Super Tomcat: The Navy’s Dream for the Ultimate F-14

[rangerrebew]

 
Super Tomcat: The Navy’s Dream for the Ultimate F-14
Story by Christian Orr • Yesterday 7:24 AM
 
The boffo box office of Top Gun: Maverick, the long-awaited sequel to the 1986 blockbuster original, has sparked renewed public interest in the legendary F-14 Tomcat. This is understandable since – minor spoiler alert – the venerable Tomcat appears in the sequel. 


What the movie does not tell you, though, is that there could have been an even deadlier version of the F-14: the Super Tomcat, or more specifically the ST21 (Super Tomcat for the 21st Century) and AST21 (Attack Super Tomcat for the 21st Century).

Whatever became of the would-be Super Tomcat?

 
What Maverick Might Have Wanted
Cinematic exploits aside, the real-life Tomcat certainly distinguished itself in air-to-air combat in the 1980s and 1990s, garnering a 5:0 kill ratio in the hands of U.S. Naval Aviators, as well as an officially claimed 130 victories versus only 4 losses for Iranian Air Force pilots during the Iran-Iraq War.   
 
However, as noted by aviation expert Tom Cooper in Smithsonian Magazine, “It is impossible to tabulate, for example, how many air-to-air victories were scored by Iranian F-14s because air force records were repeatedly tampered with during and after the war for political, religious, or even personal reasons.” 

In addition, the F-14 did its fair share of air-to-ground work, dropping hundreds of thousands of pounds of bombs, including GPS-guided JDAMs, in missions over Bosnia, Serbia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. 

As movie audiences and military aviation experts know, the original Grumman F-14 Tomcat was officially replaced in 2006 by the F/A-18 Super Hornet. Meanwhile, the Iranian Air Force is still keeping its Tomcats operational after all these decades.

But the Super Tomcat in theory could have done for the original what the F-15EX is now doing for the original Eagle, what the F-16V is doing for the original Fighting Falcon, or what the Super Hornet did for the original Hornet.

So how would the Super Tomcat have improved upon the original? 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/super-tomcat-the-navy-s-dream-for-the-ultimate-f-14/ar-AA14YZNC?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=387f9d9cadb8444a8bf5e17c0a1fdd5c&ei=25

[PeteS in CA]

The Tomcat was good ... for the US' first 4th generation fighter, and USN pilots and crew made it work well. But ...

* The reliability of its TF30 engine was poor;

* Its avionics were a mix of analog and digital that were advanced, for the early 1970s (I worked on the F-18 HUD and later saw the F-14 HUD ... 8 or 10 years made a huge difference; among the display vendor's test areas, the first level of The Inferno was F-14 Power Supply; it was so advanced that it could not be made reliable with the components it used ... one of the gurus of switching power supplies, Bob Boschert, tried; I was lucky, I worked on the F-18 HUD and the A-10 PU);

* The Phoenix missile had crazy-long range, BUT; it was designed to defend carrier task groups against slow maneuvering bombers, not for fighting highly maneuverable fighters;

* What the F-18 was designed to replace was not, originally, the F-14; the F-18 was designed to replace the aging F-4 and A-7 with one aircraft that could perform both roles;

* There was an updated Tomcat, the F-14D, https://www.historynet.com/tomcatting-why-the-grumman-f-14-never-lived-up-to-its-reputation/ :

The early Tomcat’s avionics, including the radar, badly needed upgrading to include high-speed multiplex digital data busses, multifunction cockpit displays, head-up displays and other state-of-the-art features already common in the Air Force’s fourth-generation fighters, the F-15 and F-16. The Tomcat was increasingly an analog airplane in a digital age. The advent of the F-14B and then the F-14D solved those issues.

The D model was in fact an all-digital strike fighter. It carried a remarkable new radar “that gave it an enormous increase in effectiveness…against stealthy aircraft,” wrote Rear Adm. Paul T. Gillcrist in his comprehensive book Tomcat!“Its capability against all types of targets in an electronic warfare environment [was] vastly improved.” The F-14D also had IRST (Infrared Search and Track), a passive sensor that was accurate at shorter ranges and almost impossible for opponents to detect. The fighter’s new glass cockpit, digital avionics and greatly enhanced datalink increased the crew’s situational awareness. The F-14D was a true multi-mission aircraft and its proponents believed it was a better strike fighter than the vaunted F-15E Strike Eagle. Unfortunately, the F-14D didn’t reach the fleet until 1990, a year before Tomcat production was defunded, and only 37 units were built.

As it was, the complex F-14 was difficult to service and maintain aboard carriers. Most estimates held that Tomcats required anywhere from 30 to 60 hours of maintenance per hour flown—about three times as much as the F/A-18 Hornets that replaced them. One result was that Grumman, Hughes, Raytheon and other companies sent civilian tech reps to carriers to do the heavy lifting, which gave the Navy’s own sailors too little opportunity for on-the-job training.

When the Tomcat was first deployed, a senior tech from the company that made the display systems, Kaiser Electronics, spent a couple of years on carriers that had the Tomcat. He was there long enough that the company "forgot" he existed and it took a long time for him to untangle his finances. How long other companies continued to deploy tech to carriers, I can't guess, but the navy mishandled the introduction of the Tomcat when it came to training mechanics and techs. The navy also did not "bite the bullet" when it came to updating the Tomcat. Electronic technology advanced swiftly in the 1970s and 1980s, and it was only in the late 1980s that the upgrade from analog and discrete digital avionics to integrated circuit, mostly digital, avionics got into development. The original engine also was replaced in the D model.

Like the F-15 and F-16, the F-18 proved less difficult and more flexible to update and upgrade. Being all-F-18 meant one engine, set of avionics, etc.; when the F-18 entered the fleet carriers had F-4s, F-14s, A-6s, and A-7s, four planes with different parts and maintenance procedures.

[rangerrebew]

@PeteS in CA

If you don't mind, I'll contact you every now and then to write an article for posting when the news is slow!  Great post!!