I served in the last F-14 squadron, VF-31. When President Bush landed on our carrier (Mission Accomplished!) they had the inferior F-18s in the background for the political shots. We were told that was because the US taxpayers would be pissed if they knew how ripped off they got for the F-18, which was replacing the F-14 in all of the squadrons.
This might be just F-14 bravado, of course, but I do also remember that like the second week of "shock and awe" (the initial Iraq campaign bombing) they stopped all F-14 flights for the same reasons. F-14s were trouncing the sorties of the F-18s, even though we were one squadron vs four or five of their squadrons, because we were the only jets capable of actually reaching Bagdad from the carrier and we were able to convert our bombs to "smart bombs" much faster (F-14s break a lot more so our techs were more skilled).
By the time of the second gulf war, the F-14D cost 20% more per unit than the F-18E, and some 80-100% more to maintain. I'm not sure how you're concluding that the taxpayers were ripped off by that.
Also, didn't we have airbases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait? Why were we relying on carrier aircraft for bombing Bagdad when we could have been using F-15s and F-16s?
>Also, didn't we have airbases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait?
Yes, I believe Al Jaber Kuwait had already constructed one of the largest post-Vietnam expeditionary airfields* with multiple US squadrons (including F/A-18s) present before the war officially began.
* "Expeditionary Airfields (EAFs) are portable airfields that can be constructed, used, broken down after the completion of a mission and moved to another site for re-use."[1]
When you evaluate cost effectiveness you have to look beyond unit cost to what capabilities and effects the taxpayers actually get for their money. The F/A-18E/F is pretty good at short range strike missions, but it has less range and requires more tanker support for longer range missions. It's also generally inferior for the fleet air defense mission, especially compared to a notional "Super Tomcat 21" equipped with a modern AESA radar. Fortunately the US Navy hasn't had to actually defend a fleet from air attack since the Vietnam War, so the Super Hornet deficiencies haven't really bitten them (yet).
90% of the roles that we used carrier aircraft for 40 years ago are now fulfilled by a combination of Drones, Cruise Missiles, SAMs, and CIW Systems. I'm not even convinced we really need the Super Hornets anymore, it seems like we're holding on to them for the 1 in a million "just in case" scenarios.
If the squadron really was doing the work of 4-5 F-18 squadrons, costing 20% more to build and 100% more to maintain would make them much more cost effective plane.
> By the time of the second gulf war, the F-14D cost 20% more per unit than the F-18E, and some 80-100% more to maintain. I'm not sure how you're concluding that the taxpayers were ripped off by that.
He/she isn't concluding that, they are repeating what they were told at the time.
What was the feeling from the squadrons on the whole "Mission Accomplished!" political chaff after the fact?
I heard the banner was pre-planned by the ship as a celebration for the completion of the cruise, but then it was prominent in the photo ops and Bush got attacked as though he were celebrating victory in Iraq.
Curious on thoughts from someone who was there, or if you all even had opinions about it afterwards.
Excellent question. I worked in politics after the military and when I was in the West Wing during the Bush admin it came up once! They said the same thing, that it was the ship's idea. I reminded them that aircraft carriers don't have printing presses so it would be a little hard for the sailors to put that kind of banner together.
It could be that the ship's leadership wanted something like that (they are politicians too). But at least in my squadron we were all furious the president was coming because we had been out at sea for the longest nuclear and F-14 cruise of all time (10 months) and we just wanted to go home to our families but now we are delayed another week for a political stunt and have to spend the next two weeks cleaning the ship in preparation.
It's fun to have been a part of history in that way though. And when I have some kind of career advancement I always throw up a "mission accomplished" banner as a joke.
290 days with prep for a presidential visit at the end is a helluva deployment. Nice to see Wikipedia records the sacrifice: https://web.archive.org/web/20120328094805/http://www.av8rst... And looks like the captain made flag, so apparently someone was happy. ;)
F-18s def are lower maintenance overall but they couldn’t go very far (important when your ship isn’t docked in Bagdad) or drop bombs in adverse weather so not very useful during a war. Doesn’t mean they are not politically useful, though. One part is made in each congressional district on purpose.
Super hornets have about 100mi shorter combat range than the Tomcat. That said they are capable of buddy air-air refueling so that can extend their range by a bit (at the cost of an extra pilot, airframe, and associated costs which doesn’t get to carry a useful payload).
True but the F-18s simply couldn't do many of the jobs at all. I obviously have a bias but I think it is very plausible that politics had a lot more to do with it than maintenance.
I think we thought they were a lot more sophisticated than they actually were. But shock and awe was designed to basically neutralize all of that anyway. The Navy was the night shift and that included a lot of tomahawk missiles too. The Air Force was the daytime campaign so there was a lot of capability to take out different threats.
The biggest threat I remember was we were very sure Saddam had chemical weapons (mostly because we sold them to him previously, but I digress). So we had to carry gas masks and did chemical attack drills alot. We also were forced to take many shots including small pox and an experimental anthrax shot. Many of my friends have medical conditions they believe are related to those shots.
Being on the ground and dealing with MOPP gear was no fun either. The Army certainly took the risk very seriously. The MOPP gear receded into the background on later deployments. While all the shots may be a slight concern, I am more afraid of breathing in all the invigorating air from the burn pits.
Surprising re shifts! More recently, the Navy has been biased towards day shifts due to carrier landing windows. My understanding is a big part of the Navy training/brief/debrief focus is the recovery.
There's a big difference in number of personnel involved and how important equipment (radar, IFF, landing systems) are for daytime vs nighttime recoveries.
> Isn't shock and awe designed to strike fear and terror in the hearts and minds of the populace? When you bomb bridges, railroads and vital energy infrastructure, the civilians are the ones who suffer the most.
Per the Wikipedia article on the invasion and campaign being referenced, no this was not the intent:
> In practice, U.S. plans envisioned simultaneous air and ground assaults to incapacitate the Iraqi forces quickly [...] would allow them to attack the heart of the Iraqi command structure and destroy it in a short time, and that this would minimize civilian deaths and damage to infrastructure.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraq#Opening_...
