Slashdot Mirror
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."
that we won't have to think of Tom Cruise anymore when we see one of those planes flying!!!
Not to mention we won't have to think of "Danger Zone", "you've lost that loving feelin'" (when he sings it), and we won't have to think of Navy training jets as MIGs anymore!
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
I believe Jerry mouse had it his way this time, poor Tomcat.
:)
On a related note:
Last time I checked, our country only had 4 italian training jets for our air defense. Maybe they're going to donate those things
At first I thought the Navy was dumping Apache Tomcat! :) http://tomcat.apache.org/
The link below goes to a story that claims the F-14 was a formidable opponent for MIGs in Vietnam:
D =/20060919/NEWS/609190338&SearchID=73257582885024/
http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AI
The Grumman F-14D Tomcat is a twin-engine, two-seat supersonic airplane that in the years since the early 1970s was the Navy's primary fighter. Its battles with Russian-built MiGs over Vietnam made both planes famous.
Clearly he confused the F-14 with the F-4...
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
They have moved from Apache & Tomcat to IIS & ASP.NET.
Yeah, not having enough attrition is a big problem in the Tomcat business.
On a more serious subject, were these the ones with the foldy wings? Man, I have a Micro Machine that I'm somewhat sure is a Tomcat and the wings amaze me every time I play with it.
Er, you know. Every time when I used to play with it. Because...I'm too old for Micro Machines now...of...course...
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
The F-14 uses a variable sweep wing, the idea being that for maneuverability the wings are extended and for speed the wings are swept back.
Nice idea eh? The problem is there are six hydraulic actuators on each wing to make this happen. When one breaks, there's no way to tell which one is bad without pulling all six from the wing and putting each one on a test bench. Testing a single actuator takes about an hour... and Murphy states the bad actuator is the last one you test.
The F-18 may look like a lawn dart from hell, but at least it's relatively easier to work on.
A Human Right
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.
new planes
Because slamming them into carrier decks and parking them in salt water spray incurs no maintenece cost. Those things could just be used forever, if it weren't for that damn Military Industrial War Complex.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
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.
Im an avionics tech crrently stationed at NAS Oceana, and im not sorry to see them go because of this. F-18 gear is way easier and faster to work on. Not to mention a lower failure rate. That being said, alot of the older guys and pilots are sad to see them go.
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.
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.
I wasn't aware that the Hornet or the Intruder were capable of carrying(?) laws or regulations. The word you're looking for is ordnance.
... but they can be compared. Kind of like the cardinality of infinite sets.
It sucks to have to kill people, but you must be prepared to do it to prevent other killings and/or misery — deemed greater by some measure or another.
People have always been fascinated with things beautiful, weapons included — consider the swords and the firearms collections, for example. The fascination with a fighter plane is perfectly legitimate too.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Rather like the F-4 "Phantom," in the late '60s and the '70s, the F-14 was probably the most idealized fighter for an entire generation of kids in the '80s. Something about the design - the graceful lines, or the swing wings, perhaps - just made it more romantic than either the F-15 or F-16 to my mind. I got to see one at an airshow once, afterburners on and all, which was a treat given that I don't live on the coast.
Children of the '90s have their F-22s, and F-117s, to admire, I suppose. For the rest, the postively ancient B-52 still lives.
I was sad to see the F-4 fade away over the course of the '80s, though I wasn't around for its heyday. The same with the F-111 - the last true fighter-bomber (as opposed to strike fighter) in U.S. service. I have to wonder if the "Tomcat" won't be the last pure air-combat-fighter/interceptor ever put into production for the U.S. armed forces.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The US navy at one point had at least 699 F14's in service or on order (that sounds incredibly high, is it a typo on fas.org?), at a per-copy cost of $38,000,000, plus maintainence costs with exceed procurement costs over the lifetime of each aircraft. So figure $56,000,000,000.
Now here's a little quiz for your flight-sim jockeys out there. Guess how many bogeys the F14 shot down 34 year run, in total? Guess before you read the answer.
