Re: F4 Phantom - Flying Bus???
The original Toom was called the AH-1 (Attack, McDonnell) and had flat straight wings and a flat tail and plain side inlets. IIRC they had some pitch-up problems (lot of things did then) and drooped the tail so that it would not get blanketed by the wing wake (and added the dogtooth on the wing). They found that they needed a little dihedral on the wing, so rather than bend the whole thing they applied a larger degree of crank to the folding bits. Then the Navy decided that they wanted a Mach 2-plus fighter, which meant new inlets. All this was done before the first aircraft flew, which was not bad going for the 1950s. Then the Navy wanted more detection range = bigger antenna = characteristic bloodhound nose, and raised the RIO's seat.
The great and good Bill Gunston recalls seeing the first wire photo of the prototype in the Flight office, with everyone falling over laughing about this clearly screwed-up design...