I was involved in 4 firings from the F4, all of which were 'interesting' in one way or another. My first was an 9G telemetry round on APC when I was still on convex. It was a successful firing but it had been slightly handicapped by the inability of the flt cdr in the boot to read the range checklist; his crime was revealed when the QWI played the audio tape and the assembled crowd heard me ask politely at the -30 secs point (when we got the Punch call) if it would be a good idea to put the Master Arm live. To be fair, he did buy some beers as a result.
The second was a Sparrow III QRA firing, for which we were well aware that failure to get a war-shot missile away would be deemed a foul for the Sqn. We were both chuffed when the radar failed the BIT but pressed to the range anyway. We had to hold off to the north of the range, which gave us more time, but it was also the point where our photo chase pitched up on the wing - we were busy trying to fix the radar and neither of us looked properly at him, which was a shame as he was trying to indicate that he had lost comms. Oops. At the wash-up we found that his nav's Noddy Guide was out of date and the freq was wrong. Full marks though, he guessed from the straight track into the depths of the range that things were close and started filming about 5 seconds after he saw the target smoke - he only missed the first 2m of missile travel. The firing itself went right down to the wire as we could not get the target locked up. We agreed it would be a boresight firing if all else failed, so no pressure... As it happened, the hero nav managed to get a gyros out lock as we approached min range and with just enough radar settling time to keep the QWIs happy. It worked.
My photo chase was a short notice firing and also a war-shot missile (SKF, I think). Everything went very well, the firer eased away for post-launch separation per the brief and I followed the missile. Unfortunately, shortly thereafter it pitched rapidly up, down and up again, at which point the warhead detonated into a rather pretty orange and black ball. I got quite a close look at the continuous expanding rod, which was still expanding, plus a few other chunks of debris, all of which missed us. A good reminder that just because you have fired a missile, don't assume it will always work!
My final missile was another short-notice war-shot. The firing itself was uneventful but we could probably have done without the generator failure 10 miles before trigger press. I'm not sure how many F4 firings were done with the RAT out, perhaps some other PPruners can enlighten me.
EXFIN, I will PM you the details once I have retrieved my log books from the office.