the barracks really suited out Mk1 Astra though, handled really well compared to moist stuff so could leave them behind in that stuff only to be overtaken on the straights.

Seem to recall John also flew Lightnings from there?