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