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The US Navy Says Goodbye to the Tomcat
jonerik writes "Though it's not being widely reported, this week marks the end of the line for the F-14 Tomcat in US Navy service. First flown in 1970, the Grumman F-14 Tomcat was easily one of the world's most powerful, advanced, and deadly aircraft for many years, capable of flying at Mach 2.3 and firing its half-dozen Mach 5 AIM-54 Phoenix air-to-air missiles at targets as much as 100 miles away. Having been gradually replaced during the last several years by the newer F/A-18E/F, the last of the aircraft in US service will be officially retired on Friday, September 22nd in a ceremony at Virginia's Oceana Naval Air Station. However, at least a few F-14s will continue to fly for a few more years: Iran — which took delivery of 79 aircraft before the overthrow of the Shah — still flies the plane, though only a small number (perhaps ten or twenty) are believed to still be in service due to a lack of spare parts and attrition."
Yes! All none of them!
I've read elsewhere that Tomcats were used as strike aircraft during Shrub's crusade.
Well you're half right. They weren't designed with air-to-ground in mind, but it was modified to perform in a limited strike role later on. They did pretty well over Libya, and I believe they dropped some bombs in Iraq and maybe Afghanistan as well. From http://www.airtoaircombat.com/background.asp?id=14 &bg=8
The F-14A can carry up to 14,500 pounds of bombs and rockets, although it was not originally assigned a ground-attack mission. The under-fuselage pallets which ordinarily carry Phoenix missiles can also mount bomb racks for 1000-pound Mk 83 or 2000-pound Mk 84 bombs or other free-fall weaponry. As early as 1972, a Tomcat flew with 18 Mk 82 bombs, plus a complement of missiles. VF-122 dropped the first bombs from a Fleet Tomcat on August 8, 1990. Although the F/A-18 Hornet is the primary air-to-ground aircraft of the Navy fleet squadrons, the F/A-18 is felt to lack a sufficient range/payload capacity, and the air-to-ground capable F-14 Tomcat was felt to be essential to permit a carrier-based air wing to retain its full capacity. However, there were initially some shortages of bomb racks, and it was often true that only one F-14 squadron on each carrier was equipped to carry out a secondary ground attack role, with the other squadron being TARPS-equipped. Software for a ground attack mission has now been installed on all F-14Bs and Ds, as well on some F-14As. Today, the training syllabus includes some emphasis on air-to-ground strike, although such missions would only be carried out in a relatively permissible combat environment because of the high cost of the Tomcat.
...and a rousing cheer for the guy who can't tell an F14 from a C123.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
One of the biggest problems with those old jets is the massive number of ground service hours required for every hour of air time. The F-14 was one of the worst. Not to mention that maintaining a certain level of air superiority might require X of an older type of jet, versus 1/4X of a newer type of jet.
Often you can save money buy spending money.
And those old F-14s aren't immediately ground up into Bender sandwiches -- They usually go to a graveyard to sit around in a state of somewhat possibly potentially close to readiness, just in case a really big war breaks out.
All true of the F/A-18A through D. The ones that are replacing the Tomcats are fortunately more capable. The Super Hornet (E and F model) is 20% larger, has two extra weapon stations, and quite a bit more capability.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Hornet
Its no Tomcat but its not the regular Hornet either.
"Foldy wings". :-)
Most carrier aircraft have wings that fold. Usually
they fold *up* and not back. Storage is at a premium.
emt 377 emt 4
A nerdy fact for you
History and stats on the F-14
emt 377 emt 4
The F-14 was a very interesting plane. It was a dedicated interceptor, built for pure speed - not really made for dogfighting, no matter what Top Gun claimed. It also carried the most powerful air intercept radar in either the Navy or the Air Force inventory. The backseat guy was the Radar Intercept Officer - it took a dedicated crewman just to work the damn thing. It was kind of like a flying SAM platform, almost.
It had two main roles. First was the BARCAP role. The USA kept carrier groups on patrol in case the Soviets launched bomber strikes, and the F-14 was the first line of defense against them. The idea was that it could catch up with a Soviet bomber group before they reached launch range, lock onto the big bombers, fire its AIM-54s, and get out once the missiles went terminal. It wasn't supposed to mix it up with the escorting fighters, that was the job of escorting F-14s or the F-15s from the USAF. Once the USSR collapsed, BARCAP wasn't such a big deal, so that's when they decided to give it ground attack capability.