The real impact turned out ... a bit different than this claimed strategy
No, it was designed to strike fear and terror into the hearts of common soldiers so that they would run away/surrender instead of fighting. Civilians were just collateral damage.
The uprising happened during the first war, but Bush I decided that he’d rather keep Sadam in power and that Kuwait’s oil was enough…
I did two Western Pacific tours (West-Pacs) while in the Navy. On the first one in 1979 we had the F-4 Phantoms and on the second one we were introduced to the Tomcat's. For me, this was a mind blowing experience.
The F-14 is a very large aircraft. It had electroluminescent exterior lighting that looked straight out of a sci-fi novel and with its differential rear stabilizers it looked like a living machine, especially when landing.
I was an electronics tech in a bomber (A6) squadron so I didn't know much about the workings of the aircraft, as mentioned in the article. I will say that I am always in awe when I see that aircraft and will always be.
What carrier were you on (and air wing) that still had F-4s in 1979? By the time I got to the Enterprise in early 1976, the embarked air wing, CVW-14, had no F-4s anymore, just F-14s (and A-7s and A-6s, etc.).
The article's picture of a Soviet Bear bomber above a carrier, being escorted by armed F-14s flying close aboard, brought back memories of how we were always greeted with a "welcome to WestPac" flyover by a Bear, and we likewise sent up armed F-14s to make sure everyone stayed peaceable. On my first WestPac deployment, one of my roommates in "Boys Town" (an eight-man bunkroom for junior officers, just below the flight deck) was a warrant officer who ran the ship's photo lab; he brought us all 8x10 glossies of a similar photo, taken by the back-seater in one of the F-14s. I still have mine somewhere.
We also had the Bear's and the trawlers. I think that had a lot to do the spy John Walker Jr.. He gave the Russians the cryptographic codes for the Navy, and they could read all of our communications. That's why the Bear's knew exactly when the carriers were changing station.
I was an AT and programmed the "code of the day" into each aircraft, every day. Mode-4, IFF.
Before the F-14s were retired (2004-ish?), I attended an air show at the Quonset Air National Guard Base [0] .
As part of the show, an F-14 took off from the runway and then went vertical (I assume on afterburners). It stayed vertical until it disappeared into the clouds.
It felt like I was living in some sci-fi future, watching a spaceship launch. I was in awe. It was like some Stewart Cowley [1] book [2] come to life.
IMHO it's still one of the coolest-looking fighter planes ever, up there with the YF-23 [3] and Su-35 [4].
I have a vague childhood memory of looking through a large illustrated book about spaceships in our public library and being in awe. When I came back on another trip, it was gone. I never knew the name or author, but the memory surfaces every few years. It always made me a little sad, because I couldn’t remember enough to find it as an adult - just the vibes I got as a child.
I am now 99% sure it was Spacecraft 2000 - 2100 AD. Thank you so much for posting the name and helping me solve this mystery.
You're welcome! One day when I was pretty young, my dad brought that book home from the local library. He didn't often do stuff like that, so it's a really nice memory.
I couldn't remember much about the book either. I did some digging a few years ago when I wanted to get a copy for one of my kids.
Tangent: the spaceship designs in the Homeworld games [0] remind me a lot of that book.
I agree about the coolest looking. It has a very muscular look from the front. I'd also add F-4 and Mig-29 to the list. F-22 isn't bad either although not as cool as YF-23.
The F-15 can also do that. I guess they don't operate from carriers though but otherwise they're probably the ones that took away a lot of the F-14's niche.
AFAIK, the F-15 was in fact the first fighter that could accelerate vertically. I'm not sure the F-14 ever had enough power to do that. IIRC some newer variants of the F-16 can do it with the improved engines, as well as other modern fighters.
I miss watching F-14s at the airshows. It was always a good show. Though I have to say, having recently watched a solo F-35 demo and having modest expectations, I was impressed. It may be a boondoggle and massively overpriced, but it seems to have the performance now.
I don't think the F-15 would be the first to accelerate vertically, the English Electric Lightning was also known for incredible climb performance even in the vertical and it's a much older design of aircraft.
Tomcat et all, all the swing-wing aircraft were the solutions of an interim era in which the engines were still not yet developed enough to make up for the drag that wings with low angles induced, but the aircraft needed such low-sweep-angle wings in order to be able to take of and land in short distances.
From MIG-23 to Tomcat to F-111 to less-known Su series to Tornado to whichever example you can imagine, were designed in this period.
Then engines got much stronger. They overcame the drag from low sweep angle wings and readily pushed aircraft to the barrier of 2000 km/h speeds. It was also discovered that at 2000 km/h you fly like a brick and there is not much room for manuevering or doing anything. It was also discovered that the practical max was 2500 km/h, and beyond that you either use titanium like in SR-71 and keep the aircraft light so that it couldn't do anything but recon, or, just accept that your aircraft would burn and crash if it exceeded that speed. Even the successful and widely used MIG-25 had 2500 km/h as its max.
Therefore aircraft speeds hit a wall, engines got powerful enough to make up for the loss from non-swing wings. Add to that how the industry learned to use the entire aircraft body as a lifting surface instead of loading everything on the wings, any reason for swing wings has gone away.
Max speed isn't the only consideration, of course. Almost all "supersonic" planes are effectively subsonic with a supersonic sprint capability, rather than being natively supersonic. Concorde, Tu-144, A-12/SR-71 and XB-70 are the only native supersonic aircraft I can think of. Everything else is to some extent optimised for lower speed, so using big engines to temporarily overcome drag from a non-swing-wing design is consistent with that compromise.
It's worth noting that despite all the valid points about the costs of the F-14, the F-14 was the cheaper alternate platform for the AIM-54 and AN/AWG-9 radar; they were originally developed (as the AIM-47 and AN/ASG 18) for the Lockheed YF-12A, a Mach 3 bomber-interceptor variant of the A-12, single-seat predecessor to the SR-71:
(The YF-12A program got as far as a 96 plane order for the USAF before it was cancelled in favour of the cheaper F-106X project, which also failed.)
