Not really... The JP-7 fuel that was developed for the Blackbird's engines to operate at
CLASSIFIED, is actually extremely
non-flammable at ground level, and has little/no vapor pressure there, either. And it's the fuel/air mixture that ignites; not the fuel. A common trick the SR-71 maintenance guys used to do, was drop a lighted match in the fuel puddled in the plane's catch pan. It would always go out... Blackbirds were
extremely hard to start because of that... Mtn. Home AFB in Idaho was a diversion base for the 'Birds that flew out of Beale AFB, near Yuba City, Ca. I used to see them there, fairly frequently. I used to see them a lot when I was Stationed in the UK, too. When we deployed somewhere out of RAF Mildenhall, we used to taxi right by their Maintenance hangars. And, when we played war games there, I sometimes had the opportunity to hang out with those guys. A very, very impressive plane...
And, yeah, the MiG was a better dogfighter - in the classic sense - than the F-4. That's what it was built for; the F-4 was not. As somebody else has pointed out; F-4's didn't even have an internal gun - until the F4E model, which was almost too late for Vietnam. The gun pod on that F4C in the picture, was a desperate attrmpt to do
something to remedy the problem... To tell the truth - the US never really built a "dogfight-with guns,
air superiority fighter" - until
View attachment 3632334 this one. All the others, from WWII forward (with the exception of the Navy's F4F thru F8F Grummans, and the F4U Corsair), were intended for something else - they just happened to be fairly good for that, too. Even the F-104 Starfighter, although intended as a high altitude interceptor, was a more agile fighter plane than the F4;
much more agile - and it had a gun, too...
