Boeing F-4 'Enhanced Phantom'

Duz anyone know about dis?, Its from an old 'Take Off' magazine

It looks like a British F-4E 'Gun Nosed' Phantom, Somthing we should have had.

Never heard of this one before - I will have to see what I can find.
Didn't the West German ICE Phantom have AMRAAM-carrying capability by the way?

I think that all the later F-4's did have a nose gun. The early ones just had pod guns on the wings.

The UK only ever had F4M's, F4K's (& a much later and smaller order of F4J's in the mid 1980's).

None of these were versions of the F4E and not one of them had the 'built-in' F4E style nose cannon.

The British Phantoms all flew without a built-in cannon and carried their cannon on a pylon and in a pod.

Originally posted by xmotex
...
Didn't the West German ICE Phantom have AMRAAM-carrying capability by the way?

They still have. German Phantoms are getting phased out until 2012 with the arrival of the Eurofighter, but still some F-4 squadrons are flying. They even had a renewal program in the mid 90s.

I didn't even realize they were still in service.
The idea of a Phantom with an APG-65 and AMRAAM's intruges me.

With it's still-respectable speed, I imagine it could still be fairly effective in this configuration - more than four decades after it entered service. Impressive.

Sorry, but what is this picture/chart supposed to be showing us? To me it appears to be a normal Phantom surrounded by three lines and a lot of writing.

Tim

I think its just a small section from a larger chart which shows, in 'family tree' form, the lineage of the Phantom from the the XF4H-1 of 1958 onwards and the section we can see is just the very top part of it. At least thats the impression I get

Thanks Waynos!

Tim

Actually I've heard of the super Phantom idea, it's a 1980s concept to enhance the Phantom. Aside from the predictable avionics and armament upgrades (AMRAAM etc), the idea was to massively increase internal fuel by adding a sort of conformal belly pan under the fuselage. Remember that most operational Phantoms spend most of their time with two large and drag heavy fuel tanks under the wings taking up the outer weapons station. Look at the picture Browno posted and you can see the enlarged belly.

Browno,

As Planeman stated, the Enhanced F-4 was an attempt by Boeing in the early 80's to provide some options for the Guard and Foreign upgrade at a time when the F-16A.15 OCU was just beginning to be hard-sold and the F-16C 'with all the bells and whistles' was still just a .25 + MSIP pipedream.

They were officially told to knock it off as profit was and remains the name of the game and Texas is bigger than Washington State in D.C..

That said, there were two versions of the conformal (what would have once been called 'slipper') tank, one slender and for gas only, the other deeper with accomodations for tangential carriage of various munitions.

The idea was similar but superior to that of the F-15E with real drag reductions shown in early testing, including supersonic carriage of up to 10-14 Mk.82 I think it was.

Some things to keep in mind:

1. On the phantom and the gun nose in particular, both the NLG and MLG fold rearwards/inwards through complex fairings, making life hard for CFT designers to accomodate deep/bulky containers that fair over as much as into them. Additionally, there are auxilliary doors to the engines on center belly. These are open all the time on the ground and would have to have additional 'flues' provided for use.

2. The outboard 370 tanks are more or less unlimited for Mach point and have a fairly decent G rating (5-6) when not fueled but do impose a significant drag penalty. The outboard wing panels were also beginning to show a lot of cracking at the time so you didn't carry heavy weight stores of any kind there if you could avoid it.

3. The centerline tank was always a pain with severe limits on speed and G when full and a near lethal tendency to cause 'bounce back' damage when dropped much above 350 knots. SOME of this went away when the 'F-15' tank came online but you still didn't want to pop the centerline under a lot of operational conditions. The larger of the CFTs would have accomodated enough gas to replace both tanks.

4. We were doing our level best to ditch the MER from USAF service inventory, it just took too long and was too big a tox-scrub hassle to clean and recart before loading more bombs.