Anyway, before condemning the F-14 for being expensive to operate, I invite you to consider the likely costs of fielding a fleet of hundreds of nearly-hypersonic interceptors based on the same hardware as the SR-71 ...
I was curious how much the Phoenix missile itself cost. Some sources state a development cost of $167M, and a unit cost of ~$500k (with ~5000 built), adding up to about $2.5B, some of which was recouped by sales to Iran.
It's impossible to say how much money was spent on aircraft capable of firing the missile, since they were also designed to do other things, and raw production/maintenance costs are hard to track down anyway. The Tomcat alone seems to have cost tens of billions to build and operate.
Ultimately, "the AIM-54 has been used in 62 air-to-air strikes, all by Iran during the eight-year Iran–Iraq War" (Wikipedia).
Whether or not this outcome was "expensive" is up to the American taxpayer, I guess.
The quote from Wikipedia appears to be wrong. The US has also used the missile in combat. FTA:
“In January of 1999, two F-14s each fired one Phoenix missile at two Iraqi MiG-25s, only to have both miss. Later that same year, another F-14 fired a Phoenix at a MiG-23, only to miss once again. No F-14 ever shot down an enemy aircraft with the missile it was designed to carry.”
The Wikipedia quote above is from the initial introductory section. Later, Wikipedia[0] says:
> U.S. combat experience
> On January 5, 1999, a pair of US F-14s fired two Phoenixes at Iraqi MiG-25s southeast of Baghdad. Both AIM-54s' rocket motors failed and neither missile hit its target.
> On September 9, 1999, another US F-14 launched an AIM-54 at an Iraqi MiG-23 that was heading south into the no-fly zone from Al Taqaddum air base west of Baghdad. The missile missed, eventually going into the ground after the Iraqi fighter reversed course and fled north.
Part of the problem with "super expensive" weapons is they rarely get used in actual situations and so not much is known about their performance in theater.
True, and the article discussed this. However, two of the three AIM-54 missiles launched by the US in combat failed to even ignite; the characteristics of the target aircraft were irrelevant.
I've never understood why the AIM-54 wasn't replatformed after the decision was made to retire the F-14.
I guess procurement politics?
But maybe also because the terminal active radar guidance was no longer capable of burning through expected Russian ECM? And in a balancing of "substantially update and redesign" vs "invest elsewhere", long-range fleet missiles weren't a priority in the wake of the USSR's collapse and Russia's economic struggles.
> I've never understood why the AIM-54 wasn't replatformed after the decision was made to retire the F-14.
It was a huge fucking missile. Only the F-14 was able to physically carry it and it's unique pylon. If adapted to other airframes they might have only been able to carry a single missile. Even the F-14 could only practically carry four of them. If it launched with the max of six and didn't fire any it would have to jettison two before attempting a landing.
The AIM-120 in contrast could be carried by a number of US and allied fighters, had active radar homing (fire and forget), and BVR capability. The latest versions can even match the range of the AIM-54.
The AIM-54 was designed to hit incoming high altitude bombers coming for a carrier battle group outside of the range they could launch nuclear ALCMs. With that job largely obviated by the collapse of the USSR and end of the Cold War there was never much need to keep the system in service.
The danger to carrier battle groups today are lower altitude cruise missiles, opposing fighter/attack aircraft, and UAVs. A missile that really only works well against high altitude targets isn't all that useful.
Yeah, wikipedia says the Phoenix weighed about 450kg, three times as much as an AMRAAM. And given that the latest versions, like you mention, have a range very close to the Phoenix, and the AMRAAM has been continually developed (presumably including advances in sensors, electronics and software), whereas Phoenix apparently wasn't developed since the 1986 AIM-54C. So except for a very slight advantage in nominal range, arguably the modern AMRAAM is vastly superior in every respect.
MBDA Meteor has the dimensions of Amraam but is air breathing and has very high range and speed. For one example, even the small Gripen has already fired it.
As I understand it, the AIM-54 being too expensive for its utility and its function being less prioritized was part of the calculus of retiring the F-14, which happened after the AIM-54 was retired.
The F-12 cancelation is also why SR-71 producing ended: part of the cancelation order from the SecDef was to destroy the tooling for the YF-12. Which is the same as the tooling for the SR-71.
Though: this is actually beside the point because the Navy wasn't ever going to operate the F-12. The predecessors of the F-14 were the F-111B (rejected because it wasn't actually going to be carrier qualifiable) and the F6D (rejected because it was useless once the missiles were launched)
I assume it's to ensure that a previous program can't be revived and thus threaten the follow-on program.
In my view, if the follow on program is truly compelling, it should live or die based on its own performance, but I guess that's not how the game is played.
1. Storing tooling, especially huge aircraft-sized tooling, has real costs associated with it. There's the physical space it occupies as well as the costs associated with keeping it from degrading. Guess who industry charges for all of this?
2. Concerns about security. If an adversary manages to surreptitiously capture images or other data on the tooling, perhaps they can get closer to developing an equivalent capability.
It's certainly possible the idea is also at play that by destroying the tooling, you prevent advocates of the current system from jamming up the process of acquiring new and improved systems. It would be great if the development and acquisition of new systems was always merit-based and rigorous, but it's often not. I'm not saying this is the case, but it could have been a fear of guerrilla advocacy from Lockheed or its advocates in the Government stymieing progress. For all its awesomeness, the A-12 family was heinously expensive to operate. If you had pressure from congresspersons or ill-informed generals to acquire more of these because of their incredible capability, but that meant you couldn't afford to improve your capabilities in other areas, you might not appreciate that pressure.
In this specific case, it was because McNamara believed that SAMs were too good for the aircraft to survive, and to keep it from being resurrected, he ordered it destroyed. There was no direct follow on program, just spy satellites.
The F-14 was the alternative to the aborted F-111B. This was originally intended to carry the Phoenix and AN/AWG-9. Although it would have been cool, the YF-12 would have difficulty with a catapult launch.
