Tales of the F-14 | Hacker News Reader

Tales of the F-14

airspacemag.com

29 pointsaycangulez34 comments

Print article: http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&...

Readability: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

The anecdotes I liked most:

"In designing the cockpit, we worked with the project pilot who went through system by system with each of the engineers in order to whittle down the number of discrete controls in order to justify every one that the engineer thought was necessary. In the flight control system the number of caution and warning indicators was reduced. Some of the engineers wanted a first level warning of every first level system, but we simplified the number of cautions and warnings. The objective, among other things was that it was a Navy airplane and the Navy didn’t want a pinball machine in the cockpit. They didn’t want a pilot being distracted while he’s being shot off the catapult." - Vincent Devino

"The Tomcat’s air-to-air weapons mix was just unmatched. The Phoenix gives you up to 110-mile range. It launches and...[after a programmed number of feet] the missile turns on its own radar where told to look. It was a launch-and-leave situation. You can launch six and track more than 30 targets. One step down was the Sparrow, at 20-25 miles. Then you step down to infrared sidewinder. Now you’re talking feet-you’ve got that 25-mm gun, with about 600 rounds of ammo, so you have a full minute of firing time. It was sort of a fighter pilot’s dream on an intercept [mission]. That capability has not been matched, and won’t be. We don’t have it anymore." - Charlie Brown

I wasn't expecting that second quote to be by... Charlie Brown. Must not always be easy to be named like that.

Fave (relevant) quote:

"The best way to do something ‘lean’ is to gather a tight group of people, give them very little money, and very little time."

It works if you're defending the free world (as in, that's the motivation of the members of the team).

It doesn't work at all if you're implementing enterprise software. Who gets gung ho about TPS reports? Rather than heroes, people feel exploited, since they know they're busting their arses just to make their VP look good...

It works if you're defending the free world (as in, that's the motivation of the members of the team).

Idealist me would like to think that such is the motivation of the majority of the HN 'team' =)

Isn't Iran (of all places) still flying the F-14?

Yes, they are still using it. In fact, Iran remains the only country that the US exported F-14s to.

Indeed, when the USS Vincennes shot down an airliner full of Iranian civilians, they believed themselves to be under attack from an Iranian F14.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

It always blew my mind how long the F-14 was in service - they were present at the American evacuation from Saigon in 1975.

As a fighter, definitely.

When you compare it to other larger military aircraft, it doesn't seem very long at all. The B52 has been in active service since 1955. The A-10 was introduced in 1977 and isn't expected to be replaced until nearly 2030.

And the Douglas DC-4 was introduced in the 1930s and there are still a few flying around!

I think you mean the DC-3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC-3

The DC-4 was also introduced in the 1930s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_DC-4

In active service in the armed forces, or private/commercial?

All private, I think. This one flies right over our office several times a week: http://archives.californiaaviation.org/ganews/msg09194.html .

Most are privately owned or with historical flights, but some do remain in military service. For instance, the Salvadoran Air Force operates 2 near-original C-47Ds and a few Basler BT-67s and the South African Air Force has 10 C-47TPs (converted to turboprop power with PT-6A engines) which are used in the maritime patrol, light transport and EW roles.

The KC-135 is also an old plane that is still in active service (started ops in 1957 and was based on the prototype aircraft that eventually became the Boeing 707..)

The B52 is intended to be in service until 2040 - long enough for the great-great-grandchildren of the original pilots to be flying it!

Sure do hope they find a way to extend that to 2055!

And the C-130 since 1956, in pretty much continuous production the whole time as well.

Grew up about 5 miles from the plant in Marietta Ga.

The Nimrod operated by the RAF is basically the Comet, world's first jet airliner in 1949.

While a respectable career, its not that remarkably long. A-10 for example was operational in late 70's and it's still in service. On the other hand Tomcats successor F/A-18 Hornet was already introduced in mid-80's. Compare that to F-15 Eagle, which was also introduced in late 70's and its successor, F-22 Raptor, introduced in 2005. And the Eagle is supposed to last to at least 2025, according to Wikipedia.

