The F-14 fighter, one of the most well known fighter aircraft of the 1970s and 80s Cold War period, was also the last major analogue fighter to be made by the US and building upon the experience gained in Vietnam from the use of F4 phantoms and its direct predecessor the F111B.
Although it’s generally seen as a great aircraft it didn’t have the fighting experience or the number of kills that would be expected for an aircraft of this type and reputation, well not in the US at least, with only 5 kills to its name over its entire US Navy service life.
In fact, the only other country to buy the F-14, Iran, back in the day of the Shah before the Iranian revolution, has about 15 – 30 times the number of kills attributed to their F-14s during the Iran-Iraq war, depending on the source you read.
The F-14 was also one of the main players in the 1986 film, Top Gun starring Tom Cruise and Kelly Mcgillis which helped its reputation with the public, though the pilots and maintenance crews knew the truth.
And the truth was that like many military aircraft, things weren’t all that rosy in real life. Early F-14s gained a bit of a bad reputation because of the TF-30 engines and even after that was fixed it was still seen by some as a difficult aircraft to fly low and slow, especially for carrier takeoff and landings, ironic because it was designed specifically for carrier use and in all there were 30 fatal accidents involving the F-14.
So what do I mean when I say it was the last analogue fighter, well, the F-14 was designed from 1968 to 1970, just before the advent of modern digital electronics which meant that things like fly by wire, digital radar, avionics, data processing and weapons guidance were either not available or much less capable than aircraft of just a few years down the line like the F-16 Fighting Falcon. But things didn’t stand still as new digital technology became available in the 70s, 80s and beyond it would be adapted to the F-14 but the overall design was still that of the late 60s.
Some would say that the F-14 was 3.5 generation aricraft while others would say it was a very early 4th generation aircraft and while it had many advanced features it was still a product of its time and a replacement for the much hated F-111B which the US Navy felt had foisted upon them by the secretary of defence Robert McNamara as a combined service aircraft with the Airforce to cut costs.
But as far as the Navy were concerned it was a disaster because it was too big and heavy to meet their needs so after much political wrangling they had congress kill off the Navy F-111 B version.
Although General Dynamics was the prime contractor for the F-111, they also brought on board Grumman because of their greater experience of building carrier aircraft, so when the B version was killed off by the Navy they went to Grumman to have an aircraft designed for their needs without the compromises that having to share it with the Airforce.
The root of all these problems came down to missiles and primarily anti-ship missiles carried by long-range Soviet bombers which would be capable of knocking out even the largest US carriers if they could get through the carrier air defences.
The best way to do this was to have aircraft capable of keeping these Soviet bombers at a long distance away from the fleet carrier groups, this will be known as the fleet air defence.
In the late 1950s, McDonald Douglas created the F4 phantom II for the US Navy to carry out the role of fleet air defence. Designed as a long range supersonic jet interceptor using primarily air-to-air missiles, it was so successful that it was soon adopted by the US Air Force and Marines as a fighter bomber for air to ground attacks and became the most prominent US Cold War aircraft with 5,195 built from 1958 to 1981.
But some then realised that if you could have a missile that could shoot down another missile then that would be even better.
Hughes aircraft came up with a solution, the AIM-54 Phoenix, a large radar-guided beyond visual range air-to-air missile capable of shooting down the Soviet anti-ship missiles at a range of 50 miles or 80km.
This however would not be used with the F4 Phantom but it’s replacement, the General Dynamics F111.
During the early 1960s the new secretary of defence Robert McNamara, wanted to streamline the production of aircraft to reduce development costs and combine the roles of fighter, bomber and inceptor into a new multirole aircraft for the USAF with the US Navy with the TFX programme, which would go on to become the F-111 aardvark.
Although the F-111A was multiservice aircraft it was heavily influenced by the Airforce which for them, it was primarily a bomber while the Navy really needed an interceptor fighter.
A modified B version was made for the Navy with a shorter nose, heavy duty landing gear and folding wing tips. This left the Navy feeling as though it was an afterthought, it was too heavy for carrier use, wasn’t a true fighter and lacked the manoeuvrability and overall performance that the Navy expected.
Grumman saw that the Navy F-111B project was not going to make it so in 1966 they started work on their own design called the 303 with the sole purpose of having the Navy demands in mind and creating an aircraft that would be a cutting edge design for the next decade or more.
They took features from the F-111, the two-seat design but changed it from side by side to a tandem setup. A modified swing-wing was made fully automated and they also took the dual TF30 engines for high performance, though they were later replaced with the General Electric F110 in the F-14A+, F-14B and F-14D versions. A twin tail plane was added for extra stability in case of a single-engine failure and an extra strong box frame holding the swing wings and engines was created.
It would have a top speed of Mach 2.34, flight ceiling of 50,000ft and a range of over 500 nautical miles or 926km.
They also designed the F-14 to use the widest range of weapons available, with an M61 Vulcan rotary cannon for close-in dogfighting, the Sidewinder and Sparrow missiles for medium distance up to 15 miles and the Pheonix for long distance 50 miles or 80km and targeting of up to 6 targets at once. The AWG-9 radar could track up to 24 targets at a detection range of up to 115 miles or 185km.
In a now famous six on six weapons test, an F-14 fired 6 phoenix missiles at six separate targets with five of the missiles scoring direct hit. This was the most expensive single test of missile technology ever done at the time but it proved Grumman’s and Hughes claim that a single F-14 could take on and destroy upto six targets at once.
Although it was smaller than the F-111, because of the requirement to carry upto six Phoenix missiles together with the large AWG-9 radar it would still be the largest U.S fighter to fly from an aircraft carrier.
