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F-14 was a very complex and expensive to maintain. A beauty, but an Hangar Queen in her last years.

Maybe by "peers" the author meant it was one of the "teen" fighters serie, F-14, F-15, F-16 and F/A-18. Like there was the "century" fighters, F-102, F-104, F-105, F-106.

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Fun point I read about this topic while back is that planes essentially cost the same amount of money per pound in the air, so building anything with two times the MTOW is an inherent disadvantage.

Apparently, a comment on the TSR-2 [1] was that it was too heavy. The problem was that the manufacturer misinterpreted this and instead of just going away and designing a smaller aircraft they spent a lot of money trying to make the existing one lighter.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2

It's not exactly practical to throw away a design and start on completely different aircraft! Also consider that the size was fixed by the fuel requirements and the wavelength of the sideways-looking radar. The second point was a dominant consideration in the earlier competition which led to the Avro 730 selection.

Any reason for not including the F-101?

just one, my poor memory.

And I'm guilty just as well. There was also the Super Sabre, F-100 which I forgot :)

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