This video will change your mind about F-14

[pepin1234]

 

[FR4GGL3]

"This video will change your mind about F-14"

No. Just because it is my First Love regarding Jets. And I wouldn't agree to everything that is said in this Video e.g. "Wings forward = Stallspeed". Although the F-14 had its Limitations.

 

But Thanks for the Video anyway. Every story is interesting at least entertaining.

 

Edited November 30, 2023 by FR4GGL3

[draconus]

2 hours ago, FR4GGL3 said:

I wouldn't agree to everything that is said in this Video

LOL, only 10% is true, it's in the name.

[FR4GGL3]

Before anybody looses this Lovin' Feelin'

(But remember: probably only 10 Percent True)

[ShinyMikey]

I wouldn't get too hung up on Eagle vs Tomcat stuff, every plane has strengths and weaknesses. In the case of the USN and USAF, we are all on the same side. Dale Snodgrass explains Tomcat vs Eagle really well in this clip:    

 

Edited December 1, 2023 by ShinyMikey

[Ahogephilia]

Nevertime, baby

[RustBelt]

Not happening. Air Force Cockpit logic sucks. 

[pepin1234]

It’s retired guys… Eagle is still up.

[FR4GGL3]

So what? A lot of people are looking forward to tthe F-4 from Heatblur. Also retired.

 

There is not such a thing like the only one, the best Plane of 'em all.

[Lurker]

On 11/30/2023 at 12:00 PM, pepin1234 said:

 

Can the Eagle land on an aircraft carrier? No? 

 

I. Rest. my. Case. 

[DD_Fenrir]

[Rhrich]

I see pilots who seek the limelight state stuff like this from time to time. Not really surprising that internet fanboys and armchair generals jump on and belive. What I don't understand is why a real pilot would say these things - he's just making a fool of himself.

The guy clearly doesn't understand what he's talking about, or forget it - for entertainment purposes.. It's entertaining though, I'll give him that. And ten percent is probably true.

[FR4GGL3]

And even if the F-15 would be 10 times better than the F-14, that wouldn't change my mind about the F-14. There are planes that are way better in things like ACM. But the Tomcat is the Tomcat. If you like an old GTO, you don't care that a new Porsche works better on the track.

 

And if the F-15 is so great, why didn't care Hollywood about the F-15? Heck even "Iron Eagle" used F-16s

[cheezit]

On 11/30/2023 at 6:00 AM, pepin1234 said:

 

 

I can't find the posts at the moment, but Disco here exemplifies a couple of quotes that Victory205 made on this forum to the effect that no F-15 pilot he encountered who talked about the F-14's ostensible wing speedometer could come close to telling him what the mach sweep schedule was, nor could any of them who pooh-poohed the Phoenix tell him anything about what its parameters were like (because they hadn't seen the relevant documents).

The bits attempting to cosplay as an aeronautical engineer in explaining design philosophy of airframes he'd never flown were the icing on the cake.

 

Listen, every pilot will have something to say about everything he's flown and everything he's flown against.  You'd be even sillier to take this guy's words at face value than you would be to consider every Snort/Hoser/Flash story to be gospel - you've got to balance eg. Disco's comments about F-15C vs F-14A against what "Okie" Nance says about the same fight and against "Puck" Howe's and "Jungle" Jones's comments about F-14D vs F-15C fight.

 

In conclusion,

[davidrbarnette]

Nope, didn’t change my mind about the F-14. No surprise that a career Eagle driver prefers the Eagle to the Tomcat. Did you think that he’d come on and say “you know, the Eagle sucked and the Tomcats always owned us”?

The only real “objective” feedback I’ve ever heard about the Tomcat’s shortcomings when compared to the Eagle were that it lacked an effective way to positively ID an aircraft in a busy airspace environment, while the Eagle’s NCTR capability allowed for a better ability to ID aircraft. This has been a widely reported story about the F-14 in Desert Storm. 

My experience has been that when it comes to DACT/BFM, whoever is currently doing the talking had the better aircraft.