The contract was awarded just before the new Nixon administration took over, Grumman took the unusual step of testing several airframes to destruction in the factory to find any issues and then going straight into production rather than producing prototypes so as to save time and avoid potential cancellation by the new administration.
This way of closly working with the Navy built up the ability to do updates and special modifications in sometimes days instead of the usual weeks, months or years.
However, problems started with the very first production F-14 built on its second test flight it suffered not one but two hydraulic failures as it was coming into land.
The pilot managed to maintain control till they were just 8 meters above the trees on the landing approach when the crew ejected. The aircraft then tipped down and crashed into the trees but both crew escaped with only minor injuries.
The fault was caused by the use of a new and novel method of joins and titanium pipework for the very powerful hydraulic system to power the swing wings. In a fluke event, the exact frequency matching of vibrations from the engines and the hydraulic pump, setup resonances in the pipework which then broke and because the dual system was a mirror of the other, the secondary backup system also failed. This was a blessing in disguise and would create a new rule for aviation in general in that primary and backup systems must not be mounted identically.
Having learned the lessons, the navy ordered the removal of the titanium hydraulic lines and testing continued and proved that the F-14 could out accerate, out turn and had considerable better weapons system than the F-4 Phantom.
But the the biggest problems with the early F-14s was with the Pratt and Whitney TF30 engines.
John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy said that it was “probably the worst engine/airframe mismatch we have had in years” and that 28% of all f-14 accidents were due to engine issues.
It could suffer from compressor stall at high angles of attack and rapid throttle changes at over 30,000 ft and at some altitudes, even the exhaust from a missile launch could induce a compressor stall.
It also suffered from a high number of turbine failures which necessitated the re-enforcement of the engine bay so as not to cause damage to other systems.
By July 1984 the F-14As started to be upgraded to the F-14A+ when the TF30s were replaced with the General Electric F110 engines. The F-14B and D would also have the new engines with 23,400lbs of thrust each giving them over 54,000lbs of thrust in total.
This not only increased reliability, it also reduced fuel consumption, increasing its range by upto 60% or 30% more loiter time. Its performance was considerably better with the rate of climb increasing by 61%, and It was powerful enough to perform carrier launches without the afterburner and increased it’s much famed dogfighting capabilities.
The first combat kills for the F-14 came in 1981 when the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi sent two Sukhoi SU-22 to intercept a couple of F-14s in the Gulf of sidra incident off the coast of the coast of Lybia. Both SU-22s were shot down after the Tomcats were given permission to return fire.
Then in 1989, F-14s shot down two Libyan Mig M-23s again over the Gulf of Sidra in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm and an F-14 made the last kill in US service when an Mi-8 helicopter was shot down with an AIM-9 sidewinder.
And that is the total operational number of aircraft shot down by the F-14 whilst in service with the U.S
Some would say that its reputation preceded it and that no one wanted to take it on which is true in some respects but the phoenix missile kept most of their potential enemies at Bay. Iraqi fighters would turn around once the powerful AWG-9 lit them up as a potential target knowing that if they got any closer the chances are they would never see the F-14 that fired the phoenix missile at them.
With the F-14D Super Tomcat, the radar system was updated and jamming systems as well as infrared search and track detectors and cameras fitted to help visually identify and track aircraft up to 60 miles or 97 kilometres for large aircraft.
The computer systems were also upgraded and the hybrid analogue digital cockpit was replaced buy an all-digital cockpit computer system.
By 1995, the LANTIRN pod upgrade gave F-14s the ability of forward looking infrared for night time operations and to use and direct laser guided bombs allowing it to become a bomber for the first time.
With its new capabilities it was used extensively during the Kosovo war of 1998-99 when the tomcat fighter became a bombcat air to ground bomber, something which many of the crews didn’t like preferring it to be a true fighter rather than fighter bomber.
But in the end time and technology was catching up with the F-14, the swing wing technology and exposed engine inlets made it very un-stealthy just as the very latest aircraft like the Lockheed F117 nighthawk and the Northrop B2 spirit will becoming almost invisible to radar, something which the 1960s designed F-14s could never do.
The tomcats were also expensive aircraft to maintain and sooner or later newer more capable and more efficient aircraft like the F-35 Would be on the horizon and the F-14’s days were numbered. In 2006, some 15 years after production had stopped, the Navy withdrew the F14s from service. The F-14s had been in production from 1969 to 1991 with a total of 712 being built with the expectation that they would be in the fleet service until 2015.
However, Iran still had about 60 out of the 79 F-14s which were delivered just before the Iranian revolution deposed the Shah. During the Iran-Iraq war they claimed 160 shoot downs to the loss of 16 Tomcats which included 7 accidents but research tends to put that number at about 55 confirmed kills.
So the US was very keen to make sure that spares and parts which had been withheld from the Iranians did not find their way from the now out-of-service F-14s. In 2007 the remaining American F-14s that weren’t in museums and display areas were shredded to make sure that parts could not make their way to Iran.
Although this was not totally successful as Iran managed to gain significant stocks of spares but didn’t get anything for the aircraft weapons systems so whilst they made a short term gain, the number of operational F-14s available to the Iranians remains low and the weapons available to them is also low even if you consider the Russian adapted missiles which they fitted to some of them.
The F-14 tomcat was an icon of the Cold War and although it had a very low number of kills for the US Navy it still carried a massive reputation which preceded it wherever it went, so in a way it did its job, without having to do its job, and to many of the crews which flew it, it’s still one of the best fighter aircraft ever built.
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