Feature article by: Dave Coward
Background
With Britain’s victory in the Falklands, the airstrip at Port Stanley – the islands’ capital – was upgraded to enable temporary Phantom operations while a serious station – RAF Mount Pleasant – was being constructed.
This left a gaping hole in the UK’s own air defence and adding to that the delays in the Tornado ADV programme and the unexpectedly high amounts of fatigue life expended by the RAF’s Phantoms when used in the ground attack role, the MoD soon realised it was in desperate need of some more aircraft. In the usual “You couldn’t make it up” style of procurement, the RAF ended up buying some more Phantoms – off-the-shelf F-4Js recently retired by the US Navy!
On October 19th 1984, 74 Sqn re-formed at RAF Wattisham with fifteen F-4Js. The Squadron was fully operational by June 30th, and, together with 56 Sqn at RAF Wattisham, formed part of the Air Defence Force for the United Kingdom.
After all the fuss of producing UK specific versions, the best performing UK-operated Phantoms would turn out to be more or less stock F-4Js with only minor modifications made.
They even had improved J79 engines, reducing the famous Phantom smoke trail to levels similar to those of the Spey-equipped F-4Ks and F-4Ms. Designated as F.3s, this didn’t really catch on and they were more usually referred to simply as F-4J(UK)s.
References used
- Verlinden Lock No 10 Profile – British Phantoms F-4j/FGR.1/FGR.2
- Osprey Modelling the F-4 Phantom, by Geoff Coughlin and Neil Ashby
- SMN’s Photo Reference Library set now available (Dec 2011)
- The internet
- My own photographs
Aftermarket Extras:
- Aires F-4J Cockpit
- Aires F-4J Exhausts
- Yellow Hammer RAF F-4J Phantoms
- Eduard Brassin F-4 Resin Wheels
- Aero Bonus Sidewinder covers
- Quickboost Intake covers
- Two Bobs Aim -9 and AIM- 7 decals
The kit
This ‘little’ project all started about 3 years ago when I was given a set of Yellow Hammer’s 1:32nd UK F-4J decals by Les Venus (the Maritime Editor) with the promise I would use them.
Now it’s taken a while but I’ve slowly been building up all the bits I need for this build including getting hold of a good value F-4J kit and doing some research into the back ground of these aircraft.
Information on them came from a variety of sources but a bit of luck was involved with the reference books. I had been trying to get hold of Verlinden’s ‘Lock-on 10 – British Phantoms’, but these books are like ‘hen’s teeth’ to find when I happened to mention to Geoff (the editor) of this possible build and low and behold he said ‘I’ve got these books if you want to borrow them’; one was his own book from the Osprey modelling series but the other was the elusive Verlinden book.
That was it then, now I had all the material I needed to get on with the build.