The Tomcat was never a “Cat”

[Victory205]

Our beloved aircraft was called one of three things- “Tomcat”, “Turkey”, or “F14”. I also never heard anyone call it “The Tom” until long after it was retired. 

“The Cat” meant catapult in the Navy. An aviator didn’t fly the Cat, he or she got launched by one.

It sounds a bit confusing for a Cat on the Cat for a Cat Shot. The Airboss would confuse the hell out of the deck crew if he had to say, “Suspend CAT 2, the Cat has a malfunction!”. The crew wouldn’t know where the problem was, in the aircraft, or in the launching system.

“Cat” also was used in other aviation terms. Cat I, II and III ILS approaches. Cat A,B,C,D instrument classification for approach miniums (has to do with approach speeds vs weather minimums), and Category of RAG student, based on whether a new guy from training command, or a transition from another fleet aircraft, or refresher for someone who had been qualified in the same aircraft on a previous tour.

Other differences abound. Such as “Bag” meant flight suit in the Navy, it didn’t refer to external fuel tanks. I've got a briefing in a half hour, I gotta go put on my bag and grab a cup of Joe. Fuel tanks were called “drops” or wait for it, “tanks”. 

A flight in the USAF is a "ride", in the Navy, it's a "hop", even if it lasts 14 hours, includes six inflight refueling and crosses an ocean.

“The Jet” nomenclature came from the USAF, usually used to ascribe drama to a mundane maneuver or situation. They were always talking about “I put nine G’s on THE JET”, or ”the jet SWAPPED ENDS and the left engine FLAMED OUT”.

The Navy called an aircraft…believe it or not, “an aircraft”. In recent years, “the jet” seems to have been universally adopted, and even new airline pilots who arrived after transitioning from flying bug smashers now sneer about the proper way to fly “the jet”.

For some reason, the term that grinds my gears is “fighter jet”. It’s a dorky sounding term coined by hairsprayed newsreaders on crummy cable television broadcasts. Media uses has made "fighter jet" main stream. So if fighter jet makes sense, then why do we not call a P51 a “fighter prop”?

But wait, “cargo jet” sounds perfectly fine, but someone calling a C-130 a “cargo prop” would sound odd.

Media also uses the term “Tarmac” incorrectly. “The passengers were stuck on the tarmac for twenty minutes while the crew removed the anaconda from the copilots rudder pedals…” There are three official places “The Jet” can be located on an airport- “a runway, a taxiway, or a ramp”. Some of those surfaces are constructed of “tarmac”, most are concrete. Why aren’t passengers suffering on “The Concrete” during routine cockpit reptile removal?

My favorite on this grave, linguistic quandary is a passage by astronaut Michael Collins- a broadly educated, thoughtful man, describing how NASA changed the word “nominal” from meaning “a trifling, or small amount”, into a new usage describing an event as being “normal”. I think of him every time some kid from SpaceX utters it during a Falcon launch to dramatically convey that the payload fairing jettisoned without hitting anything important. Courtesy of NASA, the new meaning of “nominal” made it into the dictionary. I can’t bear to look to see if “fighter jet” has polluted Webster’s hallowed pages yet. Depressingly, it probably has.

During the height of the space program, NASA terms also found their way into military aviation, where pilots began to call something that wasn't working as it should, “an anomaly". I heard an A4 pilot say that she couldn't get the canopy to open because there was an "anomaly in the handle linkage". Scrub the launch, get Gene Krantz on the horn, break out the emergency procedures manual and run the "anomaly in the handle" procedure!

If a celebrity uses a term incorrectly, it will be instantly adopted. I met John Travolta long ago in the middle of nowhere in an airport FBO. He was on a break while he training for his multi-engine rating with one of my old instructors. Years later, he was on a PBS show talking about how he had a total electrical failure due to a “Transducer Rectifier” failure in his Gulfstream II. No Mr Barbarino, it’s called a “Transformer Rectifier”, and it converts AC power into DC power. That single interview resulted in years of newbie jet pilots going on about Transducers that weren’t installed in their “Jets”.

If you’ve read Shakespeare, you know that language naturally evolves, so this is all in fun, but there is no doubt that in an effort to sound cool, participants in aviation, like most endeavors, often end up appearing silly. It’s part of what makes aviation so much fun. 

Edited May 9, 2024 by Victory205

[MAXsenna]

Interesting! Thank you!


Sent from my SM-A536B using Tapatalk

[Grundar]

Fighter Jet is not in the Webster's dictionary I just checked it lol, neither is Jet Fighter.

Fighter-Bomber is though, it is, as of yet, to be changed to Fighter Jet-Bomber Jet.

I guess because aviation has had so much innovation over such a relatively short space of time that new areas of development (space for example) subvert some of the previous terms and became more widely adopted.  Though as you point out, sometimes it's use is in a somewhat nonsensical use, or at least has it's definition diluted and more broadly applied. 

