Quoted:
Not to derail this thread too much, but why did we jump from the F-22 to the F-35? What happened to using F-24 (assuming the YF-23 retained the “F-23” part)? It will be interesting to see if, post-F-35, we go back to F-24 or go with F-36. My OCD will handle it better if we go back to sequential destinations.

Quoted:
With LANTERN pods, GPS, and a few other upgrades it was a hell of a bomb truck in the end.

Quoted:
America sold F14s to Iran under the Shaw's regime.

Quoted:
Fair enough, except the Strike Eagle can't land or take off on a carrier. At the end of it's life cycle compared to other Naval Aviation assets, it was a hell of a bomb truck that was never supposed to be a bomb truck, just like the F-15 was never designed to be that. But with the upgrades and service life extensions, it is.

Quoted:

The ability to take off or land from a carrier doesn't endow it with any special air-to-ground capabilities.  It is just a turd that happens to takeoff and land on a carrier.

The "upgrades" still made it into a mediocre bomber at best.  It was never "one hell of a bomb truck", no matter how many times you repeat it.  I didn't fly it, but I sure heard about it from the guys who did, and they had precisely zero nice things to say about it.

From the placement of the targeting pod, which led to massive spots where the aircraft was blanking the field of view of the FLIR (leading to substantial limitations on weapon employment altitudes and azimuths), to the lack of systems integration between the GPS, the radar, the pod, and the jet (e.g. no ability to cross-cue or share target data across avionics), and the worst part apparently was the actual mechanization of how the pod was controlled from the back seat and the scope that the FLIR was actually viewed on....it was a cobbled together mess, an excuse to try and keep an obsolete aircraft relevant.

Quoted:
These aren't the droids you're looking for.

Quoted:


High five.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Grumman_F-14_Tomcat_SDASM.jpg

Quoted:


I think I heard... Somewhere that over half of F8s were written off in carrier landing mishaps.

Sometimes the human factor needs be accommodated. The F14 seems like a very un-ergonomic weapons system, there's no denying it's accident rate and availability. But given the number of people on this site who seem to look forward to speeding past the "using a rifle from a distance" phase to the "killing people over a can of beans with a piece of jagged rusting garbage" phase of the apocalypse...

If I had been in charge I would have said, phase out the F14. Keep the S3. Short legs can be counterbalanced, a carrier based tanker is useful and I don't care what they say. Using Superhornets for that job is silly. Using them exclusively is pure

Quoted:


And just a dash of transonic research patent right back.

https://www.ar15.com/media/mediaFiles/383325/image_jpeg-1953667.JPG

Quoted:
They got rid of the Phoenix missile.

No need for the only weapon system that carried it.

Quoted:


I don't think you understand what the CAP mission is.  
Is it best to turnover on station or on frequency?
How many intercepts should a CAP station be able to conduct before they are bingo fuel?
Is less than one the correct answer?  Because that's what the FA-118 gives you.
Have the enemy threats gotten longer or shorter ranges?

The standard cycle time for carrier cyclic ops was reduced BECAUSE of the short legs of the FA-18.
That creates a domino effect, reduces time to spot the deck for the next go, reduces time to reset the boat, a LOT of things are affected by the ridiculously short legs of the FA-18.

Make an easy flying aircraft like the FA-18 if that is your hobby, but for God's sake, build it with the capabilities needed.

We lost capability retiring the F-14s, lost capability retiring the A-6s, lost capability retiring the S-3s.

Carriers are now dependent on land based tankers to conduct their missions.
Carriers are dependent on land based ASW platforms for long range ASW screening an OTH targeting.
And there is no Alpha Strike capability anymore.
It is not possible to engage and defeat the archer with CAP before they shoot their arrows.

But hey, at least the recovery rate is higher...

Quoted:
The F14, F15 and F16 were all designed fairly close together in the 1970's so why was the Tomcat retired but the F15 and F16 retained and upgraded?

