Thread 64459575

Was scrapping the F-14's the right call?

it should be ok as long as we never have to go back to
the danger zone

It's gay but yeah, parts smuggling was a huge problem

>>64459575 (OP)
The Tomcat was kinda maintenance heavy. Grumman was more focused on making an advanced fighter (technically had the first modern computer onboard) than one that was easy to maintain. I remember watching Ward Carrol do a walk around of one and he pointed out just all the moving parts on it plus some dumb things. Like a radom panel on the side of the fuselage took no less than 5 fastner changes to take off. That is horrid from a time management perspective when you factor in the whole plane is like that. I love the Tomcat, but fellow aircraft of the generation outlass it in nearly every aspect except for the thicc radar and phoenix combo.

>>64459575 (OP)
Yes. It was a finicky piece of shit. Don't get me wrong it was an amazing piece of technology for its time, but that time has passed.

No.64459575
I miss the f14 tomcat bros :(
its like the su27 long lost brother.

its not fair navy bros. :(


they craped them as soon as iran was buying up all the parts.

this is why buy american made weapons is shit.
becuase J***

these cabal and millatry destroy history and always replace good jets with ugly crap

like ugly drones and ugly helicopters

where manned jets which actually bring in people to the airforce are slowly alienating their futures.
and making everything ugly on purpose.

>>64459575 (OP)
for this gay and feminized world?
yeah.

>>64459575 (OP)
only because they dropped the NATF to replace it

>>64459780
>that generation of ram plus swingwings dealing with sea corrosion
It’s a good thing they canceled it the repair bills alone would’ve forced the Navy to sell all the ships

>>64459840
on the one hand, yes
on the other, consider the Kino

jokes aside, even if it wasn't a stealth platform like the NATF, it does feel like the navy could use a dedicated heavy fighter/bomb and missile truck, rather than shoehorning in the f18.
maybe a navalized f15?

>>64459613
>>64459618
>>64459780

I think with the word scrapping instead of retiring, he's talking about how virtually all airframes were scrapped instead of being put on static display or museums to prevent parts from ever getting to Iran, which still has and uses(debatable) Tomcats the US sold to them in the 70's.

So in that regard... maybe? I personally don't think that even the worse case scenario would be a real problem for the US, but I can see how it would be for the Jews, so in that light I understand why it was done. Actually wait. It was a complete travesty.

>>64460215
in that case, they should have blown irans f14s up on the ground (like israel did anyway a few months ago) and kept their own f14s in service or as museum pieces

>>64460187
F/A-XX should rectify that in theory. Should give them a twin with more get up and go than an F414 assuming they go for an F110 derivative. Just need the damn government to reopen so the contract gets out of limbo

>>64460218
At the time I think the US had enough on their plate without forcibly withdrawing the export clearance to the Shah. The Tomcat was going to be pulled from service anyway and they had some museum pieces set aside, and frankly I'm not sure there would've ever been enough money and engineering talent available for a warbird community to keep one flying reliably anyway. So at that point why risk leaving them in the boneyard?

>>64460223
>F/A-XX should rectify that in theory.
thats the plan. 20 years without a large navy fighter is rough, but thats what the sandbox does to you
>Just need the damn government to reopen so the contract gets out of limbo
this and every other US project
as usual, the US gov is its own worst enemy

Should have sold em all to Iran.

>>64460187
No i mean the Navy has a perfect air wing mix with the VA/VF/VFA squadrons in the Late 1990s. Then Cheney got his wife a board seat at Lockheed by canceling NATF, he had earlier canceled the A-12, retiring early the A-6 and F-14. It was purely a corrption/grift thing. That led to no range, which led to buddy refueling without a dedicated tanker, which led to all the legacy hornets getting trapped out very early which led to the strike fighter shortfall, which led to the current situation where the entire strike component of the entire US Naval Air Forces is made exclusively of a mid plane the Navy never asked for and never wanted.

And anyone crying about "muh maintenance" clearly doesn't know ball, the manhour per flight hour ratio of a D model compared to A/Bs was night and day.

>>64459575 (OP)
the $/hour was bad for GWoT era, and it'll totally be obsolete by the time we throw down with China.

