First Production

how did a combat aircraft designated F8 come before the F4, shouldn’t the F4 have come first in production ???

usually letter and number designations follow production, F14, F15, F16, F18 in this case F8 came before the F4,why ? How? Does anybody know? Thanks

There are different company program designations and the F-8 Crusader came before the F-4 Phantom II because it came from a different company. Everyone who was building fighters had “F” numbers (or pre WWII it was “P” for Pursuit) and we ended up with a lot of F4 and F8 type numbers with designators after for the company that built them.

The F-8 Crusader built by Chance Vought came after the Vought F-7 Cutlass.

The F-4 Phantom II built by Boeing came after Boeing’s F-3 Demon.

There were these others:
F4F Wildcat
F4U Corsair
F4 Phantom II

F8F Bearcat
F8U Crusader (Later redesignated F-8)

Later, the armed forces gave the designation to programs so that these numbers wouldn’t get duplicated like this.

The Hobbit production diary – Start of production (HD)