It was also tasked with Fleet Air Defense, meaning to protect the carrier air group from airborne threats - bombers dedicated to anti-ship strikes, cruise missiles, fighters scrambled to attack Navy bombers. In this role, it was obseleted by the AEGIS cruiser as much as the F/A-18.
I apologize in advance if I got any of the facts wrong - this is just as I remember it as a plane geek.
While its true that the F-14's primary role throughout its length of service has been as an air-to-air interceptor, it could indeed drop bombs. I don't know that the F-14 did any bombing in Vietnam (the US Navy had several aircraft to fill this role, most notably the A-6 Intruder which was in service well into the 1990s), but at the very least it did drop laser-guided bombs (with laser designation by other aircraft, presumably F-18s) in Bosnia in 1995.
I don't know the numbers, but the poster you're responding to is talking about military spending as a proportion of federal income tax revenues, not as a proportion of GDP.
The 2007 Federal budget allocates about 20% of its funds for defense spending not 64%.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I live in Virginia Beach and F-14s have flown here for many, many years. They are cool planes, more so than the F-18s, and will be missed.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
* second-sourced motor safety made incorrectly by the morons at Raytheon at fault there. I have almost as many stories about dumbfuck engineers from Raytheon "reinterpreting" design drawings to save money on manufacture and thereby delivering unusable missile parts. Now Raytheon has bought up all the US missile designers/manufacturers, Hughes included. One wonders how a company that's run so badly ends up owning the whole show, but I'll save rants about congressional lobbyists for another time...
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-706964884 2128183770
Ultimately, there is no escape from the fact that the government must always have the greatest capacity for violence. It is the basis of orderly society. Otherwise, how could the government enforce the law or prevent itself from being replaced by a group with greater force at their disposal? And as weaponry evolves, populations grow, the government has to stay out ahead. And that means researching, developing, and buying new weapons and technology for the part of the government responsible for violence: the military and the police force(s).
It sucks. It sucks BAD. Militaries are the most contemptible organizations on the planet, followed shortly thereafter by police. But they're necessary, at least until we can develop a virus that exlusively kills jackasses.
Actually, the F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet is a COMPLETELY different jet than the F/A-18 C/D. The only reason they kept the F18 designation was for funding purposes.
Ride the skies
That's great that the US Air force can handle that many planes. Too bad few if any of them are Tomcats being that it is a NAVY plane...
Chamberlin did not "stand up to Hitler"
As I recall, Chamblerin was folding like a wet mattress.
*Churchill* stood up to Hitler.
But not even all of that 3% goes to buying weapons. A sizable chunk of it goes to ship building for the Navy, for example. Another chunk goes to buying ammo.
Last time I checked warships counted as weapons. Or is the Navy building cruiseships?
Don't get me wrong -- I'm not a flower child by any means. But the grandparent has a point even if his numbers are flawed. We spend way too much money on our military. You'd think that the several thousand deliverable nuclear warheads would be enough to ensure our safety......
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Not true.
an ill wind that blows no good
This post is complete and utter bollocks.
First, the Cobra. The Cobra is a great-looking airshow maneuver that has zero utility in actual air combat. It's a high-alpha maneuver that does nothing but dump a whole lot of energy and gets nothing in return. "I'll hit the brakes, he'll fly right by" is a bullshit Hollywood thing that in real combat would get you dead as the guy who "flies right by"'s wingman now has you boresighted and you have no energy to do anything with. Moreover, the notion that American aircraft can't do it is dead-on wrong. There's a well-known photo of Bill Dana, former X-15 test pilot, doing just that in an F-14. You don't need vectored thrust to do one, you need an inlet geometry that can handle the high AoA without choking off the engines.
Second, the bit about 360-degree engagement is a pure pipe dream. It is complete nonsense. Some advanced Russian aircraft have a limited degree of off-boresight engagement capability, using a head-tracking system similar to that on the AH-64 Apache, and missile seeker heads than can look around up to about 60-degrees off-boresight. The only thing I can think is that you're confusing the ability of modern IR-guided missiled to engage targets in ways other than right up the tailpipe. The SU-37 can supposedly carry a rear-firing missile, but that doesn't in any way equate to 360-degree field-of-fire.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
Couple of things. You have to understand what "to track" means. What specifically they are talking about with the AIM-54/AWG-9 weapons system is that it can engage 6 targets at once.
