Originally Posted by
Video Mixdown
I can’t imagine that offending the delicate sensitivities of Russians had anything to do with it. More likely they deliberately chose ugly/dull names to avoid any possibility of confusion with the dynamic/powerful names commonly used by Western operators.
The mundane, unlikely-to-be-used-by-western-air-force as a name approach did kick in. ISTR reading that there was concern over the MiG-15 related to a report coming in of a Falcon being somewhere undesirable and the recipient of the message wondering what on earth one of the handful of remaining examples of FG Miles’s fine 1930s touring monoplane was doing there... So the reporting name was changed.
This sounds implausible, but there may be some truth in it, since during the saga of the RAF”s (non) procurement of the F-111, there is a note to be found in the files at Kew explicitly rejecting Firebolt as a possible name for the type. This was on the grounds that it might be confused over a degraded comms system with FIREBAR, and the principle of avoiding confusion of this sort through the same or easily-misheard names was noted as being a valid one to uphold.
(We ended up choosing ‘Merlin’ as the F-111 name, as the alternative of ‘Harrogate’ was deemed a little uninspiring)