Aviation Bookazine Series F-4 Phantom II Special Issue

Few ¬fighter aircraft have proven so successful, so adaptable and just so… right, that they remain in service for more than 65 years but the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II has done exactly that. The US Navy began to receive F-4s in 1960 and by the time production ended in 1981 some 5195 examples of the ‘Double Ugly’ had been manufactured. It has been flown by a dozen countries: the US itself, Australia, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Iran, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Turkey and the UK. And of those, Greece, Iran and Turkey were still flying it in 2025. Over the past six and a half decades, the number of different F-4 variants and adaptations produced has been truly mindboggling – from the relatively basic analog Phantoms of the early 1960s right through to the massively upgraded digital systems of the F-4E Terminators serving with the Turkish Air Force.