Throwing expensive toys away if they work is bit silly, that's why phasing operational stuff out takes so long. Especially if you account for the need to retrain all your people, not just the pilots, but service crew as well.

Not to mention that since the collapse of the Soviets, the F15 is perfectly competitive with anything it's likely to meet in the air in the foreseeable future.

That goes for all the other major Western fighters too. The ONLY reason we're buying Eurofighter Typhoons is contractual obligation. Tornadoes (more-or-less a British equivalent to the Tomcat) are still perfectly good. If there were worries about the airframes we should have simply spun the production lines back up and made more of the proven design.

During one of the all-night engine runs a few days before First Flight, I was running the engines ... I looked over the side and saw a large puddle of hydraulic fluid... I asked what happened, and he said it must have been a loose B nut... We were all sleepy, so we went home and thought no more about it. !!

wtf?! you're test piloting a mulit-million dollar jet plane, it starts leaking fluid when you're testing the engine on the ground, it leaks fluid, and since you're sleepy you just forget about it and go home?! That's pretty crazy. I guess these guys are more gung-ho than I thought. Would you even do that even if you were testing a race car?

"At this point we were about a half-mile short of the runway, about 25 feet above the trees. Bill quickly initiated the ejection sequence using his face curtain. A sensitive accelerometer on the nose strut recorded and telemetered back to the ground the little blips showing the firing of the canopy and then the ejection guns on the two seats in turn. That all took 0.9 seconds as advertised; 0.4 seconds later the nosewheel hit a tree!"

Some footage of the last few seconds of the flight is on Youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY3tsYoLopQ

As a fun side note, F-14s inspired the creators of Robotech (Macross). The mechas in this classic anime look very much like F-14s when they are in their normal "fighter" mode. Here is how they look like when transformed half-way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:VF-1S-Strike-Valkyrie-02.j...

Why is it that the Navy never replaced the F-14 with a fighter with similar characteristics - speed, range, weapon range etc ?

I assume because we're preparing for different threats. The F-14 was designed for creating air superiority in direct confrontations with the Soviet Union. Now our likely opponents will concede that territory to us and respond with suicide bombs.

The F14 was, like almost all weapon systems, built ot fight the previous war. It's exactly what a WWII carrier pilot flying would have wanted and as soon as they got promoted high enough - it's what they bought.

I don't think the Chinese or the Norks would adopt that strategy. Nor would India or Pakistan if an intervention was required there. In fact nor would Russia if they decided to step up their activities in Chchnya or Georgia.

Who's to say what the geopolitical situation will be in 10, 20, 50 years? Aircraft flying now will see it...

The entire US Navy F-14 fleet's entire combat record shows 5 kills, four Libyan ("freedom of the seas" operations in the Gulf of Sidra) and 1 Iraqi helicopter (Desert Storm). Other operations include menacing an Egyptian airliner and diverting it to land at a NATO base in Sicily to arrest a few terrorists. The F-14 occasionally dropped bombs on the Balkans and Iraq as well. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-14_Tomcat_operational_history) Clearly, in retrospect you can do just as much--some things even more effectively--with more versatile F/A-18 Hornet or F-35 Lightning II aircraft. And then you have fewer different airframes to service, which is always a logistics boon.

The F-14 was designed to protect US carriers from air attack. They would have been really fucking useful in WWII but since then that job hasn't been necessary. Less flippantly, they may have helped the British in the Falklands, since the Phoenix missile was designed to shoot down cruise missiles like the Exocets which the Argentines used to some success (as well as the planes they were launched from). Of course, the British at the time did not have carriers capable of launching or landing the F-14, only smaller carriers designed to maintain a fleet of Harriers.

Aegis cruisers came out a couple years after the F-14, and do most of the same job with surface to air missiles, and even they are overkill. It's exceedingly rare we will get into a shooting war with a country capable of matching even the F/A-18's performance in the hands of American naval aviators, much less on the high seas. (Off the high seas, it might be useful to have an overpowered air superiority fighter, but that's the F-22's job. Of course, judging from the Iraq war it helps to have as much as your air fleet as possible launching from carriers, just in case you manage to piss off all the countries where the Air Force could base their planes in the region.)

Great answer, thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com