Identity of Wiggy still not established, though I'd like to suggest that he may have been the pilot who jettisoned a burning FGR2 whilst on 23 Sqn circa late 1980/early 81?
I have some nice piccies, including possibly the lowest F4 ever seen, if someone can explain how to include them in a post.
Would love to see the photographic results of flypasts at Mt Alice and Saunders Island too (just in case I was visible flying past in the background!). I've got a couple of shots of the late Mark Hanna visiting the latter whilst I was there on R&R. Unfortunately, they're on 35mm slide (must get them scanned).
For those 'just visiting', you might be interested to know that the FGR2 Flight Reference Cards show that a time to 30,000 ft could be achieved in a time of 1.1 minutes, covering 11 nm whilst burning 2730 lbs of fuel.
As for speed, whilst flying against the 'Aggressors' at Alconbury in 1981 I was one of a pair of FGR2s fighting a pair of F-5s and a mixed pair (one of each). My wingman and I (Stu T+9, who I bumped into at LGW earlier this year) decided that we would plunge headlong towards the centre of the ACMI range (to, according to the brief, receive our weapons) at Mach 1 point something, then turn round and rush back through again, shooting at anything we could whilst going b+lls out for home, at base height). As we started our second run through at M1.2 ish and at about 30,000 ft, I was only really watching the Mach meter, though I should have transferred my attention at some stage to KCAS (well, I'm no QFI!). Peak Mach No reached was M1.55 at 7,000 ft! I'll let a QFI work out the actual airspeed (OAT about -15C, QNH about 1000) but it was certainly a good deal higher than the 750 KCAS limit (though I seem to remember an 815 KCAS limit at about 13,000 ft). F-5 pilot tried to roll in behind me for Fox 2 shot but out of range (!) - said in debrief he'd never seen anything going so fast. Also saw M1.6 in level accel with drop tanks (had to throttle back to hold limit of 1.6), but never reached Mach 2.0 (waste of fuel really). Used to particularly enjoy Bucc affil over the sea and always tried to hang on to enough fuel to overtake one after shooting it. It was great to sail past a Bucc goin b+alls out at 620 kts, with 100 kts+ overtake.
Oh, and the scrambles from Wattisham for base defence against an inbound attack - most of the time spent in burner, not above about 2,000 ft and landing after about 15 mins. Ah, those were the days