Quoted:


Well I'm just a lowly civilian. I leave things like that to people who get paid to do it. I certainly have no authority to even advise or influence such things. Those who do will continue to do it however their budget and circumstances permit until the day comes US Navy runs into an an enemy that rips its head clean off its shoulders.

Kind of a weird scenario considering that the Navy wears out its equipment so fast being on the front line of all these brushfire conflicts. You would think that these sort of ludicrously expensive capabilities that, at the moment. No other country on Earth can hope to replicate, (except the French on a small scale). Would demand some care and restraint? Nope! Straight into the teeth of the enemy from the word go until the politicians lose interest in the conflict du jour.

This will continue until either this country bumps up against something that can defeat it militarily. Or looking more and more likely at the moment. We all wind up in some mess that results in the military budget being chopped down to .0002 % of its current level.

And no, this won't be because the Demmycrats give all that money to the homeless and various social justice organizations.

Quoted:
The Brits and Indians also have 2/3 Nimitz size ski jump carriers like the French and the PRC bought and refurbished the two Russian ski jump carriers and have been developing their own program.

But the point of the carrier is not to fight other carriers.  It is to operate independent of land based constraints.  There is no Backfire threat anymore, but plenty of adversaries carrying ASCMs with triple digit NM ranges.

My point about recovery rates was that the ship is not there to simply launch and recover aircraft.  Those birds have missions to perform.  
And the doctrine that was developed during the Cold War has had to be modified significantly because our capabilities have atrophied.

Quoted:


And will continue to atrophy for the foreseeable future.

The entire US military is a mess right now. The Trump administration did address an awful lot of things. But there's some very persistent areas of rot that nothing will be done about. If someone were to do something about this. They would get the axe.

Yet... The only constant is change, is it not?

Quoted:

In my lifetime, I will not be surprised to see the Chinese sink a US carrier with their ballistic missiles and the US Government simply shrug its shoulders and bitch a little.

Quoted:

In my lifetime, I will not be surprised to see the Chinese sink a US carrier with their ballistic missiles and the US Government simply shrug its shoulders and bitch a little.

Quoted:


Comparing an F14D with bombs to an F15E is not a fair comparison at all. While the F14 "had" some air to ground capabilities even when it first came out (despite never being put to use until near the end of its life), the "Bombcat" was really just an attempt to get some more life/use out of the Tomcat before its eventual demise. The F15E was *designed* to drop bombs. The F15 series was a better warplane than the F14 in all things, except, maybe long range interception (and frankly the F15 may have been just as good).

Guys who flew a "Bombcat" then flew an F15E and saying they didn't know how much the "Bombcat" sucked compared to an F15E is like someone saying they thought their Corvette was a great sports car until they drove a Ferrari and realized how much it sucked.

Quoted:
I made the second to last deployment with the mighty Tomcat. Jan-Aug '05, VF-143 Pukin' Dogs with our sister SQD VF-11 Red Rippers. That was my 3rd go round in Tomcat squadrons over 21ys of doing maintenance on Naval aircraft. Last cruise both Tomcat SQDs always, ALWAYS, beat the hornet guys off the deck for alert 5 and our mission completion and sortie rates were better than theirs too. All that while NAVAIR cut the on hand parts and support to the boat before we even left on cruise because it was going to be the last one on CVN-73 for Tomcats

In all I did tours on F-14s, F-18 legacy and Supers, EA-6B, H-60s, & H-46s. Only reason I got to work on F-18 A-F was I was at Pax River NAWCAD, now VX-23. In the whole of VX-23 at the time we had 4 Tomcats with about 20 people who knew what the fuck we were doing working on them and about 130 Hornet fags for like 10 hornets & 2 super hornets. Have to do something like put a Tomcat on jacks to do a drop check on the landing gear? Yea, it's real work and the hornet guys scatter like cockroaches!