 

Edited December 6, 2023 by davidrbarnette

[Tweety777]

On 12/2/2023 at 5:31 PM, pepin1234 said:

It’s retired guys… Eagle is still up.

Because the Eagle was designed to serve for a long time, where as the Tomcat was designed to serve a short time until a replacement was available. The results in build quility (some buttons in the Tomcat would easily fall out like HB has very well implemented here in DCS) became the downfall for the Tomcat, along with her limited ability to do anything else then air superiority (at which the Tomcat is about as good as the Eagle). Also the Hornet is quite close to the Tomcat and Eagle in air superiority and far better at ground attack then the Tomcat. Therefore retirement doesn't say anything about the quility of a plane, especially in the luxury position the USA is in in terms of available aircraft.

[Noctrach]

1 hour ago, Tweety777 said:

Because the Eagle was designed to serve for a long time, where as the Tomcat was designed to serve a short time until a replacement was available. The results in build quility (some buttons in the Tomcat would easily fall out like HB has very well implemented here in DCS) became the downfall for the Tomcat, along with her limited ability to do anything else then air superiority (at which the Tomcat is about as good as the Eagle). Also the Hornet is quite close to the Tomcat and Eagle in air superiority and far better at ground attack then the Tomcat. Therefore retirement doesn't say anything about the quility of a plane, especially in the luxury position the USA is in in terms of available aircraft.

Both the Eagle and the Hornet were also infinitely cheaper to maintain and upgrade... The Tomcat was never a very good value proposition, costing ~38 million per airplane in 1980, which, adjusted for inflation, is ~140 million USD in 2023. That is literally the price of a Raptor. It was "a necessary evil" in a time that promised a real risk of your entire strike fleet being sunk by long distance cruise missiles. When that threat went away ... well the Hornet offers you nearly twice the number of planes/parts for the same money.

Edit: A shower thought occurred while writing this... The Tomcat and the Raptor share a remarkable similarity Insanely expensive "super-planes" designed to counter a threat that would never quite manifest, causing them to go obsolete before ever flying the mission they were designed for, replaced by a cheaper jack-of-all-trades cousin using more mature implementations of the technology they pioneered.

At least the Tomcat-D had its moment of fame as a precision strike/FAC(A) aircraf, I wonder if the Raptor will turn up in a bomber role someday...

"Yessir, I know those externally mounted GBUs will have the RCS of a shiny metal barn door, but at least we get to use the plane for a little longer?"

Edited December 6, 2023 by Noctrach

[illegal1984]

No disrespect to Disco, but the way he hates on the F-14 he comes off looking like a clown, which is kind of sad to see because he was an excellent Eagle driver. He doesn’t know what he is talking about at all, at least in respect to his comments about the Tomcat. I think any self-respecting F-14 driver would laugh his comments off rather than really debate them. The F-15 is wildly overrated to point of absurdity. Always has been, always will be.

[Nealius]

Why do people have such a hard-on for arguing about which airplane is best? Just fly the damn thing and have fun.

[cheezit]

On 12/6/2023 at 5:06 AM, Noctrach said:

Both the Eagle and the Hornet were also infinitely cheaper to maintain and upgrade...

 

 

I think this is true for the Hornet and the Viper, but not the Eagle.  The Eagle was probably 75% of the maintenance problem that the F-14A was (somewhat fewer hydraulic problems and many fewer electronics problems) - while the Air Force doesn't publish maintenance hours per flight hour numbers like the Navy and USMC do, it does publish costs per flight hour, and the Eagle is more expensive than other 4th gen jets by a mile; the exact numbers differ from annual report to annual report, but it's generally about 2x what the F-16 costs to run (circa $40k vs $20k/hour in recent years, with fuel costs making up only a small fraction of that difference).  Even the projected target cost-per-flight-hour of the F-15EX (designed to be more maintainable) is still high compared to everything else 4th-gen that's still in the air, and that's a number coming from the manufacturer's sales & marketing department, not an observed figure.