The author lists the "F-14 Tomcat, F-15 Eagle, and F-16 Fighting Falcon" as peers. I'm not really sure I agree with this. The F-15 and F-16 are land based fighters. The F-14 is a carrier launched aircraft. The requirements are different & the constraints are different. To consider the F-15 as a peer isn't even a valid starting point. It's a different plane for a different mission.
Also worth mentioning there are effectively two generations of F-14, the second one having an improved engine design. These did not debut until 1987.
They are peers in the sense that they had their first flight and operational introduction within 4 years of each other. Contemporaries would probably have been a better choice of wording.
The main thrust of the article is that the machine has no direct peers because the job it was designed for was unique, and restates this several times all through it. Any comparisons to any other aircraft are by definition automatically contrasts with other things that are different.
The later upgrades which are worth mentioning, were mentioned, several times.
The F-16 actually had a carrier demonstrator, the Vought 1600, for VFAX.
While the F16 beat the YF17 for LWF, it’s carrier version was defeated by the carrier version of the YF17 (which would become the F/A-18).
I would agree that the F16 is not a peer to the F15 or F14, the entire point of the 16 was to be a small and cheap workhorse. Not just because of the LWF program, but because that was its designers’ ethos inside General Dynamics.
The 15 is 50% heavier when empty, And the 14 more than double (though part of that is changes and reinforcements for carrier-based operations, the Vought 1600 was also quite a bit heavier than an F-16).
> The F-16 actually had a carrier demonstrator, the Vought 1600, for VFAX.
To be clear, the Vought 1600 (a partnership with GD where Vought took on the prime role and GD became a sub, similar to the what happened with Northrop and McDonnell-Douglas with the YF-17 and F-18) never left the conceptual design phase. You won't find a Vought 1600 airframe in any museum.
> Not just because of the LWF program, but because that was its designers’ ethos inside General Dynamics.
And also on the part of the USAF instigators of the LWF program (the so-called "fighter mafia"). The interesting thing is that if you look at the combat & military exercise record of the F-15C, it contradicts a lot of what the fighter mafia took and preached as gospel, at least as far as the air-to-air theater goes. The F-16 did/does enjoy a great deal of success as a multirole fighter with a non-trivial emphasis on the ground attack role.
> The interesting thing is that if you look at the combat & military exercise record of the F-15C, it contradicts a lot of what the fighter mafia took and preached as gospel, at least as far as the air-to-air theater goes.
I dunno. Another way of looking at it is that the F-15 has never had to compete in a war the fighter mafia was designing around: specifically total war.
Israel/US vs Lebanon/Syria/Iraq was never a peer state conflict, and so allowed staged strikes or long-range AWACs-supported intercepts, both of which played to the F-15's strength, without exposing the weaknesses the fighter mafia claimed to address (feasibility of procuring large numbers and visual range dogfighting).
The F-16 was designed for a scenario where the number of F-15s became a limiting factor and where any-fighter >> no-more-fighters. I.e. NATO-vs-WP
Sure, in a pure mass vs. mass scenario where the adversary's systems are no more advanced than yours, more mass likely wins. But this is really the only scenario in which aircraft like the F-16 or F-18 give you "air dominance".
The fighter mafia tended to overextrapolate from Vietnam that systems/technology were never going to be the force multiplier originally thought, and you needed to equip lots of smart men with incredible knife-fighting ability.
The maybe underappreciated lesson from the F-15 (air-to-air variants anyway) is that the systems did indeed catch up to airframe capabilities and proved their mettle. Not just in combat with lesser-trained adversaries but also in western military exercises. Moreover the F-15 doesn't give up very much in the WVR dogfight situation either, despite a lack of fly-by-wire (until F-15SA) or lack of relaxed static longitudinal stability. I'm sure you can setup a WVR fighter maneuvers set where the F-16's characteristics give it an advantage but that is likely to be a small window in the envelope of potential engagements. The F-15's size actually ends up being a pretty sweet spot and is (ironically?) a better airframe for getting within the adversary's OODA loop.
That all being said, John Boyd is credited with keeping the F-X program from foolishly pursuing a more complex and less maneuverable design - design direction which deserves immense praise.
It’s been nice in my opinion to see the international market for the Viper generation to maintain relationships. It’s a spiffy development imho for a really practical machine.
Eh, I'd call them peers. The F-18 was originally peddled to the Air Force in a competition that the F-16 ultimately won. The Navy picked it up later. Any of the planes could have been outfitted for carrier duty.
More troubling still, with the engines mounted a vast nine feet apart to allow for greater lift and more weapons carriage space, a stall in one engine could throw the aircraft into an often unrecoverable flat spin. These issues led to the loss of a whopping 40 F-14s in all.
It's not like they didn't know about it - it was a tradeoff that allowed them to carry more ordnance and drop-tanks on the center-line. They weren't able to put ordnance stations on the wings, so the centerline and the sides of the fuselage were the only areas available to carry the honkin' big Phoenix missile (13 feet long!)
As a swing-wing plane, putting weapon stations on the wings meant they'd have to pivot in the opposite direction of the wing motion to keep the bombs/missiles pointing forward (so they didn't become an aerodynamic drag.) Pivoting ordnance stations on the wings would also mean the wing swing servos would need to be larger and more powerful (aka heavier). So no ordnance on the wings.
The other heavy consumable part of a fighter is the fuel. Most of the fuel on the F-14 was carried inside the fuselage between the engines. There were small tanks in the wings (which mean there was a flexible hose connecting it - that likely leaked) but most of it was stored along the centerline of the aircraft, helping with the center of gravity and allowing it to turn faster.
More F-14s were destroyed (which OK: in conjunction with the crappy engine) because of this design than in combat.
The AIM-54's never lived up to their name as an air to air missle, since it was meant to shoot down bombers, which never flew (and you know: thankfully never flew). Though they tried against fighters - that wasn't very successfully (except for Iran?).
One wonders if a computer system like what's in the F35 could have worked in the F14 to mitigate the problem with engine failure - of course: if one could go back in time 30+ years to install it.
