المعلومة صحيحة لكنها غير دقيقة بتفاصيلها، والصحيح أن السعوديين عرضوا الطائرات على المصريين لكنهم طلبوا منهم تشغيلها والتدرب عليها وأخذها بعد ذلك لمصر، ولم يشرفوا على تدريبهم كما يذكر الأمير بندر !! بالنتيجة، المصريين عادوا بخفي حنين من المملكة بعد قضاء سنة كاملة !!! يذكر تفاصيل القصة الكاتب المتخصص في شؤون الشرق الأوسط Nadav Safran في كتابه Saudi Arabia: The Ceaseless Quest for Security أو المملكة العربية السعودية .. المسعى المستمر للأمن !!
في البداية، الكاتب يتحدث عن فشل الطائرة في اليمن وسقوط البعض منها وضعف أداء المدربين السعوديين !!! ثم يتحدث عن موضوع توجه الطيارين والفنيين المصريين في السعودية للتدرب على تشغيل الطائرة وجلبها لمصر، وأن العملية فشلت كتطبيق (كما ينقل عن الشاذلي) بعد قضاء سنة كاملة في السعودية وأن الأمر كان مضيعة للوقت والطائرات لم تجلب لمصر!!!
In the first place, the Lightnings turned out to have been built for too specific an interceptor role, and their conversion to multirole weapons, including ground attack, was largely unsuccessful. Altogether, the aircraft proved to be extremely difficult to keep serviceable, and the British contract support effort was poorly organized and inadequately capitalized and staffed. The Saudi trainees were deficient in preliminary qualifications and thus forced a slow and low standard of instruction, and the Saudi bureaucracy added more problems than it helped resolve. Finally, compounding the difficulties were the extensive arrests and purges of air force personnel in connection with the 1969 coup attempts, and the intensification of the already cumbersome security procedures to guard against disloyal acts.
The result is illustrated by the following episode, reported by General Saad al-Din Shazli, the Egyptian chief of staff before and during the 1973 war. In November 1971, or six years after the inception of the Anglo-American program, Saudi Arabia agreed to contribute two squadrons of Lightnings to a collective Arab military effort in anticipation of war, but said that it could not provide the pilots and asked Egypt to supply them instead. As mentioned earlier, Faisal offered the twenty lightnings to Sadat on the eve of one of Sadat's trips to Moscow. The fact that at this time the Saudis received the first twenty of 55 F-5s ordered in 1971 suggests that the Saudis switched to the F-5s pilots who had been assigned to the Lightnings and did not have enough pilots to man both groups of aircraft.
At any rate, Shazli's report says that in May 1972, at Sadat's insistence and contrary to his own judgment, he sent a first contingent of seven Egyptian pilots and thirty-three mechanics to Saudi Arabia to receive instruction in operating and servicing the lightnings before bringing them over. "It was a waste of time," he concluded:"There were so many problems with the serviceability of the aircraft and the standards of instruction and administration, that after wasting a year, our pilots finally returned to Egypt. The Lightnings never came."