>>64459575 (OP)
yes, but not replacing it with a low-cost high altitude missile truck to supplement the current arsenal has been a mistake. should have built something who's whole point was to be a giant forward radar with XBAWKXHUEG missiles to sling out with F-35's screening and snapping up targets off of datalink. wouldn't even be worth making it stealth, make it something that when you see it on RWR you go home.

>>64459575 (OP)
Short answer, yes.

Long answer, we could have gone either way but between the wing joints being such a maintenance hog and the F-15 proving that you didn't need swing wings for a good fighter the F-14 just wasn't worth the costs.

>>64461153
>And anyone crying about "muh maintenance" clearly doesn't know ball, the manhour per flight hour ratio of a D model compared to A/Bs was night and day.
maybe you should substantiate your claims then, because all I can find on the matter is that the F-14 required 40-60 man hours per flight hour and I can't find any sources that specify the difference between the A/B and the D.

>>64461153
>And anyone crying about "muh maintenance" clearly doesn't know ball, the manhour per flight hour ratio of a D model compared to A/Bs was night and day.
>>64462172
The biggest difference was the test systems - the F-14 and A/B Hornets shared some very, very ancient, slow, and clunky benches. Those were what I trained on. Moving over to the new benches - which were shared between several shops - offloaded something like a dozen different types of bench and gave us immense flexibility on what got worked up next. They also ran the test programs in a third or half the time, so iterating to find some of the more annoying faults (don't get me started on the goddamned legacy Hornet communications systems) went from a week-long process to a single shift, even if I had to reflash shit or go get it soldered. Nothing's going to speed up rewiring a chassis or getting a chipped HUD bezel replaced, obviously. But now instead of having half the shop taken up by a couple sets of two benches (one of which was down or unable to run specific gear a significant chunk of the time), those got replaced by six new systems and a lot more crosstraining. Dramatically lowered idle benches. Shop throughput more than tripled and man-hours per item dropped to less than half when we dropped JUST the Tomcats and the Marine squadron upgraded to the hybrid-Delta config they were using on their Alphas. It was a very, very significant difference for morale as well.


TLDR it was indeed the maintenance, no matter how cool the 'Cats were and are they're a fucking albatross around the neck of every maintainer who isn't pumping gas on the deck.

>>64464461
>>64462172
Bast part with the new systems was modularity. if power got knocked out in my section of the ship, or we had a shitstorm of repairs, I could haul a few parts out of my backup storage bay, grab three opticals, and go down to the RADAR or "special" comms shop to set up the bench for my cockpit comms, fly by wire, and armament repair team. RADAR was stuck in their house because of the sinks, unfortunately, but Comms could come in with security screens and work in the classified corner of our shop too. Again, dramatically improved throughput even with the extra little hoops we had to navigate to make it work.

>>64462172
>>64464461
NTA for either but it seems to me that even if man hours were halved to 20-30 with the D variant, that's still double that the 10-15 for the Rhino. Totally get why that would be such an advantage.

>>64464470
Oh absolutely. Thing with the Rhino is that it self-corrected a lot of the bullshit gripes by telling pilots being retards to go fuck themselves (diplomatically) when they tried to gripe out a working system. Average gripes were faster, some of the more esoteric ones were much, much weirder and actually inflated their average a bit. I'd wager the gap has gone down a bit now, the Rhinos are starting to get broken in. All the really fun shit the contractor missed kicks in after 10-20 years. There were some hilarious ones in the older Hornets, one of which involved aluminized plumbing tape and another a sheet of stiff silicone rubber and some five-minute epoxy.

The other half of the man-hours equation is Supply, when the Rhinos hit the fleet there was a lot of housecleaning down in the tunnels. As beefy as Rhino gear may be it averages a third or more smaller than the 'Cats and you didn't have to get three guys to move an armcomp or pylon up a ladder with a winch anymore. Made stacking parts easier so less had to be canned or shipped in from Stateside.

>>64464461
On the one hand I really don't think you should waste your breath when OP is clearly a Tomcat autist who can't accept that the (admittedly very cool) plane from Top Gun isn't the best plane ever, but on the other it's interesting hearing your input on this.