Good point on the variable swept wings not allowing hard points, didn't think about that. The F111 did allow for ordinances on the wings and they did it in the method you've described (tho much larger plane)
Perhaps the greatest achievement for the F14 was selling it to Iran, which had a real hard time keeping them in the air due to flight costs. Kinda sold them a lemon then cut off diplomatic ties. No one else wanted the plane!
> One wonders if a computer system like what's in the F35 could have worked in the F14 to mitigate the problem with engine failure
It could be possible that with full-authority fly-by-wire flight controls, a flight computer could prevent departures in case of single engine failure. I doubt anyone with enough F-14 flight dynamics knowledge is going to be on HN (you never know though!) to say if there was enough authority in the controls in these parts of the envelope to recover from such scenarios.
While not the same failure mode, the SR-71 in the '80s acquired a system called "DAFICS": Digital Automatic Flight and Inlet Control System. During supersonic flight, you could get inlet unstart (ejection of the internal normal shock and a resultant sudden decrease in thrust due to poor inlet performance) - which typically occurred asymmetrically and was not uncommon. DAFICS sensed an impending unstart and actually forced both inlets to simultaneously unstart. A less expensive patch than redesigning a finicky inlet already 20+ years old.
That aside aside, the real fix the F-14 needed was the GE engines (A+/D model). So you likely ought to blame the losses of these airframes from engine-induced issues on acquisition system decisions, rather than the airframe design itself.
And another one next to an A-10. Notice how substantial the landing gear is on the F-14 compared to the A-10, and the A-10 was designed for landings on improvised runways...
It’s due to carrier landing requirements. When landing on carrier, you don’t flare the aircraft, you just dump it on deck with significant vertical speed. At least that is what you do with F-18 (with 200-400feet per minute descend rate), I would assume F-14 is the same for all the same reasons.
In short, carrier landings are closer to controlled crashes over the thing that everyone is calling landings.
> Perhaps the greatest achievement for the F14 was selling it to Iran, which had a real hard time keeping them in the air due to flight costs. Kinda sold them a lemon then cut off diplomatic ties. No one else wanted the plane!
They did a number on the Iraqi air force, you could argue that they got their money’s worth. They got more actual combat use out of them than the US ever did.
Huh, interesting. The Panavia Tornado was a swing-wing plane from a similar vintage and did have pivoting wing-mounted pylons. Tradeoffs abound in aviation though, of course.
Imagine if one of your swing wings is locked in the "out" position and one in the, "in" position. Couldn't imagine all the scenarios like this the pilots had to deal with.
I LOVED seeing the F14 fly in the 80s at an air show. Total star of the show - I can't believe how close to the ground they fly that thing!
Hypothetically, couldn't they have made a design with both engines right beside each other, and fuel tanks, and pylons for weapons and drop tanks on the outside of the "engine box"?
It's not a design flaw, it's a design choice which was made without the expectation the airframe would be saddled with the awful TF-30s. A very valid design choice at that.
If you want to understand more about the genesis of the configuration, look on YouTube for "Peninsula Valley Seniors" or "Western Museum of Flight" for a talk by Mike Ciminera of Grumman.
Uhm.. sort of, I guess? The airplane that Art Scholl died in was a Pitts S-2 BiPlane, not an F-14. So.. pretty different, although yes he died in a spin while filming footage for Top Gun.
F-14 was a very complex and expensive to maintain. A beauty, but an Hangar Queen in her last years.
Maybe by "peers" the author meant it was one of the "teen" fighters serie,
F-14, F-15, F-16 and F/A-18.
Like there was the "century" fighters, F-102, F-104, F-105, F-106.
Fun point I read about this topic while back is that planes essentially cost the same amount of money per pound in the air, so building anything with two times the MTOW is an inherent disadvantage.
Apparently, a comment on the TSR-2 [1] was that it was too heavy. The problem was that the manufacturer misinterpreted this and instead of just going away and designing a smaller aircraft they spent a lot of money trying to make the existing one lighter.
It's not exactly practical to throw away a design and start on completely different aircraft! Also consider that the size was fixed by the fuel requirements and the wavelength of the sideways-looking radar. The second point was a dominant consideration in the earlier competition which led to the Avro 730 selection.
I always loved the F-14. Top Gun was of course a big reason (and I'm glad they brought it back for the newest film). But before Top Gun, there was Macross (or Robotech in the US). The variable state of the Tomcat influenced the variable state design of VF-1 Vaklyrie fighters in the anime. And I'm sure the AIM-54/AWG-9 Phoenix missle system (with the ability to fire on multiple targets almost at once) influenced the multiple missle launches seen throughout the TV series. Here's a clip I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZazVwBlz9fc
That's because the original F-18 was not a replacement for the F-14 - it was intended to be a complement. The F-18E/F which did replace the F-14 entered service in like 1997 or something. The F-18E/F is not really a variant of the F-18 - calling it E/F was a procurement masterstroke.
I saw an F-14 during fleet week in San Francisco when I was still in high school...we were watching from the pedestrian pathway on the golden gate bridge. It broke the sound barrier, and I still remember the shock wave and the sound of the bridge cables vibrating for 5-10 seconds afterwards. It was terrifying...I seriously thought the bridge would be damaged from it. I'm still not sure what the story was behind it, whether it was an accident or an "accident", but it made me fully appreciate the reasons why supersonic flight is not allowed over land.
Just as a point of note, the vapour cone often seen around fast jets at low level in humid conditions doesn't necessarily mean they're going supersonic themselves. Certain local areas of airflow do, however, which causes the drop in air pressure and thus condensation.
Not sure if that was an explanation for me, but I've seen it before and I wasn't basing it off that. This was obvious from the sound. The plane was too far away for me to see a condensation cone. It was probably somewhere over Angel Island at the time.
A sonic boom, on a small scale, isn't something impressive...bullets cause sonic booms, even the tip of a bullwhip will. I had been around high explosives before too, an oddity of my father's profession. This wasn't just a loud jet, it literally sounded like a bomb, and it resonated for what felt like 5-10 seconds.
You don't need supersonic anywhere to cause condensation. Watch the wingtips of a commercial airliner landing in high humidity; you'll often see swirls of fog caused by the low pressure inside the vortices.
