Boy am I going to miss this plane. I remember my days aboard the USS John F. Kennedy (I worked on A6 Intruders) and watching Tomcats being shot and trapped off the deck, what an amazing experience. It will be a sad day in US Naval Aviation. The newer, sexier F-18′s are great, but in my book, just the shear intimidation of the F-14′s looks are enough reason to keep it around. I guess that’s why I am not working at the Pentagon making those “executive” decisions huh?
[ 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.
But by next fall, Navy pilots will have completed their switch to the smaller, more reliable F-18 Hornet, said Commander Jim Howe, deputy commander of the Roosevelt’s F-14 squadrons.
Despite the dogfighting flash of Top Gun, in real life the Tomcat was so tough to fly and maintain that it became known as the “turkey,” said Howe, “because it doesn’t look like it should fly.”
The first squadron of Tomcats, a big two-seater with its signature retractable wings, screamed across the skies in 1971, after rolling off Grumman’s assembly line in Bethpage, New York.
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. Howe declined for security reasons to name the date of the Roosevelt’s departure for its base in Virginia.
Most remaining F-14s will be mothballed in the desert on Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Arizona.
“It’s a bittersweet time for all the Tomcat people,” Howe, 38, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, told The Associated Press by telephone from aboard the Roosevelt. “The powers that be figured it was time to put it to rest.”
When it emerged 34 years ago, the Tomcat was considered a major coup in the U.S.-Soviet arms race. The F-14 carried up to six Phoenix air-to-air missiles that could be fired simultaneously and guided to six separate targets.
The Pentagon envisioned the F-14 defending U.S. carrier groups against fleets of Soviet bombers, said Rear Admiral John W. Miller, a former Tomcat radar operator who is deputy commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command in Bahrain.
“It was a phenomenal capability when it was developed,” Miller said. “It’s one of the planes that helped us win the Cold War.”
The Tomcat’s wartime debut in April 1975 was a humble one: providing cover for the U.S. evacuation of Saigon just before the city fell to the North Vietnamese.
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.
In 1989, Tomcats downed a pair of Libyan MiG-23 fighters, after apparently deeming the Libyans had displayed “hostile intent.”
The Tomcat had an even longer adversarial relationship with Iraq.
In the only known export of the plane, the United States sold 80 F-14s to Iran in 1974, while the country was a U.S. ally under the shah. During the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Iranian Tomcats – now defending Iran’s Islamic revolution – downed three Iraqi fighter jets. Saddam Hussein’s air force is also thought to have downed a handful of Iranian F-14s.
Ironically, the last flying Tomcats may be Tehran’s.
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.
“I have almost no doubt that their F-14s are in such poor shape that I would not call them operational,” 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. After that, the air-to-air equipped F-14s were of little use.
Soon after, carrier-based F-14s began enforcing the no-fly zone over southern Iraq under Operation Southern Watch. They’ve flown over Iraq ever since.
Upon the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Tomcat’s dogfighting prowess became an anachronism. The Navy retooled it as a ground-attack jet, with capabilities to drop guided bombs.
Tomcats joined the air war over Bosnia and Kosovo in the late 1990s, dropping laser-guided bombs for the first time.
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.
They haven’t seen as much action as Air Force and Marine F-18s and AV-8 Harriers, which have been engaged in increasingly intense bombings of rebel positions in western Iraq.
Still, the Tomcats have proven useful.
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. The insurgents also opened fire on the Tomcats, giving away their position. Howe said he radioed the rebel coordinates and U.S. ground troops captured the men and their anti-aircraft gun.
The Navy’s Tomcat pilots will be retrained to fly two versions of the Hornet, the two-seat F-18F and the one-seat F-18E, Howe said.
The Tomcat isn’t the oldest combat jet still active in the U.S. arsenal. The B-52 Stratofortress bomber, which entered service in 1954 and still blasts targets in Afghanistan wins that honor. Also going strong in Afghanistan is the Air Force’s A-10 Warthog, which debuted in 1972.
The F-14 became notorious for the painstaking maintenance it needs: 40 shop hours for each hour in the air, four times the tinkering needed by its F-18 replacement.
“It’s been flying on the backs of the maintainers for a long time,” Howe said.
The F-18s are also easier to fly, Howe said. But the Tomcat has a few qualities that pilots will miss. Howe, who will move to a one-seat F-18E, said he’ll miss having a companion in the cockpit.
“I’m a fan of the two-seat concept,” Howe said. “You get a synergistic effect that pays dividends when people start shooting at you.”
4 comment(s) for this post:
Flying JC:
13 Aug 2009
I could'nt agree more either. I really love this fast aircraft. But that is unfortunately the way it works : cost saving, resourse optimisation... Thses great decades which showed us the most exciting aviation period of time has gone, and now, Concorde, Tomcat, and other great aircrafts are not flying anymore. But thanks to the dreams they have drawn in our minds, they will still be alive in our hearts.
Farewell F-14 Tomcat !!!
Rajko Pljevaljcic:
23 Jan 2007
I'm just a fan of Tomcat, and I didn't know it will be retired so soon. I'm sad about that, I think it was the best, and if not, then the most beautiful and powerful plane in US Army.
Rajko, Serbia
Kreeos:
23 Dec 2006
It's really sad that they've decided to retire such a beautiful plane. There's no doubt that she will be missed.
C:
01 Sep 2006
Couldn't agree more that it's sad such a great aircraft is being retired. However, having flown both, don't think I've ever heard anyone refer to the Hornet as being sexier than the Tomcat!
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