John Cook wrote:

snip

By all means remove the gun on an aircraft, but I think you would also
have to remove the title 'Fighter' from its name.

Ah, so then the F-4B/C/D/G/J/K/M/N/S should also have the title 'Fighter' removed
from its name. And many MiG-21s as well, along with the F-102, the F-106, most
F-101s, etc. I guess you could at least make the argument that the interceptors
shouldn't have been called fighters, but I'd have to say that the Phantom's a
fighter in anyone's book, with or without internal gun.


I think you just proved the point, the biggist drawback to those
Phantoms was the lack of an internal gun, otherwise it was a bloody
good design... I really like the Phantom!.

I'd list several other items before the gun as major drawbacks to the Phantom: for
most of its combat career the smoking engines were a major problem, plus poor
visibility from the cockpit, poor switchology, crews that were often less well-trained
in ACM than they could have been, and inadequate A-A dogfight missiles. Given the
missile technology of the time a gun was nice to have for close-in fights but improved
missiles plus better-trained crews could (and did) make more of a difference.
Checking the Israeli total, out of their 116.5 F-4 kill claims, 58 were claimed by
missiles, most of them by AIM-9Ds; 34 by guns (but 14 of those were helos on the first
day of the Yom Kippur war, which the available missiles couldn't lock onto) and the
rest listed as either 'no weapon' kills or unknown. Their F-4s were normally carrying
limited numbers of AAMs on ground attack missions, so an ability to carry more
missiles instead of the gun might have led to an even greater number of kills.

Once the Israelis got decent missiles the gun scored a smaller and smaller percentage
of kills, fading away to almost nothing in Lebanon, and to nothing (of a small sample)
since.

Guy