Several years since it was eventually retired from the U.S. Navy, the Grumman F-14 Tomcat remains one of the most loved planes by aviation enthusiasts.
Any article about this iconic fighter plane, still operating with the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force, its story, capabilities, records and surrounding anecdotes, always become a much debated and commented post on The Aviationist. For this reason, we will continue writing about this legendary plane and its replacement: the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet.
After the Tomcat retirement, not only has the Rhino (as the F/A-18E/F is nicknamed by its aircrews) quickly become the backbone of every Carrier Air Wing (CVW), but it has also replaced some of the oldest Legacy Hornets on the American flattops. Having fulfilled such a difficult task, the Super Hornet has demonstrated to be one of the best multirole jets available today. But could an advanced version of the F-14 have been even better?
LCDR Joe “Smokin” Ruzicka, who was the Radar Intercept Officer (RIO) who flew the last F-14 Demonstration before the Tomcat’s retirement in 2006, last year released an interesting interview to Foxtrot Alpha’s Tyler Rogoway. Among all the other things, Ruzicka explained that, while the Super Hornet is a great plane, it seems like its strength mainly comes from technology. “In the Tomcat, I think you had to be a better aviator because the technology just wasn’t there. It was up to the aircrew to maximize its performance (or minimize it if you sucked).”
That said, one might wonder whether integrating the same technology in the F-14 would have been possible.
By 1987, Grumman realized that the potential for growth had not yet been reached by the F-14 airframe, and they proposed to the U.S. Navy four advanced versions of the F-14, as told by Tim Callaway in Issue 13 “Grumman F-14 Tomcat” of Aviation Classics magazine.
The F-14D Quickstrike was the first proposal: featuring an enhanced version of the APG-71 radar, this advanced Tomcat version would have carried stand off weapons such as the Harpoon, HARM and SLAM (Standoff Land Attack Missile) missiles.
Requiring only new software and minor modifications to existing F-14Ds, the Quickstrike would have been a cost-effective attack platform but it didn’t meet the Advanced Tactical Fighter specification and the U.S. Navy chose the shorter ranged F/A-18E/F.
The second proposal was the ST21, the Super Tomcat for the 21st Century. The latter would have been a structural upgrade to the existing F-14Ds, that would have introduced a new wing glove design and single piece windscreen, while sensors positioned in front of the under fuselage weapons rails would have supplemented the chin pods. Moreover the ST21 would have also received a new engine the F110-GE-129 of 13,154kg of thrust, which would have provided a supercruise speed of Mach 1.3 featuring also thrust vectoring nozzles for greater maneuverability. These new engines would have supplied to the ST21 a tremendous acceleration alongside with a greatly increased range of the aircraft.
Another modification to the standard F-14D would have been the AST21, the Attack Super Tomcat for the 21st Century.
This advanced Tomcat would have been fitted with additional extra bomb pylons under the engine nacelles, a nuclear weapons capability, a modified radar with a Forward Air Controller (FAC) mode and an Integrated Defensive Avionics Package (IDAP) to improve survivability in the air to ground environment. The last proposal, as Callaway explains, was the ASF-14 Advanced Strike Fighter.
The ASF-14 would have been a totally new aircraft with the F-14 shape and it would have taken advantages of the new materials and new technologies developed for the Advanced Tactical Fighter and Advanced Tactical Attack Aircraft programs.
None of these proposals has been built and we’ll never know if an advanced Tomcat would have been better than the actual Super Hornet, but for sure these two fighters are two different aircraft as explained by Ruzicka, who told to Rogoway that the better way to understand the differences between the F-14 and the F/A-18E/F is using the analogy of a muscle car to a mini-van, “with the Tomcat being the former and the Super Hornet being the latter. The muscle car doesn’t have much to it in the way of fancy technology, just some raw speed and the coolness of a Steve McQueen movie, but it gets the job done. The mini-van on the other hand is a very nice car, complete with DVR’s for the kids, Air Conditioning, power windows, and lots of places to put your sippy cup. It’s a great car—-but it’s still a mini-van.”
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Sorry bro, enlighten yourself, read the chart-
For bring back tomcats again you need to things : 1) the technicians and all the complete team of grumman aircraft corporation and that company today don’t exist and 2) the f-14 molds destroyed to many years ago…without that its impossible and a totally joke i think!
All you need are the engineering drawings.
I did 7 deployments as an aviation electrician, 5 with the F-14 (2 with A’s, 3 with B’s) and 2 deployments with lot 14 F/A-18C’s.
Speaking from a maintainers perspective, the F-14A kept us employed almost non-stop, it took good techs and aircrew to make a squadron effective.
The B was easier, DFCS, the GE motors and some other upgrades helped alot, it still took experience and a good work ethic to keep flying.
The C model hornet was pretty easy to take care of and didn’t take as much effort to fix.
This all being said, I believe the F-14 can’t be replaced by any hornet version. The Tomcat even in a less technological form is a better weapons platform than the Hornet.
If some version of the F-14 Tomcat and A-6 Intruder were currently operating off today’s carrier decks, the fleet and this nation would be MUCH safer, THAT is a fact!!
The main reason–simplicity. Think Marcus Aurelius. One former Tomcatter said the big problem wasn’t it’s cost or even politics. Ever since the F14 first flew, there quickly became an inverse relationship between the amount of time one plane under went maintenance vs the amount of time that one plane flew. Secondly, because of the law of free enterprise, some of the suppliers of the F14 simply went out of business, forcing the Tomcat Tweakers to cannibalize the Christines that did nothing but sat around the hanger. What do you do when your Christines all dry up. Additionally, the F14 just like the F15 were designed to fight against major nation states like China, India, Russia, etc. How can the pentagon justified more high tech planes where they were fighting countries that didn’t even fight rouge terrorists nations that didn’t even have a navy, air force, or army. The peace dividend kicked in after desert storm, and budget cutters in both parties had trouble justify this to their voters…even though people like Arlen Spector did his best to keep up the Philadelphia Navy yard. This is why everyone is pushing lattoral combat ships, and floating ideas like smaller aircraft carriers.