Posted on 06/14/2026 8:45:39 AM PDT by rlmorel
After 7 long years, the Collings F-4 Phantom is back in the air!
A MASSIVE thank you to the museum volunteers who made this possible. Without them, there's no way any of this could have happened. And a special thank you to Harry “D-Day” Daye for allowing me to backseat this flight! We are so excited for what this year has in store for both the VWFM and the Collings Foundation planes.
And as always, thank you to the Collings Foundation for allowing us to fix and fly this beautiful jet! If you want to see more of the Vietnam War Flight Museums' aircraft or support either of these amazing organizations, click here: https://www.vietnamwarflight.com
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Jim
Yes… There was that combination of the drooping horizontal stabilizers, the wind tips, angled upwards, and the nose configuration that gave it a characteristic look, along with the beefy wasp – waisted he’s alive that gave it the impression of something that was about to completely kick ass on something else!
Ha ha ha… I saw something the other day about some soldier who is describing his life in the military that you might find entertaining…
It’s something like a 30 second video where when someone asked soldier about how to describe his time in the military, it showed someone unscrewing a screw from a plate of metal, drilling out the hole, welding over the top of it, grinding it down with a grinder, smooth, drilling another hole, tapping out the hole, and putting the screw back in!
I think they were flown during Desert Storm.
Aviano italy, saw and heard them all day long:-)
ChatGPT final summary:
The F-4D was not grounded for seven years because of one big problem. It appears to have spent seven years working through dozens of smaller age-related, maintenance, parts-sourcing, and certification issues until the aircraft was finally airworthy again.
The visual and the sound (waves) were just awesome. You go IDF!
A family friend who flew the F-4 articulated my perception by saying the F-4 was proof that a brick could fly.
The F-4 Phantom II: Proof you can make a brick fly, if only you give it enough thrust.
Oh, but what a brick. I got to be plane guard at one of these during an air show (I was in the CAP). I was the kind of plane geek that could rattle off random facts about the plane so they let me stand on front of it. A wonderful memory.
CC
That’s great! I always thought it would have been great to to be in CAP, but I only became aware of it while in the USN.
Ahh...but the F-14 could really dogfight. But its Achilles Heel was those TF30 engines that were not designed for a fighter. I worked on A-7s which used the TF30-P408, but when we got the A-7E, they switched to a TF41, a thermally goverened engine that was also used in the Royal Navy F-4 Phantoms, and I have been told that was still a pretty hot plane but had better fuel consumption and less smoke than the J79s.
The problem with it is that it ran hot and cracked turbine blades were an issue, so we had to use a boroscope on a regular basis to inspect. We would remove the igniter in one of the cans, and feed the horoscope down to the turbine, and someone else would use a big socket wrench to turn the turbine so you could examine them one at a time.
LOL we did have a guy who put that expensive (again, this was the late Seventies) boroscope too close and the turbine blade which chopped off the tip of the horoscope as the turbine was rotated manually by the other guy, and we had to remove the engine as we had no way to remove it back in those days.
Exactly-the fighter jet equivalent of watching the Starship launch into space!
Thanks for that info. So...it was largely the fact that the Phantom was a highly sophisticated jet aircraft with lots of moving parts...that makes sense to me!
I saw the Thunderbirds when they were flying F-4s too. Only aircraft to have been flown by both demo teams.
My pleasure...
F4s flew into Moffet Field breaking the sound barrier on occasion. It would really shake the house and bring all of the neighbors out.
(p)
It took humongous balls of brass to fly the F-4 brick off aircraft carriers.
Ramp strikes by the score. I saw the bridle hook on one F-4 break halfway through the cat shot. Two fatalities. Peacetime air ops.
A Marine F-4 squadron replaced a Navy squadron transitioning to F-14s. The Marines lost at least two.
Much safer mishap rate after adoption of the F-14.
Absolutely...by the way, didn’t realize you were a squid like me!
Yes-the F-14 was far more expensive (as are all aircraft today) both to acquire and maintain, but more modern aircraft are also better designed not only fundamentally, but to facilitate easier maintenance and have technological implementations that reduce the mishap rates even further.
Good stuff!
Not the Navy or the Corps F-4s, mostly taking the wire.
During my time in the Navy, we were losing at least one plane a month off of our carriers parked near Vietnam. Nobody ever reported that.
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