5. What made the F-4 special was not the gun but the radar and missile and targeting pod and EW well combinations that could be used at relatively low impact on the main A2G stores and/or external fuel. It was something that neither the F-15 nor 16 could match and made the Rhino the all 'round smart bomber of preference' for much of the early 80s, despite all attempts to sellup the LANTIRN program as a viable alternative. The CFTs would have effectively required that these stores be either moved or requalified. Given that CFT missile carriage on the F-15 proved to be less than a stellar success, I'm not sure that thid would have been such a good idea.

I'm not sure what would have been upgraded inside the jet (it's a real rat nest of 'layered' avionics, some of which require removal of things like canopy and seats to get at) but I do remember a one-piece windscreen being tested on a couple Missouri-Guard F-4E's at the time. Air Defense (F-4C/D) were looking at APG-65 and 66 as well as reinstalling F-106 IRST at one time so it's likely that this would have been considered and option on the aging APQ-120 as well.

The IAF took the Super Phantom concept a step further and what eventually became the F-4E Kurnass or 'Heavy Hammer' mod (all avionics) started out as the 'Super Phantom 2000' with PW1120 engines and at least the possiblity of canards. The variable ramp boost and reduced carcass on the (Lavi) engines brought total T/Wr up around 1.18:1 and the inlet canards (rather like those tested on the FBW RF-4C) were designed to help offload the stabs and provide greater control freedom. Combined, they just about doubled the F-4's climb rate to 20,000ft and they provided sustained turn numbers and carefree handling margins that were close to what the modified MiG-21 Bis was capable of if not quite in the same league as the Teen jets.

What they eventually ended up sticking to was a complete rewiring of the jet with a digital bus, glass cockpit, and I believe a new, SAR capable, radar in some of the jets. Of course Israeli aircraft almost always have augmented EW systems using local Elbit/Elisra designs. And a lot of Israeli Phantoms also carry dedicated SRM pylon on or near the port forward missile well (duuuuh, I think it is, whichever side the NLG fairing is not humped on).


KPl.

I was in the USAF till 1991, got out after the 1st Gulf War. I recall seeing an "enhanced" F-4 and heard the term F-4X, Phantom 2000 program and a few other names. Anyway, one of the F-4's I saw had a set of forward canards and F-15 engines in it. They said it was faster, going from 17,600Lbs thrust each to 25,000, kinda like adding a 3rd engine to an already fast plane and with the canards could turn inside an F-16A. I'm going to look thru my old photo's as I did have a picture of it. After I got out, I did read alot about a program that involved an updated F-4 with a water injection system that was mach 3+ capable tho it was killed, as it didn't make sense to the DOD/USAF to spend money on a system that might well put the F-15 funding in jeopardy.
Anyone ever see or have pictures of an F-4 with forward canards?

reply to post by PupSter


i think this is the one you meant

YF-4E

The best F-4 variant from performance point of view that has flown, is the IAI F-4E-2000 Super Phantom, equipped with PW1120 engines:

IAI installed one PW1120 in the starboard nacelle of an F-4E-32-MC of the IDF/AF (Number 334/66-0327) to explore the airframe/powerplant combination for an upgrade program of the F-4E, known as Kurnass 2000 ("Heavy Hammer") or Super Phantom and to act as an engine testbed for the Lavi. The powerplant was more powerful, and more fuel efficient than the General Electric J79-GE-17 turbojet normally installed in the F-4E. The structural changes included modifying the air inlet ducts, new powerplant attachment points, new or modified powerplant baydoors, new airframe mounted gearbox with integrated drive generators and automatic throttle system. It also included a modified bleed management and air-conditioning ducting system, modified fuel and hydraulic systems, and a powerplant control/airframe interface. It was first flown on 30 July 1986.

Two PW1120 powerplants were installed in the same F-4E and it was flown for the first time on 24 April 1987. This proved very successful, allowing the Kurnass 2000 to exceed Mach 1 without the afterburners, and endowing a combat thrust-to-weight ratio of 1.04 (17 per cent better than the F-4E). This improved the sustained turn rate by 15 per cent, the climb rate by 36 per cent, medium-level acceleration by 27 per cent and low-level speed with 18 bombs from 1,046 km/h to 1,120 km/h (654 - 700 mph or 565 kts to 605 kts). It was demonstrated at the Paris Air Show in 1987.

en.wikipedia.org...