But, the cone of condensation coming off the body of a plane is the supersonic shock wave.
> But, the cone of condensation coming off the body of a plane is the supersonic shock wave.
And shock surfaces can be present over the body due to local flow speed being supersonic even when the aircraft's velocity vector is strictly subsonic. Though to be fair, still in the transonic realm if you're seeing shocks.
Can the F/A-18 do BARCAP? Engage cruise missile carrying aircraft at range?
The F-14 was an excellent aircraft when using the F-110 engines. The TF-30s were terrible. Cheney just didn't trust NAVAIR to develop any aircraft (see the A-12 fiasco), and he wasn't going to approve updating all the F-14s to the D standard.
The F-14 was never tasked with CONUS defense, that was part of the Chair Forces responsibility. The F-14 was designed to prevent missile carrying bombers from attacking the carrier task force.
I don't understand how a plane like that would work in a serious conflict. A week of maintenance after an hour of flight? Anyone depending on those planes in a war wouldn't last very long.
In a serious conflict, within hours either the carrier will be sunk and so maint will be a moot point, or the opfor will no longer have the capability to sink the carrier (at least by air) and again maint will be a moot point.
Kind of like calculating hours of maintenance per hour of cruise missile flight time, admittedly that metric would apply very well to an observation platform like a E-3, but not so much to a wartime interceptor platform.
Exactly, the F-14 value calculus stems from the carrier's survivability.
Keeping a carrier from being sunk was almost invaluable (at least, to the Navy) in many envisioned conflicts.
Consequently, in a modern, first-strike-is-primary-strike (limited numbers of exquisite, high-lethality weapons and platforms) scenario, ongoing maintainability is less of an issue than maximizing aerial and combat performance.
Reminds me of the UK Type 440 destroyer class, which (I'm going from memory here, if somebody fact checks me I expect them to be right, not me) was designed to fire missiles at incoming USSR aircraft ... with an average time from initial engagement to toast of around 7 minutes.
But if those aircraft were intending to drop nuclear weapons on British soil, even a single successful kill would have saved far more lives than the crew complement of a 440.
It's not unheard of for labour cost to be explicitly excluded as a purchasing criterion. The English Electric Lightning was one example: it was intended for defence against Russian bombers with nuclear weapons, and cost of maintenance just didn't matter against any performance improvement which would improve the likelihood of success. The most extreme example was the Mirage IV nuclear bomber, which was said to consume 25% of the French military budget at one time. It wasn't unreliable - apparently it was surprisingly good in that respect - but keeping available was very expensive.
Also aircraft are not cars. The front line does day to day wartime service, but the "tasks people take cars to auto mechanics to do" like completely tearing down and re-assembling is done by a totally separate depot level service back in the states. Its like "keeping it running day to day" vs "doing a complete restoration".
Depot service hours only matter in a budgetary sense, although I heard they were immense for the F-14. All those moving wing parts need to be removed, inspected, x-rayed or magnafluxed or whatever they did, reassembled, and exhaustively tested. In comparison, on the flight line day to day, I don't recall hearing the jet required unusually more time than similar aircraft.
Hmm, that's strange, because I keep hearing from several Navy sources that the F14s biggest problem indeed was the time they needed for servicing - the newer Hornets require significantly less time for equal maintenance operations (avionics, engine swaps) and also break less.
The time the F-14s spend sitting inside hangars (and requirements of trained techs to work on them) being useless was the primary driver of their retirement. Carrier hangar space and tech numbers are very limited after all.
I think we're aggressively agreeing with each other.
Using made up numbers, its fine if each F-14 requires twice the maint of a F-18 if a mission pack for a F-14 takes two birds but doing the same mission with F-18 would require at least four.
On the other hand depot level longer term service certainly was a budget buster for the F-14 and if you can pay for depot level service for 100 F18 for the price of 10 F14, well, the fleet's getting F18s.
Short version was the engines were terrible. They were prone to compressor stalls and blades started failing ahead of specification. The Phoenix missile and associated AWG-9 radar were top of the line in 1972, but were simply obsolete by mid 90s. If you look at the lifespan of the F-14 it was pretty remarkable, and the irony is that the F/A-18 was another design from the same era - it was a beefed up, navalized version of the YF-17 Cobra which lost out the the F-16.
Hard to overstate how large the F-14 loomed in the consciousness of kids growing up in the 80s/90s — not just from Top Gun but from this game as well. So many quarters spent having this machine babysit me while my mom shopped.
> … but without a Soviet boogeyman to keep Uncle Sam’s pocketbook upturned and shaking, it became an incredibly expensive and sometimes problematic solution to a problem nobody had anymore.
This says a lot about our world. Just look outside.
Cold war Russia and today's Russia are two different beasts. Also, Russia's strategy of deliberate large-scale brutality against civilians to win military conflicts still motivates the drive to nullify their military capabilities as quickly as possible.
The Soviet Union had vast excess capacity to scale its army, build more armaments, etc. All of that went away as unaffordable when the Union collapsed.
Because the F-14 was based on the epitome of 1960s tech, while the newer planes were based on 70s/80s tech. There was no slack for upgrades and even maintenance was difficult.
This is a very underappreciated aspect. The systems (i.e., avionics and portions attached to the avionics) would have also needed significant updates ($$$) to keep the aircraft relevant into the 21st century. It's not just the engines that needed modernizing.
That update existed (F-14D) but the upgrades of 40+ year old airframes were deemed to be a pretty big waste of money when they could be spent on fully modernized designs that could be stealthy and require less maintenance and pilots.
The avionics and weapons systems have all been replaced, and the engines soon will be. Also, the B52 is no longer considered suitable for the role it was designed for - dropping strategic nuclear weapons. In this role has been supplanted by the B2.
Isn’t it still the best platform for lazy figure 8s over the battlefield packed to the brim with jdams though? Like you can almost consider it a close air support platform.
