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fighting in the valley when they shot down an Israeli aircraft. The pilot was dead and he got hold of his maps and found that the Jordanian positions were marked exactly where they were an hour previously.
‘During the June War only one Jordanian pilot had to eject and he broke his back,  though others were badly hit. Two Hunters were shot up at the end of the runway (at Mafraq) while they were vainly waiting for permission to take off; the pilot of one was killed as he was getting out of his aircraft. He was the only Jordanian pilot to die in the June War.

‘Before that, in the summer of 1964, Israeli aircraft penetrated over twenty kilometres into Jordanian territory. Four Hunters managed to engage and claimed one aircraft. Pictures seem to confirm this although no wreckage was discovered. The next day Israeli newspapers had on their front pages that Jordanian aircraft had violated Israeli air space and been chased off by the TAF. The penetration by the Israelis was witnessed on radar by a Royal Air Force officer and he completely refutes the Israeli story.’

The Six Day War destroyed all but four of the RJAF’s Hunters. Once the ceasefire was implemented the Jordanians went to great efforts to replace their losses; twelve more Hunter FGA.9s were acquired, some of them ex-Iraqi aircraft, and these were complemented by a small number of ex-USAF F-104s (HM King Hussein would have liked either the Mirage or the Lightning, but these were too expensive). The F-104 was not popular in RJAF service and suffered from high unserviceability, so for the time being it was the Hunter that remained the backbone of the country’s air defences.

The Royal Jordanian Air Force played no direct part in the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, adopting a purely defensive posture. In 1974 the Hunter began to be phased out of service, being replaced in Nos 1 and 2 Squadrons by the Northrop F-5 and in No 6 Squadron by the Cessna T-37. In 1975 the RJAF’s remaining thirty-one Hunters were transferred to the Sultan of Oman’s Air Force, were about half the number was placed in storage.
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