Voltage wandered wire to wire, producing crazy glitches: Gauges displayed 800 gallons when the fuel tanks were empty. Cheek-by-jowl components generated clashing sources of electromagnetic energy. On the factory floor, integrating 30,000 electronic parts and 14 miles of wiring gave troubleshooters a fit-and job security. A network of onboard sensors extended nose to tail. Though not strictly solid state, the airframe was stuffed with state of the art: Westinghouse radar, Raytheon missile fire control, advanced navigation systems, and an analog air-data computer. For the air-to-air encounters of tomorrow, gunnery was supplanted by radar-guided missiles. The F-4’s rear cockpit was there for a backseater to handle what was sure to be a heavy information load. McDonnell’s and the Navy’s design philosophy assumed the next war, not the last. By 1962, F-4 program manager David Lewis would be company president. Now designated F4H-1, the project soon engulfed the entire resources of “McAir,” as the company was known.

As the engineers worked, the Navy clarified its concept of air superiority: The service wanted a two-seat, high-altitude interceptor to neutralize the threat Soviet bombers posed to America’s new fleet of Forrestal-class super-carriers. Louis, Missouri factory known as the advanced design cage-a cluster of three desks and a few drafting boards partitioned off with drywall topped with chicken wire-just four engineers worked on the airplane that would propel naval aviation into the future. The Navy green-lighted McDonnell’s concept, as well as a competing offer from Chance-Vought that updated the F8U Crusader. Navy’s request for a twin-engine air superiority fighter. In 1954, the ambitious founder of McDonnell Aircraft personally delivered to the Pentagon preliminary sketches based on the U.S. “All we had to work with at the beginning was a gleam in the customer’s eye,” said James S. military, the Phantom performed every combat task thrown at it-almost every mission ever defined. To see that massive thing in flight and be right there in the air with it-you can imagine the exhilaration.”įor nearly four decades of service in the U.S. Of pacing a Titan II in a two-seat fighter, Petry says: “Absolutely beautiful. Matching velocity with a Titan rocket for 90 extreme seconds, the Phantom powered through the missile’s thundering wash, then broke away as the rocket surged toward space. After a Mach 1.2 dive synched to the launch countdown, he “walked the contrail” up to the intercept, tweaking closing speed and updating mission control while camera pods mounted under each wing shot film at 900 frames per second. “Those two J79 engines made all the difference,” says Petry. And the preferred chase airplane was the McDonnell F-4 Phantom. When NASA engineers were launching rockets at Florida’s Cape Canaveral in the 1960s, they needed pilots to fly close enough to film the missiles as they accelerated through Mach 1 at 35,000 feet. “Not enough wing or thrust,” recalls Jack Petry, a retired U.S.

F4 phantom cockpit video