Did anybody in the Oakland/East Bay area see...

[RAMd®d]

...what looked like a white F-4 flying towards OAK, late last week?

The anhedral of the rear elevators was obvious, but from my location and the plane's angle, the dihedral of the wingtips wasn't visible. It looked like it had an orange racing stripe on the fuselage, aft of the wings. Sort of the opposite coloring of the USCG HH-65s I see around here.

But I can't fathom the CG having a Phantom.

The roar of the engine(s) was horrendous, which got my attention in the first place.

So I'm wondering just what the UFO actually was.

[Buzz]

Sorry for the disruption... was just flying up to visit friends and family.
I'll be sure to drive next time :-)

[vision63]

It mighta got shot down over East Oakland. I didn't see it that I know of.

[gabester]

I thought Larry Ellison had a couple fighter jets he liked to cruise around in? A quick search reveals an F5 and a mig...

And the Googlers recently picked up a fighter too... but that's a Dornier.

Maybe it's something NASA flies out of Moffet with instrumentation?

F4's pretty old these days, I'd be surprised if it was Coast Guard.
g=

[freeradical]

There are T38's/F5's flown out of Beale AFB.

I haven't seen an F4 since 1982 when I was at Kunsan AB in Korea. They were in the process of converting from F4's to F16's then.

They did remain in service through the mid 90's in a wild weasel role.

[Paul F.]

Without having seen it, my gut feeling would be a NASA plane...
Although why they'd be flying an F4, I don't know... but I'm going to guess they have one in their stable of test aircraft (god knows they have one of almost everything else... or HAVE had.. some may have been long since disposed of).

[flareslow]

Did it look like one of these?:



The Navy converted them to QF-4's and used them as drones for training and targets. At one time they were based at Pt. Mugu near Camarillo. Apparently the one in the photo was going to be used as a static display on the Midway.

[Paul F.]

I think Flareslow might be the winner!

[RAMd®d]

I called OAK and talked to the Noise Abatement guy who was very helpful.

My time window may be off so I'll have to nail that down.

But he did a query and found something I heard but didn't see, as it was gone by the time I got outside- an H-60 Blackhawk doing a flyover. It turns out it or another has flown over the area a couple of times recently. He even gave me the tail number.

Then he found another record of a flyover late last month- a T-45 Goshawk:



The bird I saw was white also, with some orange, but I don't remember seeing as much as is in this pic.

I'll check again when I get a better time, but this may be the plane I saw.



This was the perspective I had of the plane, wheels up, but not nearly as close.

I'm very familiar with the Talon/Tiger configuration, thought I was pretty familiar with the Phantom.

Thanks for all the help, guys!