Nobody in Tomcats ever said "I can't wait for them to retire so I can work on Hornets". And here is why. Hornet maintainers are retarded. Plane goes flying, has gripe, pops BLIN code on the computer, book says change part X. Shotgun part into jet aaaaaand, didn't fix it. Now you have to troubleshoot and actually diagnose the problem. Issue is, 95% of the Hornet maintenance fags don't have a fucking clue about their systems theory of operation, principles of operation, or use of deductive reasoning to rule out what is working and what isn't and replace the parts needed to fix them. And having gone to the schools for Super Hornets when VF-143 traded Tomcats for F-18Es, they are getting worse. Avionics and wiring is fiber optic. Break a fiber, yea, can't repair that at SQD level, call in the contractor. So no, nobody but FAGs wanted to jump from Tomcats to Hornets. Maint to Man hours was around 50/1 by the time they retired the Tomcat. It was never that great to begin with. A lot of that had to do with an aircraft that just wasn't maintenance friendly. We always joked that they designed the structure and aerodynamics, then figured out how to shoehorn everything in there. Lots of times you have to remove a few different things just to get at the component you need to change that was bad. Book said 1hr, reality said otherwise and that was if you weren't tail over water or if they would spot you on the deck in a wing spread spot. The cost that will never get recouped on the Hornet is the institutional knowledge of how not to shotgun parts into a jet and hope it fixes the gripe. Legacy hornets are gone off flight decks except the odd USMC SDQ that goes out and currently many of the repairable parts on Supers are still warranty items, but Boeing/Northrop Grumman will argue every part with the Navy as to weather it is BCM (Beyond Capable Maint) because it works on a test bench. But it must not be in working order because the computer said change that part but it didn't fix the grip. Maint to Man hours is going to go up over the next couple of years and so are costs on the super hornets.

I can't say much on the pilot side except all of them loved to fly the B/D models because that is what it should have been from the get go. With LANTERN pods, GPS, and a few other upgrades it was a hell of a bomb truck in the end.

Finally, troubleshooting and rigging the flight controls on the swing wing wasn't that hard. It was almost entirely hydromechanical. Even when the DFCS came along, the winsweep system and associated flight controls didn't get anything new outboard of centiline in the turtlebacks.

Quoted:


Go look up the range of the F-14 (hint - the Super Hornet actually has a longer ferry range than the Tomcat).

The Super Hornet gits a bad rap for range because 1. it's often conflated with the original Hornet, which was short ranged and 2. it's spent its service life lugging around heavy bomb loads deep deep inland.

Load it up for A2A and its range is virtually identical to the F14.

Quoted:
@sq40
Do you have a link to a hi-rez version of that fighter poster?
I need that as a cheat sheet to follow along in this thread.

Quoted:
Many times. Plus everything from F-104s and F-106s to F-18s to the Migs in the Constant Peg program.  

F-16s were incredible performers, but they were an incomplete system for many years until AMRAAM.

F-15s pretty much ruled the skies for half a century.

Quoted:
Perhaps they know something I don't... Either way it seems to be an incredibly dangerous mindset.

Quoted:


It’d depend on the administration in power at the time AND the dynamics of congress. If Reagan was in, he’d of retaliated in kind and Chinamart would of regretted it, the Soviets would of collectively held their breath then once they realized nothing was coming their way they’d of bitched to the UN and the Democrats in Congress would of impeached Reagan.

Bill Clinton? Nothing...

Bush Jr... post 9/11 with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, he’d of nuked the shit out of them.

Obama? UN route...

Trump? He’d of started WWIII...

Quoted:
Comparing an F14D with bombs to an F15E is not a fair comparison at all. While the F14 "had" some air to ground capabilities even when it first came out (despite never being put to use until near the end of its life), the "Bombcat" was really just an attempt to get some more life/use out of the Tomcat before its eventual demise. The F15E was *designed* to drop bombs. The F15 series was a better warplane than the F14 in all things, except, maybe long range interception (and frankly the F15 may have been just as good).

Guys who flew a "Bombcat" then flew an F15E and saying they didn't know how much the "Bombcat" sucked compared to an F15E is like someone saying they thought their Corvette was a great sports car until they drove a Ferrari and realized how much it sucked.