/not an expert, I knew more about this stuff when I was 12 than I do now heh
No one is mentioning airframes, but the technology put in the composites of the F18 airframe was worlds cheaper and more flexible to repair in a fleet than the pre composites airframe of a F14
"Pre composites", doesn't that mean, well, aluminum? That's not particularly hard to work with, no? With composites, well, you can slap together some repair relatively easily, but for more complicated stuff, well you're not carrying around a large autoclave on a carrier are you?
(Unless the above doesn't make it abundantly clear, I have little knowledge of aircraft repair procedures)
Before the revolution, Iran had bought F-14s and made them the core of their air force.
The US went out of its way not only to retire the F-14 but also to ensure that there would be no spare parts for it that could help Iran maintain its F14 fleet.
Iran used F-14As to great effect during the Iraq-Iran conflict. The Tomcat flown by Iranian pilots did exceptionally well against its Soviet and French peers in the Iraqi Air Force.
Listening to the intro, good to point out that the Shah was an accomplished pilot himself and could appreciate the demonstration.
--
"`There were several factors which influenced the selection of the F-14. Iran’s northern border with the USSR, and those to the west and southwest with Iraq, are guarded by high mountains. Our Air Defence Command was building radar outposts on many peaks for better radar coverage, but we could never improve the situation with ground-based radar alone. There were too many “blind spots” in this coverage, and the big white domes of our radar stations were also excellent targets, visible from up to 50 miles away. Intelligence information obtained at the time verified that the Soviets would indeed strike them first.
`In the south, along the Persian Gulf coast, we had only US-supplied radars, which did not work properly in hot and humid conditions — that is, for ten months of the year — and otherwise also had poor performance, despite several upgrades. All the radars supplied to the IIAF as part of Military Assistance Program projects were far from being top-of-the-line. The Americans gave us what they wanted to give, not what we needed.
For two years — 1973-74 — a group of Iranian radar instructor including Col Iradj Ghaffari (the first Iranian tactical radar instructor) studied coverage problems associated with “Radar Sites Reinforcement,” but could not find a solution. Eventually, it was decided that a “flying radar” would eliminate the terrain masking problems. That flying radar would also have to be able to defend itself. It is beyond doubt that during the war with Iraq, the F-14 proved that it was exactly what we needed.
`Before these studies were conducted within IIAF circles — at the time we were still flying F-5A/B Freedom Fighters and F-4D Phantom IIs we started looking for a top-of-the-line fighter interceptor. The result of these studies, directed by Gen Mehdi Rouhani, was a requirement for F-14s and AEW aircraft. US briefings on F-14s and F-15s undoubtedly helped us to formulate our requirement. We created the plan to purchase eight AEW aircraft — initially four, followed by four more — and the F-14s. Eventually, four orders were issued — the first for 30 Tomcats and the second for 50. There was one for Boeing E-3 Sentry AWACS, followed by one for two communication satellites, which would enable all these aircraft to communicate securely with each other.’
"Unaware that the Iranians had already identified the F-14 as the right aircraft for their unique operational requirements, the US Navy and Grumman started an intensive campaign to ‘sell the Shah’, which included sending the F-14 Program Coordinator of the Chief of Naval Operations, Capt Mitchell, to Tehran twice to brief the Shah and IIAF commanders on the Tomcat’s capabilities. This culminated in a spectacular fly-off in July 1973 at Andrews AFB, Maryland, for the Shah and a group of high-ranking Iranian officers."
This seems.. unlikely? If the US govt didn’t want Iran to get spare parts, all it had to do was forbid the US companies making those parts from selling them to Iran.
The decision was mainly a cost reduction measure, driven by the failure of the A-12 program and a need to free up funds to fight the GWOT while continuing JSF development. The earlier F-14 problems had largely been resolved in the F-14D model and there was a clear, low-risk development path to the "Super Tomcat 21" model with greatly improved capabilities in every area. The F/A-18E/F Super Hornets which replaced the Tomcat, while cheaper and more reliable, lack the speed and range that would be needed to fight a future Pacific Theater war against China.
I stronly doubt your conclusion considering the Navy is replacing the F/A-18s with F-35s which are closer to design of 18s than 14s.
Perhaps there might be time to face the fact that the F-14 may not have been the most useful (and upgradable) planes for actually practical roles the carrier aircraft are expected to do?
The F-14 maybe has been sexy in the air, but for effective and operational warfare the things like logistics, maintainability, reuse of parts and carrier space matter much more, especially if F-14s shortcomings made it less able to actually be in the air when needed.
It's like taking your daddys 1970s charger (with new infotainmed and bolted on cruise control) into a desert expedition. Sure it has that gas guzzling V8 for the POWER when you need to hunt sand people, but in reality a modern Hilux is going to make the combined force a much more potent force and won't need truckloads of spare parts and mechanics to trail it. Even if it doesn't go 0-60 in 3s.
The Navy isn't really replacing the F/A-18E/F with the F-35C. Carrier air wings will continue to contain both types until the Super Hornet is replaced by the F/A-XX currently under development (assuming it doesn't get cancelled).
By the end of its service life the F-14D had decent availability rates. And while the F/A-18 was certainly superior in terms of logistics and maintainability, that doesn't help if it lacks the range to reach the target.
I think it is even worse. NAVAIR had the 14 with its massive capabilities and instead spent a ton of money improving the A6, A7, a bunch of canceled projects, picked the effing LOSER of the LWF program, and then effed the 2 stealth projects and got out of the 2010s with extremely limited capability.
Even worse, the money that could have been spent building ships that would be useful in a conflict with CN was spent on effing GUN Cruisers (!!!) and littoral ships that didn’t even work.
Imagine instead if the USN had 8 additional Burkes, upgraded/refurbed 47s, Aegis/VLS across the fleet, and a hi/lo of updated, maintainable 14s and 16s.
The US taxpayer spent billions and billions and got nothing. It’s been huge scandal for 30+ years
It's an outstanding book about an outstanding man but still a bit of a hagiography when it comes to all the "fighter mafia's" ideas on aircraft design. However, his focus on prioritizing investments in people over weapons is a truly underappreciated part of his legacy.