>>64460187
>maybe a navalized f15
I wonder why this never happened.

>>64464530
USAF and USN fucking hate each other, and it used to be a much stronger rivalry. The USN wouldn't want to use an Air Force plane just like the USAF didn't want to adopt a navy missile with the AIM-9.
In at least one telling the programs were specifically running because each branch wanted to insist it needed something the other's plane couldn't offer.

>>64459575 (OP)
>Was scrapping the F-14's the right call?

yah , just send the firebee

>>64464530
>>64464583
The DOD could have forced the adoption like it did with the F4 phantom and F-111 program. The real reason the F15 was never navilized was because the reinforcements for carrier ops would have made it far heavier and kinematically inferior to the air force f15 and with the AWG-9 and AIM-54 (Navy requirement) it would have been worse than the F14 in everyway in everyway

The F/A-18 replaced not only the Tomcat, but at least 3 other plane types. It necessarily means it was not a great dogfighter as the Tomcat but it was still better than any Soviet fighter (Malaysian classic D Hornets regularly beat Guccied Su-30MKMs at all ranges in training dogfights, even with the vaunted Sukhoi's cobra manoeuvre). The Tomcat wasn't even that popular until Top Gun and Robotech came along.

>>64466314
>>64464583
while it didn't work at the time when they were being developed, could it have replaced the Tomcat in the 90s or 2000s instead of the super hornet?
tech would have been advanced enough to get an equally capable radar for far lighter, then, for example.

>>64466546
I was under the impression, it's the Super Hornet that replaced those plane types. And the Super Hornet is quite a different aircraft from the original Hornet.

>>64466557
hindsight is 20/20. Also you have to keep in mind that Dick Cheney played a part in forcibly killing the F-14 and A6 intruder by cancelling their modernization programmes to fuck over Grumman (he owned stock in a rival company o algo). The Super hornet was in many way completely different to the Legacy hornet (30-40% structural parts commonality) and they basically tricked congress into funding it by selling it as "hornet upgrade" instead of the functionally brand new aircraft it actually was hence the F/A-18E/F designation instead of a new one.

>>64466557
in the 90s they got the Legacy Hornet and went on the whole super hornet tangent in >>64466605

It became an unnecessary money pit when the USSR ate shit and the US had nobody in the forseeable decades that needed a long range (capable), heavy missileer plane to combat against.
In all other aspects besides novel intercept threats the hornet was already superior, and the already existing Super Bug more so. Dumping the F-14 secured finances for other necessities.

>inb4 muh highway to the danger zone
There's a point where the attachment to formative age experiences is a hindrance, and a grown man in his 30s should opine fondly yet readily advance from them.
But Gen X is the most lead poisoned one, after all.

You can thank Dick Cheney for killing the F-14. Cheney had stock in McDonald Douglas. That's how you got the Super Bug to replace the Tomcat. The excuse is that Super Bug can use an existing airframe, when in reality only like 20% of the original F/A18 is in there. Grumman also tried to propose a super Tomcat in the same vein and was shot down.

Cheney is also why they upgraded so many F-14As to F-14Ds. It certainly wasn't to save money as tearing an airplane apart just to put it back together wasn't saving the taxpayer much money, but it was killing Grumman's profits.

So yeah, always thank Dick Cheney for killing the Tomcat and Grumman.

>>64468566
checked, this and there was an F-14 thread last month went over this (how the Tomcat was, over a decade time interval de-procured into oblivion, along with critique of the Stooper Hornet) in detail.
Entire 'topic' here and every single post above (You)rs is a waste of bandwidth.

>>64461153
>Canceling A-12
>Corruption/grift
Former McD execs post on /k/?

>>64464530
It was considered but it'd be much fatter and slower after being reinforced for use on carriers and having an AWG-9 shoehorned into it. IIRC it also would lose fuel capacity compared to the normal F-15, and that already carried 4000 pounds less than a F-14

>>64461153
Wearing out the F18 airframes early was dumber than just ditching the F14. Ditching the A-6 and S-3 early was so dumb. The F18 wasn't fuel efficient as those are.

>>64459575 (OP)
what happens if they forget to unhook those chain when it launches?