The AIM-54 Phoenix is guided initially by the F-14's AWG-9 radar is what is known as "semi-active radar homing". The missile sees the reflections off the target from the F-14's radar. Once the missile gets close enough, it spins up its own active radar which will take over terminal guidance.
"Old school" radars are directed mechanically (the dish actually moves left and right and up and down). To track a target, the dish points directly at the target instead of scanning back and forth. With the AIM-7 Sparrow for example, (a SARH missile) the firing aircraft could track one and only one target. With the AWG-9, a Tomcat can divide its attention among 6 targets at once, providing guidance for 6 missiles in the air at once. This was a Big Deal at the time. Now with electronically scanned array radars, it is a LOT easier to do (no pointing a physical dish).
The AIM-120 AMRAAM is guided initially by an inertial system (the firing plane tells it the target info, location, speed, etc) then when it gets close enough it starts looking for the target with its own radar. This leaves the firing platform free to do whatever it wants, there is no initial need to provide target illumination like with the Phoenix. Thus, with AMRAAMs you can engage as many targets as you have missiles. The AIM-120 is a damn fine missile, you have to keep in mind the AIM-54 was in service before the AMRAAM was even a glimmer in an engineer's eye.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
No offense, but that is totally wrong. The tomcat was designed for one thing and one thing only: to protect the carrier group from nuclear capable soviet bombers. The tomcat was so physically large because it was basically a weapon platform... the awg-75 (?) radar system and up to six aim-54 missles that were used to flight out very fast (what dogfighter needs mach 2.4+ speed?) and rain Phoenixes on the bombers before a single one could take out the entire carrier group with a nuke. The Navy did studies and determined that that was preceisely what the Soviets would do. As a dogfighter, the Tomcat was for most of its career crippled by the anemic Pratt & Whitney TF-30 engines also used in the F-111. Aside from tending to flame out (the justification for Goose's death in Top Gun) at high alpha and spraying compressor blades everywhere, they did not have the umph to counter the induced drag when the Tomcat was turning. Hence, it bled energy and couldn't sustain corner velocity. Think about it... it's got a huge planform and can't turn... not a recipe for a great dogfighter. It wasn't until the DFE engines and later the GEs that allowed the Tomcat to take advantage of it extremely low loading, but that was years into its service life. The majority of the fleet was always the poor A version. Incidentally, remember the Aldrich Aames spy case? Well, the Tomcat was one of the casualties of that affair. He passed inflated radar estimates to the U.S. government which caused the Navy to calculate that the Tomcat would not be non-survivable in light of the threat of Soviet radar advances. So the Tomcat was cancelled depsite the fact that it had been re-engined (with the same GEs used in the F-15, making it the dogfighter it should have been originally) and received firmware upgrades making it an extremely capable attack platform called the Bombcat. In a move that sparked a scandal, Congress ordered Grumman to not only stop production, but to also destroy all the tooling, ensuring the the project could not be easily restarted. And today, we have the F-18E/F, which in many ways fails to meet the performance of the old C/D version. Each time it failed a test, they simply relaxed the criteria, and (I don't know if it was ever corrected) I remember that it was discovered that the Super Hornet behaved extremely badly at high alpha, where a fighter pilot who wants to live another day usually flies. There's a great book called "The Tomcat Story" which is worth reading. it's written by one of the program managers. I think the above poster was confusing the F-14 with the F-15, which was created when the CIA was scared out of its wits by its own estimates of the Soviet Foxbat. So they told MacD to pull out all the stops and basically build a superplane with fewer tradeoffs.
Chamberlain left office after declaring war on Germany for its invasion of Poland, after refusing to fold on Hitler's demand for Danzig.
Did he screw up royally on Czechoslovakia? Did he totally misestimate Hitler in 1938? Yes, of course he did. And he knew he did, which is why he stepped down so somebody credible could take over the war effort. But Chamberlain did stand up to Hitler in the end.