Seriously? What’s going on with this aircraft. Without combat flaps down, the plane pulls much more instantaneous AOA and accelerates faster, and seems to rate better. But then when you drop the “flaps”, instantly your turn rate drops. you supposedly produce more lift, but you can’t pull as much AoA. Someone explain this for me? It’s like things are backwards on this plane.
Flaps increase lift through 2 mechanisms - firstly they increase the effective camber of the wing - ie the distance over the top of the wing compared to the straight line distance under the wing.
The 2nd thing they do is increase the effective AoA of the wing compared to the AoA of the fuselage by dropping the trailing edge - ie the wing AoA increases, but the nose AoA does not.
At a guess and without knowing the specific maths involved, it may be that in this case the wing is nearer to stall, so you can’t get as much nose AoA as with flaps up.
combat flaps on the F4E just deploys the leading edge slats
that already automatically deploy when they are needed
Could it be having a lower sustained turn rate but tighter turn circle?