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The United Kingdom operated the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II as one of its principal combat aircraft from the 1960s to the early 1990s. The UK was the first export customer for the Phantom, which was ordered in the context of political and economic difficulties around indigenous British designs for the roles that it was eventually purchased to undertake. The Phantom was procured to serve both in the Fleet Air Arm and Royal Air Force in a number of different roles including air defence, close air support, low level strike and tactical reconnaissance. Although assembled in the United States, the UK's Phantoms were a special batch built separately and containing a significant amount of British technology as a means of easing the pressure on the domestic aerospace industry as a result of the major project cancellations.〔Lake 1992.〕 Two individual variants were eventually built for the United Kingdom; the F-4K variant was designed from the outset as an air defence interceptor to be operated by the Fleet Air Arm from the Royal Navy's aircraft carriers, while the F-4M version was procured for the RAF to serve in the tactical strike and reconnaissance roles. In the mid-1980s, a third Phantom variant was obtained when a quantity of second-hand F-4J aircraft were purchased to augment the UK's air defences following the Falklands War. The Phantom entered service with both the Fleet Air Arm and the RAF in 1969; while in the Royal Navy it had a secondary strike role in addition to its primary use for fleet air defence, in the RAF it was soon replaced in the strike role by other aircraft designed specifically for strike and close air support missions, and by the mid-1970s was transferred to become the UK's principal interceptor, a role in which it continued until the late 1980s. ==Background== In the late 1950s, the British Government began the process to replace their early second generation jet combat aircraft then in service with the Royal Air Force and Fleet Air Arm. At the time, the British aerospace industry was still a major source of equipment, with designs from different companies in service in a number of different roles. However, the 1957 Defence White Paper brought about a significant change in the working practices, with the Government compelling a number of the major aerospace manufacturers into amalgamating into two large groups; British Aircraft Corporation (formed from the merger of English Electric, Vickers-Armstrongs, Bristol and Hunting), and Hawker Siddeley (formed from the merger of Hawker Siddeley Aviation, Folland, de Havilland and Blackburn). The intention was to rationalise the industry in order to cut costs, with the government also offering incentives for amalgamation through promises of contracts for new aircraft orders for the armed forces. At the time, the RAF were looking to replace the English Electric Canberra light bomber in the long range interdictor role, and the Hawker Hunter in the close air support role, while the Royal Navy sought an aircraft to assume the fleet air defence role from the de Havilland Sea Vixen. BAC, through its English Electric subsidiary, had begun developing a new high performance strike aircraft, the TSR-2, that was intended to undertake both long-range, low level strike missions with conventional and tactical nuclear weapons, as well as tactical reconnaissance. Hawker Siddeley were also developing a new aircraft, based on their P.1127 V/STOL demonstrator. The P.1154 was proposed as a supersonic version that could be marketed to both the RAF and Royal Navy to fulfil a number of roles; close air support, air superiority, fleet air defence.〔Buttler 2000, pp. 118–119.〕 During the early 1960s, aircraft development became increasingly expensive, with the result that major projects often became mired in political and economic concerns. The development of TSR-2 saw increasing cost overruns, combined with the presence of a potentially cheaper alternative then under development in the United States, the F-111.〔Burke 2010, p. 274.〕 The P.1154 was subject to the ongoing inter-service rivalry between the Royal Navy and RAF, which led to two wildly differing specifications being submitted for the aircraft that were impossible to fit within a single airframe. In 1964, the Royal Navy withdrew from the P.1154 project, and instead made moves to procure a new fleet air defence interceptor. It eventually selected the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II, then in service with the US Navy as its primary air defence aircraft, intended to be operated from both existing and new build aircraft carriers.〔Thetford 1994, pp. 254–255.〕 This better suited the Royal Navy, as it had two engines (providing redundancy in the event of an engine failure), was cheaper than the P.1154 and immediately available.〔 This left the P.1154 as a wholly RAF project. Later the same year, a General Election brought the Labour Party back into power. The new government undertook a defence review, which led to the 1966 Defence White Paper that cancelled a number of different projects, including both the P.1154 and TSR-2. As a consequence of this, the government was forced to order new aircraft to replace the Canberra and Hunter for the RAF, and eventually chose two types – to replace the Canberra in the long range role (which was intended for TSR-2), the F-111 was selected, with plans for a redesigned variant, while the roles undertaken by the Hunter (for which P.1154 was to be procured) would be undertaken by a further purchase of F-4 Phantoms. As the Phantom had been developed primarily for fleet air defence, the Royal Navy was happy with the choice of the aircraft as its Sea Vixen replacement, given that the type had been operational in that role with the US Navy since 1961, and had successfully undertaken touch-and-go landings on both and .〔Thornborough and Davies 1994, p. 260.〕〔Hobbs 2014, p. 280〕 The RAF was less enthusiastic, as the Phantom was primarily designed to operate in the air defence, rather than close air support role, and had been selected as its Hunter replacement more as a way of decreasing the per unit cost of the overall UK order. Partly as a means of guaranteeing employment in the British aerospace industry, agreement was reached that significant amounts of the structure of the UK's Phantoms would be built domestically.〔 The F-4J variant, which was then the primary version in service with the US Navy, was taken as the basis for the UK aircraft, with major redesign. The most significant change was the substitution of the larger and more powerful Rolls-Royce Spey turbofan for the GE J79 turbojet to allow operations from RN carriers , and potentially the smaller , all of which were smaller than the USN carriers that J79-GE-8 and -10 powered Phantoms operated from. To accommodate the larger engines, BAC redesigned and built the entire rear fuselage section. The Westinghouse AN/AWG-10 radar carried by the F-4J was to be procured and built under licence by Ferranti as the AN/AWG-11 for Fleet Air Arm aircraft and AN/AWG-12 for those of the RAF. The overall changes to the aircraft led to the two variants being given their own separate series letters, with the FAA version being designated as the F-4K and the RAF version as the F-4M. Initially, there was an intention to procure up to 400 aircraft for the Royal Navy and the RAF, but the development cost associated with the changes specified by the United Kingdom to accommodate the Spey turbofans meant that the per unit price eventually ended up being three-times the price of an F-4J; because the government then had a policy of negotiating fixed-price contracts it meant that these costs could not be evened out by a large production run, which left the total order at 170. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II in UK service」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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