If I had my name written on one of those. I would have been irritated.

Yes I know pilots don't always fly the plane with their name on it.

Could be...should have just said standard.

I can never keep the various versions straight. Is the 6 the one they taught to schwack ships?

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.

They never should have gotten X designations.  They are prototypes, should have been YF-24 and YF-25 from the start.

X1000

There were over 500 built.

Stupid question, what does the F15 do, I always thought it was the replacement alongside the F18. I always figured more specialized aircraft were preferable to all purpose aircraft?

Forgive my ignorance, my knowledge ends at fighter jets are cool.

The Turkey was a missile carrier, not a fighter.

Because J.A.G got cancelled and Harmon Rabb didn’t need to fly one to represent a sailor in a naval court.

The F-15 operates from runways for the Air Force for starters.

are you sure about the F15? The way I remember its development history, its aerodynamics/airframe was 50s tech

In operation with the Australian Air Force it sounds like it was a combination of the Doof Warrior Truck and the Space Cruiser from Rick and Morty.

Thanks. So the Sec. of the Air Force just had a senior moment? And no one decided to correct it via press release later? We need to go back to F-24 for the next one.

Too late. Some people are already talking about an F36. A concept akin to an American made Mig21. Something cheap and primitive to replace the F35 in mass production.

Course the joke then would be...

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I'm surprised our resident Navy and Air Force aviators haven't come in to say what a POS it was.

Maintenance pig. That was the main reason.
The AIM-54 was never the badass weapon it was claimed to be, and was really only effective against large slow bombers.
Cold war ended and its role largely changed.
Dick Chaney

Regarding the F16 and F15 being built around the same time, remember the F15 had ENORMOUS money poured into it for R&D for the exact purpose of making it the best and most formidable fighter ever to counter the threat of the MiG25, before we found out what a POS it was/is thanks to Viktor Belenko. The F16 was a highly successful airframe for export and that helped get it upgraded so much over the years. It was also a more versatile plane compared to the F14.

As much as I hate to admit it, as I consider the Tomcat the most beautiful airplane ever to fly, it had to go. The F18 series was a MUCH easier plane to maintain, more reliable, and more versatile. Especially with the Super Hornets. On a carrier especially, maintenance and versatility are incredibly important factors, even more so than land based planes.

The IRIAF has about two dozen Tomcats that are still in operation as the F-14AM. Whether they are combat effective or not is up for debate. They haven't been grounded for a long time. Iran makes parts as well as contracting with China.

IMO, it also would make sense to not have a bunch capabilities overlap for the sake of a more diverse fleet.  On paper it would be easy to maintain and upgrade Phantom IIs, but that would mean they would be competing with newer designs for pilots, support infrastructure/supply chains and maintenance personnel.  Like the Phantom IIs, upgrading the F14 would mean maintaining airframes that are not getting any younger.  

Not to the bean counters.  Guess who makes the decisions?

Sexiest plane is the Corsair and the Warthog (its so ugly its sexy) and the swing-wing F-14.

Kenny loggins intensifies

The F-15 had a particularly convoluted design history. It started in the early 1960s as a low cost fighter, then morphed into a high speed interceptor and was almost merged with the F-14. Finally, the USAF turned it into the dedicated air superiority fighter we know today, both to incorporate the lessons from Vietnam and to distinguish it from the F-14 program. The final specifications weren't released until late 1968, and the winner was chosen in December 1969.

The large wing, lifting body, and high thrust to weight ratio were all pretty revolutionary, as was the fact that it was a single-seat all-weather fighter. You really didn't see anything else like it until the Su-27 in the 1980s.

Nope.  Completely different roles.

A retired pilot on Youtube told me they were really difficult to land.

Thanks for the insight. I just see this kind of stuff in my job and other industries where there's a huge disconnect from the people calling the shots and designing the product from the end users that have to make some sense of what they were given. It's endemic to every industry, or at least it feels like it.

Hardest plane to land on deck hands down was the whale(A-3).  Too many times they had to toilet paper the wires.

The F14 was a pig.  Man hours to flight hours ratio was bad and it had the under whelming TF30 until Super Tom with the F110.

I was on the ground floor with the FA-18 before going NSWG, that was a nice jet, but it had growing pains to.

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.

It did, for a while.

The airframes got tired, with no new production.


The Navy went full retard on the FA-18, just like they did on LCS.

With legs so short CAP was a meaningless endeavor.

I don't care how easy it is to fly, it's capabilities are a SIGNIFICANT step back.

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I think not.

Thank you for the real world examples!

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

Interested to hear how the F-104 fared against more modern aircraft.  I seem to recall hearing someplace (maybe the Fighter Pilot Podcast?  You by chance know Jell-O?) that the F-104 had some tactics where it was hard to see until the last minute and make a quick engagement and then scoot on out of the area in a hurry.  Obviously you wouldn’t wanna get into a turning fight with it but it was interesting how pilots in the later years of its life found ways to make life tough for folks in the newer jets.

Iran.

There... Used to be a guy on here who could tell some pretty interesting stories about fighting F104s.

When you could get him to talk. Which remains a damned awkward process.

The Threat Environment had changed with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Navy. At the same time the A-12 ended up getting canceled due to massive cost and schedule overruns and it was decided that given the current threat environment at that time: a redesigned FA-18 Hornet (a Super Hornet) would be a more cost effective and logistical solution at being both a Bomb Truck as well as a Fighter...so...the F-14 and the A-6 got axed.
But a funny thing happened...which always happens throughout history....the Threat Environment changed yet again...and now the Navy finds itself in need of an Air Superiority Fighter as well as a Bomber...and a plane with much greater range than the FA-18 EF Hornet as well as having a lower radar cross section.

I wish they kept a few flying just for air shows if for no other reason. They made the most awesome bad assed sound with the afterburners lit up.

I have always loved those more than just about any other plane, but seeing one in its glory again after several years,

My most memorable air show experience with an F-14 was when someone forgot to check the PCN and one of the main gear wheels punched through the ramp at the Portland Air Show maybe 30 years ago.

Splash the Zeros!

We had a Change of Command Ceremony at Naval Base Ventura County and VX-9 did a low level high speed flyover with one of their F-14s (shortly before they retired them), it was painfully loud to everyone on the grinder.

Always loved the Playboy paint scheme along with the VFA-103 Jolly Rogers

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.

Augustine's Law XXX: By the time the people asking the questions are ready for the answers, the people doing the work have lost track of the questions.

I thought this was neat.

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.