Answer: 4 jets and 1 helicopter.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the total US Federal Budget for 2006 was projected to be approximately $2,507 Billion. Of that, defense is $438 Billion, Social Security is $540 Billion, Medicare is $380 Billion, and Medicaid is $193 Billion. Social welfare dwarfs military spending now, and it will skyrocket over the next 30 years or so as the US baby boom generation is starting to retire.
Still, $438 Billion is all weapons, right? Well... no. Depending on the year, Defense spending, is about 23% for personnel (pay, benefits), 31% for operations and maintenance (fuel & parts), and 15% for R&D. Procurement is a stunning 18%. That is about 3% of the total Federal budget. 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. There are plenty of other things, like fire fighting equipment, periscopes, and pollution control equipment, night vision gear, and construction equipment.
The Federal budget also doesn't include state income taxes for which an even smaller percentage is going to go for defense related expenses. City and county taxes don't contribute anything either.
Overall, a minute percentage of American taxes goes to new weapons.
(I guess protest signs wouldn't look so scary if they complained that the US spent 1.6% of its Federal budget on weapons.)
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Well, yes. The plane was designed for air superiority combat against a capable contemporary air force (read, the Red Air Force). Since we thankfully never fought a full war with the Soviet Union, we never had a chance to use the Tomcat for its intended purpose (in the Gulf War, Iraq refused to face our Tomcats, knowing its air force would be slaughtered). Similarly, we never used our arsenal of nuclear missiles, our subs, or any of other huge classes of weapons for their designed purpose, either.
Now, it's possible that if we'd never built these weapons of war to fight the Soviet Union, people like Brezhnev wouldn't have taken the opportunity to conquer Western Europe or at least extort from it money to prop up the Soviet Union, and accordingly the only reason we built them was to fund a military-industrial complex. It's similarly possible that, had Danzig been handed over to Hitler when he demanded it, World War II would have been averted, and the only reason Chamberlain stood up to Hitler in 1939 was to please Britsh armaments manufacturers.
* 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.
Answer: 4 jets and 1 helicopter [aerospaceweb.org].
I know! My locks at home have prevented ZERO thefts by last count so I'm having them all removed! What a waste!
Also, I'm not fat, which makes all my exercise and healthy eating REALLY pointless. I'm wising up and switching to TV and twinkies!
"the Tomcat was a killing machine - I see no reason for us all to feel sentimental for something being "retired" (anthropomorphism anyone?) that existed on this earth for the sole reason of killing human beings."
The only thing the Tomcat was intended to "kill" were enemy bombers. They were built as super fast planes with weaponry that could reach out and touch air targets (bombers, specifically). They initially had no ground capability whatsoever. Their primary offensive weaponry couldn't hit the broad side of a barn, let alone a highly manueverable fighter aircraft. However, they could swoop in quickly, unload on large bomber groups (taking down huge numbers of bombers), and then run like hell from the escort aircraft.
The purpose of the Tomcat was to take down Russian bombers before Russian bombers carpet-bombed and/or dropped nuclear weapons on American cities. It wasn't a killing machine; it was a tool of deterrence. Without reason to believe their bombers would never make it to American shores, the Soviets would have felt a lot more comfortable launching a crippling first attack on America. ICBMs can only do but so much damage. Bombers, on the other hand, could cripple our counter-attack capability and nullify MAD.
In other words, the Tomcat served to help prevent what could have easily been the bloodiest and most destructive conflict in all of human history.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Funny you should mention that. My former linear algebra teacher used to work for SPAWAR back in the 60s-70s. He spent years collecting data on (at that time) existing aircraft and applying it to various formulas (mainly least square matrices, which is why he brought it up) to estimate the GSH/flight. He determined that it would be a maintenance nightmare and recommended against it. They ignored him and made the jets anyway.
He cited that as the key reason why he decided to teach. He thought that once in awhile someone in class might actually listen to him.
