The Last Of The Phantoms

The Last of the Phantoms is a farewell to the RAF’s great smoky Cold War relic, the McDonnell Douglas Phantom: an aircraft so subtle it might as well have arrived by kicking the hangar doors off and asking where the Soviets were. By the time Ian Black’s book comes in, the Phantom is no longer the bright new monster on the apron, but the ageing heavyweight at the end of the bar, still enormous, still loud, still faintly alarming, and still entirely convinced that the modern world has gone soft.

This is the twilight of British Phantom service: squadrons winding down, air defence duties passing into history, crews looking back, cameras clicking, and the old machines making their last smoky contributions to the national weather. The Phantom was never a sleek little whispering thing. It was all intake, exhaust, attitude and kerosene, a flying argument from the period when aircraft designers apparently believed that if something could not be solved elegantly, it could probably be solved with two enormous engines and a terrifying fuel bill.

Ian Black records that final chapter with the sort of affection usually reserved for difficult dogs, eccentric uncles and cars that fail every MOT but somehow remain part of the family. There are photographs, squadron memories, service detail, and the melancholy business of watching a famous machine become heritage while everyone involved pretends to be brisk and professional about it. The Phantom may have been retiring, but it was not going to do so discreetly. Discretion was for aircraft with smaller exhausts.

What comes through is the odd dignity of the obsolete. The Phantom belonged to a world of quick reaction alerts, grey skies, hard runways, Cold War nerves and pilots sent up to inspect whatever metallic anxiety had appeared on the radar. By 2002 that world had shifted, and the aircraft that once looked like the future had become a survivor from a more blunt-force age. It is hard not to admire a machine that aged into legend simply by refusing to look embarrassed.

For the aviation shelf, this is exactly the kind of thing that causes otherwise calm people to say “ah, Phantoms” and then disappear for twenty minutes into a private weather system of afterburners, squadron badges and airshow memories. It is not just a book about an aircraft leaving service; it is about the strange human need to mourn machinery that drank too much, smoked too visibly, and made the sky more interesting.

Good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. Not pristine, not tragic, just properly presentable — which is more than can be said for the Phantom’s emissions record. A solid copy of a book about a solid beast, from the days when air defence came with soot, noise and absolutely no concern for being tasteful.

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