 

It's interesting to look at how the Air Force treated the F-15 versus how the Navy treated the F-14 in terms of upgrades over the common service life of both aircraft (roughly 1976-2006).  Everybody knows about the boneheaded spares decision in the early 1980s (I had a copy of the appropriations hearing where that decision was made, but I can't find it now), but look at the original Grumman/Navy plan for F-14 development and it's similar to what the Air Force actually did with the F-15.  Different program offices, budget priorities, etc.

 

Nb. that there would be no F-15Cs in service in 2023 and no F-15EX if the original Raptor buy hadn't been repeatedly clipped until ending up at a quarter of what was originally intended.  Similarly, there'd probably be no SuperHornet if the specific sequence of events in the early 90s hadn't played out about the way they did, with the A-6 upgrades being cancelled because the A-12 was in the works, then the A-12 being cancelled, then the F-117N proposals all being rejected, then the A-6 and S-3 in their entirety and the F-14 Block I Strike program and the AAAM program being killed for budget reasons after Desert Storm, then the F-14D buy being severely clipped because NATF was in the works, then NATF being cancelled, then the joint USMC/RN program to replace the Harrier becoming 'jointer' and then 'jointest' as it metastasized into the JSF program, then the legacy Hornet program executive office needing a few billion for the MLU and CBR programs, then finally SuperHornet winning over QuickStrike and all other "Super Tomcat" variants to be the stopgap until a 5th-gen flight deck was achieved - and there's plenty that I missed.

 

At least we can say that the Superbug was a very good aircraft for the wars we actually ended up fighting during its service life.  Further note that, despite both design improvements for enhanced maintainability and an extra two decades of experience maintaining the design, the F/A-18E/F has seen substantially worse availability than the legacy Hornet at the same point in its service life.  Want to guess why?  My two cents say the culprits are minimal manning, near-constant high op tempo, penny-wise/pound-foolish budget decisions (esp. during sequestration), and having killed their tankers and thus having to do a ton of buddy tanking.  It's almost a blessing the Tomcat got spared most of these, and got to end on a high note as the "most capable strike fighter on the flight deck" with, comically, also the best availability and cost-per-flight-hour numbers for its last cruise (there are obviously some asterisks that belong on that figure).

 

 

[Victory205]

Seems like many of you are finally realizing that “fighter pilots” are simply normal people, and are not worthy of Kim Kardashian level celebrity worship. I find myself optimistic this fine day, having discovered that there might be hope for the world after all.

Very well written summation, @cheezit.

I would add that the reason for the depressing choices on parts support and the upgrade timeline was the result of SECNAV’s insistance on a 600 ship Navy. It turned out to be based on overstated intelligence on the Russian Naval capabilities, but the procurement, manning and maintenance costs of those ships, which spend most of their lives sitting in port and in maintenance, was astronomical. As Reagan and Gorbachev cooled tensions (Defense spending peaked around 1987), and especially after the USSR collapsed and true capacity was revealed and no longer a threat, it was payback time for the USN’s steamrolling of the years of budget dominance.

There was a priority of total hulls over total quality present during the time of @Cheezit’s analysis above.

Edited December 9, 2023 by Victory205

[PAIDtriot]

On 11/30/2023 at 10:58 AM, draconus said:

LOL, only 10% is true, it's in the name.

LOL "10 Percent True" is just the name of the podcast.  

[pepin1234]

On 12/6/2023 at 7:43 AM, Nealius said:

Why do people have such a hard-on for arguing about which airplane is best? Just fly the damn thing and have fun.

probably because what really was, it is represented with steroids in DCS.  

 

[BIGNEWY]

Folks keep it friendly here, people can have opinions even if they are wrong ones. 

thanks

[Quid]

2 hours ago, pepin1234 said:

probably because what really was, it is represented with steroids in DCS.  

 

https://heatblur.se/fmupdate/

Those 0.1-0.2deg/sec deviations (+ or -, by the way) in regions of the envelope less than .1M wide are not putting the plane "with steroids," nor handicapping it in any significant way on the "-" side.  It's pretty close to the manual data.  Where, then, are you getting this?