Royal Navy with F-8 Crusader instead of F-4 Phantom II

[Scott Kenny]

1" may not sound like much but its a dramatic increase at supersonic speeds.

You're assuming that there's not a couple inches of clearance around the engines already...

 

[TomcatViP]

Especially in the rear portion of the fuselage, where boundary layer is already turbulent, this dramatic statement around 1 inch is exacerbated. (see Karman equation for estimation of BL thickness in function of wet body length).

 

[Yellow Palace]

Can anyone imagine the F-8's tilting/high incidence wing mechanism being added to one?

Not in a million years. Moving from a mid-wing to a high-wing configuration is really designing an entirely new aeroplane. That decision is one of the things you lock in at the earliest stage of the design process.

 

[orlovsky]

Also British Phantoms had a much greater requirement to bring back unused ordnance compared to the USN, which would dump unused bombs into the sea. All of these changes were likely most useful as a heavily bombed up and therefore very sluggish Phantom was coming in to land.

The maximum arrested landing weight of the F-4 was increased over time from 28k to 40k lbs. The F-4B was 34k lbs, the J version took that to 38k lbs, same for the F-4K. As the K was a bit heavier bringback was probably a bit lower.



What the F-4K had was a strengthened hook for 4.8g, allowing the arrest on the dax2 with higher speeds/weights.



Which reminds me of another problem of the speyed Phantom: very high single engine approach speed.