US carrier groups have been pretty underutilized since WWII in terms of their capital cost (the Nimitz cost a couple of billion with a B, and I think she's seen action near Libya once and did some support during the first Gulf War, and thats about it). But the entire purpose of being the biggest guy on the block is that so your fighter aces can grow old and die without ever seeing combat. Every time Communist Russia thought the prospect of universal socialism could be achieved faster by rolling over Western Germany, every time a tinpot dictator thinks "Hmm, starving my people for the last couple of decades has given me enough tanks to crush my neighbor... sounds appealing", every time Kim Jon Quackpot gets tired of eating grass and thinks "Hey I could get some sweet kimchi if I could take a quick vacation in the burning remains of Seoul", they look to the horizon and see a distinct absence of US military ready to kick their ass. And they remember that that could change tomorrow if we had a reason to change it. And so their tanks stay parked collecting rust while they scavenge parts to bring a couple out to the parade ground.
Of course, some folks and even some nation-states occasionally decide "Eh, the Americans were probably kidding about actually using that whole military machine thing". Hiya, Saddam, tell me: how did that invasion of Kuwait go for you again?
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
It's hard to find any grown man today who hasn't seen the classic man-flick "Top Gun."
e produce-if-they-were-mammals" would still follow orders. Additionally, I heard from one of the enlisted plane captains at Miramar at the time that Tom Cruise treated them like they were way low-class during filming. Way, way, uncool to treat the people responsible for the aircraft you are about to fly in like that. Apparently he's changed since then, but even so, I still consequently hate that movie, even more than most other chick-flicks.
Surely you jest. I saw it, and being in the Navy at the time, hated it, since it was nothing like the real Navy, and apparently a chick-flick. There are emotional issues, a love conflict, (boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl-again story line,) the men-playing-volleyball scene, and the ending with the protagonist confronting personal demons and finding self-actualization. Take away the F-14s, and it is your stereotypical chick-flick. I would say all it needs is Meg Ryan, but she's already there.
To be fair, I am kind of biased. Most (definitely not all) of the Navy (and other military) pilots I have known followed orders to the tee to safely complete their mission, and would never act like Maverick, so the whole screenplay is bull. Even the pilots who were bigger-penises-than-supernovae-would-require-to-r
Answer: 4 jets and 1 helicopter [aerospaceweb.org].
Apparently the Iranians added substantially to that score during the first Gulf war. Ironically enough, and if your information on Tomact air victories in US service is reliable, that means that the majority of F-14 Tomcat victories were achieved by the air force of the Islamic Republic of Iranian. It took Iran a while to recover their capability to operate the Tomcat after the revolution but when they did the Tomcat had an easy time especially vs. Iraqi MiG-21s, MiG-23s and assorted helicopters since the Iraqis only got pretty low grade export variants from the Soviets and had nothing capable of matching the Tomcat on any level until they got MiG-25 and Mirage fighters with good radar warning receivers, modern intercept radars and the all important long range missiles. Of course all this happened while Saddam was still America's friend and <sarcasm> before he joined the axis-of-evil </sarcasm>. What is really amazing is that Iran still manages to operate the Tomcat today 27 years after the revolution without manufacturer support.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Actually, there's a fair amount of evidence that the Russians never did have intentions beyond holding the WarPac line, and the main reason for their massive arms spend was an utter refusal to fight the Great Patriotic War again. I don't follow it terribly closely, but just as the US would claim it never intended to start a war, the Russians can quite plausibly make the same claim.
There's also a fair amount of evidence that prior to the Great Patriotic War Stalin was hoping that Nazi Germany and the UK would beat the shit out of each other so that the Soviet Union could pick up the shattered pieces of Western Europe.
You think they would have stopped at Berlin if we hadn't had a few million troops in Europe when Germany surrendered? You are dreaming. Ask Finland or the Baltic States what it was like to be nextdoor to Stalinist Russia.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Gee - and the average policemans gun is fired in anger how many times during it's life? Prior to the current war in Iraq you could pretty much say the same thing for the average Military rifle, or artillery piece, or tank, or machine gun...
Have it, and hope you don't need it is a LOT better than Need it - and don't have it
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Not true.
an ill wind that blows no good
To celebrate the flying of the last US F-14 it will be flown by Tom Cruise from Norfolk VA out to a carrier in the Atlantic. However the plane will only carry enough fuel to get it out a hundred miles out over the sea and will not have a functioning ejection seat. The carrier will also move during his flight to an undisclosed location. Fare thee well Tom!
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
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.