Uk F4 Phantoms being tested on HMS Eagle 1969

[GeeRam]

It's like our Thypoon fleet, the idea in principle of a single multirole fighter shared across the squadrons is predictively turning into a fleets within fleets situation, with retrospective rework to the current build standard,
(batch 1 aside) either watered down, or probably, just outright abandoned.

And exactly the same philosophy is being used by LM with the F-35, as our cousins are now finding out to their cost........and which we'll have to go through the same pain barrier with again (and we won't have the luxury of numbers to deal with it with the F-35B with such a small fleet)

The pursuit of the latest whizzy technofest toy and the shear time it takes to go from design through to FOC is just ridiculous now......and a lower budget one step back in tech, but having more of them and getting them into service quicker, should be the way we in the UK should be going.....the UK is no longer the pre-WW2 British Empire....sadly.
Quantity has a quality all its own......

[Mk VII]

The Rolls-Royce Spey-engined Phantom turned out to be slower than the standard models, despite developing more thrust.