[ via Military.com ] Aging F-14 Makes Final Bombing Runs : The U.S. Navy’s F-14 Tomcat fighter, built as a Cold War defense against Soviet bombers and emblazoned on popular imagination as Tom Cruise’s plane in the 1986 movie Top Gun, is just weeks away from making its final combat sorties over Iraq before being retired for good. A pair of Navy squadrons with the last 22 operational Tomcats are still flying bombing and strafing runs on insurgent targets in Iraq, jetting off the deck of the U.S. aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Persian Gulf…. Its final combat sorties are taking place in coming weeks, before the Roosevelt departs the Persian Gulf early next year, taking the last American F-14s to their retirement in the United States…. Tomcats didn’t see combat until six years later, in 1981, when a squadron flying near Libya’s Mediterranean coast shot down a pair of SU-22 Fitter fighters after one of the Libyan pilots fired a missile at the U.S. jets – and missed…. U.S. intelligence assessments say five or six of Iran’s early model Tomcats can probably still fly, but do so rarely, given the U.S. embargo on the Islamic Republic and the prodigious maintenance and parts the F-14s need, Howe said…. In the Gulf War in 1990, U.S. Tomcat pilots took on the Iraqi air force – losing one plane to an Iraqi missile and shooting down one helicopter – but the dogfights were over in three days, when the Iraqi air force was destroyed or fled…. The pair of squadrons on board the Roosevelt fly daily over Iraq, giving air cover to U.S. ground troops fighting guerrillas in Baghdad and north of the capital, Howe said…. One night last month, Howe said his pair of F-14s flew low over Baghdad’s airport to investigate reports of U.S. C-130 cargo planes taking rebel anti-aircraft fire.