> Could the F-14 have been modernized, upgraded, and improved to still be flying today? Of course it could. But like the bringing the F-22 Raptor back from the dead… sometimes it would cost more to keep a really good older fighter than it would cost to design and build a great new one.
Is the F-35 considered "great" when compared to the F-22 Raptor? I was under the impression the Raptor was better in most ways, but also way expensive.
Disclaimer: I'm no expert on military aircraft, though I have visited the San Diego Air and Space Museum countless times.
The F-22 is an air dominance fighter. It's primary objective is air superiority. F-35 on the other hand is a versatile multirole aircraft which has been adapted to 3 variants for air force, navy and the marines.
The F-35 trades a slightly higher radar visibility (vis a vis F22) with a very modular software & hardware architecture & networked combat assistance. Its avionics is much more easily upgradeable & mostly written in a C++ dialect to best of my knowledge. F-22 on the other hand is absolutely the best in class on stealth & maneuverability - but the tech it is built on, will be of 90s always (sadly). Its avionics & controls were coded in Ada on i960MX architecture (CPU clock ~90MHz) which is no longer maintained.
Between the two, F-22 is a marvelous bird still, and still outclasses F-35 in air dominance roles. Its capabilities can strike fear to even well-equipped combat adversaries. In an anecdote that I was told by an US airman friend, Pakistan AF had scrambled F-16s during the OBL's Abbotabad raid, but the sortie was pushed to flying the perimeters of the city when a F-22 pair switched on their radar beacons temporarily to ping their presence (& as a obvious warning). Apparently they were overflying at reasonably high altitude having taken off from Qatar or KSA on special close air support mission. Their stealthy presence & perceived capabilities from this incident speaks volumes.
Edit: The hardware is Intel i960MX. I mistakenly remembered it as IBM Power architecture.
Edit2: Aviation Intel also surmised that F-22s were possibly in the theater
Having seen quite a lot about the language, I do rather wonder whether Ada would've been a better choice of implementation platform, just with a modern-ish processor underneath it.
(I would not describe myself as competent at either Ada -or- C++ though, so take my wondering with a suitable amount of salt)
They really do different things. F-22 is meant to fight other planes and has much less flexibility of attacking ground targets and supporting the army. It also can't even land on a full sized carrier, much less a smaller Marine one.
F-35 is a jack of all trades, has a better sensor suite for ground attack, can be dispatched somewhere from a deck of even small carriers and is much cheaper to manufacture. It is also worse at fighting other planes (although not bad really).
In any kind of real fight you'll probably see both because they're complementing each other, but the 22 is much less flexible and more specialized at its role.
So the 22 is more of a successor to F-15 and F-35 is a successor to the F-18 or F-16.
Seems like the airframe limitations of swing wing aircraft make the designs hard to modify and make existing aircraft require more maintainence. The F-111 was also retired relatively early and the Indian Air Force retired its Mig-23 and Mig-27 aircraft before its Mig-21s. Aside from the one exception of the Su-24, seems like only the big swing wing bombers are kept in service worldwide.
The F-14 was a fantastic airplane. My favorite of all time (except for MAYBE the A-10, F-4, or the spitfire).
Unfortunately, it was too expensive to maintain and didnt perform a role that couldn't be performed by more advanced multi-role fighters (e.g. the F-16 and F-18) at the point it was retired. Similar to the A-10, really, in that the F-35 will likely take it's place.
I feel this is in line with other computers of that time, and uses rather clever parallel design to improve the performance of the specific functions required - but it is not general purpose by any means.
Within a given class of system, sometimes rugged, robust, and plentiful does win the day over sophisticated but more fragile and expensive. On the other hand, an advanced military will want advanced capabilities and there is plenty of history of putting such things to good use. See for example the F-117, precision guided bombs/JDAMs, etc.
A lot of good arguments can be made about how the U.S. has failed to control the costs of developing and fielding advanced capabilities. Sometimes they just plain make bad design decisions, like with the M1A1 or F-35. But I don't think there's a valid case that advanced capabilities confer insignificant benefits vs. large quantities of less-sophisticated systems. You ideally want a good balance of both and you need the understanding and empowerment on the acquisition side to control costs.
How was the F-35 a bad decision? It's already cheaper than every competitor it has and is leaps and bounds the better overall fighter due to its stealth.
Militaries tend to be fairly conservative, so this is generally true of any given gun - civilian variants tend to acquire features faster. There's also the economic aspect of it - even small savings add up to a lot when you're ordering the product by the million, so there's a tendency to skimp on such small stuff.
And then, of course, there's the military bureaucracy. Here are some entertaining stories from David A. Lutz, who was the project manager for M16A2 at USMC:
"Ever wonder why Safe, Semi, and Burst are marked on the starboard side of the receiver? Well as the list of improvements increased to a point some 2 1/2 years into the program spilled over onto a second viewgraph, the last thing on the first page was the starboard side marking, the first thing on the second slide was a "mirror image" selector that pulged-in from the right side for us left-handed Marines. One Colonel who shall remain un-named insisted that I "lose everything on the second slide.""
Or here's the story of the M16A2 barrel profile change:
What's "fetish" about the M16 series? It merely makes different compromises than AK. And some of them ended up working better long-term - e.g. the split receiver makes optics easier to mount, and the gas system and the charging handle placement make the receiver much better sealed against dirt and such.
The difference in ruggedness and reliability between the two is also very overstated - much of it dates back to the original introduction of M16, and the various associated early problems (none of which were due to the design as such). But today? Watch:
The tooling exists and was carefully packed away. The problem is the stuff that wasn't F-22 specific, and we can't make anymore, because the company that makes them doesn't anymore. Or doesn't even exist.
This might be just F-14 bravado, of course, but I do also remember that like the second week of "shock and awe" (the initial Iraq campaign bombing) they stopped all F-14 flights for the same reasons. F-14s were trouncing the sorties of the F-18s, even though we were one squadron vs four or five of their squadrons, because we were the only jets capable of actually reaching Bagdad from the carrier and we were able to convert our bombs to "smart bombs" much faster (F-14s break a lot more so our techs were more skilled).