[WarthogOsl]

Well, to be fair, "jet" as a term referring to an airplane, and not just an engine, goes back a pretty long ways...maybe to the 50's.  It's the same as how we refer to a rocket-engined spacecraft like the Falcon 9 as just a "rocket"

I suspect it's because before no one referred to planes as "prop planes" before jets existed, simple because they were all prop planes (minus gliders).  But then with turbine engines, you had the term "jet plane" to differentiate from, well, non-jet planes (heck, they even wrote a song about it).  And I think it's understood that "jet" means "jet plane" in that context.  Anyway, that's my 2 cents.

[Hayrake YE-ZB]

Funny stuff. You made my Friday. 
 

edit: I mean my Phriday!!!

Edited May 10, 2024 by Hayrake YE-ZB

[Nightdare]

On 5/9/2024 at 6:34 PM, Victory205 said:

I can’t bear to look to see if “fighter jet” has polluted Webster’s hallowed pages yet. Depressingly, it probably has

"Depressingly"?

 

You are forgetting that fighter planes are under the bigger family of "Jets", It's a coinage/Neologism, has been since the jet propulsion planes came to be

So next to passenger jets, jet (air)liners, jumbo jets, private jets (of which the genericized trademark Lear jet not forgetting), the fighter jet/jet fighter (and bombers) most certainly should be found amongst them

 

You are making it awfully hard for yourself, look up in the sky, it's either a prop plane or a jet, and if it's a jet,... what kind of jet is it?

[Bealdor]

"Old man yells at clouds" is all I'm reading here. Sorry, lol.

Yeah, language changes and not always for the best. But it is what it is, I guess. 

[draconus]

My favorite is when DCS users put their aircraft into the hanger

[MRSHADO]

... just getting around to reading this. Insightful.
If it helps, I read it with Andy Rooney voice in my head and agree with most of it.
 

[Victory205]

6 hours ago, MRSHADO said:

... just getting around to reading this. Insightful.
If it helps, I read it with Andy Rooney voice in my head and agree with most of it.
 

“Do you ever wonder why…?” 

As written in the article itself, it’s meant to be humorous.

There was a VF41 RIO who did a fine impression of Andy Rooney at Fo’c’sle Follies. “Do you ever wonder why all of the aircraft spotted on the bow are launched off of the waist cats, and all of the aircraft spotted on the stern are launched off of the bow?”

Add to the list- aircraft aren’t “parked” on an aircraft carrier, instead, they are “spotted”. 

[FR4GGL3]

On 5/9/2024 at 6:34 PM, Victory205 said:

If a celebrity uses a term incorrectly, it will be instantly adopted.
 

Then be our celebrity and teach us the usage of the terms correctly

[Viper33]

Who really cares? Let people call it whatever they want.

[FR4GGL3]

It was meant funny because we all know that Victory205 doesn't like it if "fighter pilots" get "Kim Kardashian level celebrity worship".

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

On 5/9/2024 at 6:34 PM, Victory205 said:

If a celebrity uses a term incorrectly, it will be instantly adopted

Or a politician

”SR-71” instead of the correct RS-71;

”F-35” instead of the correct F-24.

There are probably a lot more examples of this.

[RustBelt]

Wait, the 35 is the 35 because some stuffed suit mumbledumped the wrong number? 
 

[draconus]

9 hours ago, RustBelt said:

Wait, the 35 is the 35 because some stuffed suit mumbledumped the wrong number? 
 

Not really but it hasn't much thought put into it, just made up ad hoc.

http://www.designation-systems.net/usmilav/nonstandard-mds.html#_MDS_F35

Quote

 

Q: What's going to be the nomenclature for these airplanes? What's the designation?

Aldridge: Very good question. It's going to be called -- the Lockheed version was the X-35 --

MR.: Mike knows. Mike knows the answer.

Mike, the answer is?

Hough: F-35.

Aldridge: F-35. Thank you, I knew -- X-35 was the Lockheed --

Q: How did you decide on that? Where does that come from, the F-35?

Hough: It's a list of the different variants, different companies, different --

Aldridge: The Boeing version was X-32.

Okay.

 

[WarthogOsl]

10 hours ago, RustBelt said:

Wait, the 35 is the 35 because some stuffed suit mumbledumped the wrong number? 
 

The X-32 and 35 were at least the consistent numbering within the "X" designation, thought its not clear to me why they weren't "YF" such as the YF-22 and 23 were.

But then this is the same system that went from the B-2 to the B-21, so what-are-you-gonna-do?

Edited June 4, 2024 by WarthogOsl

[MicroShket]

В 02.06.2024 в 19:41, Raven (Elysian Angel) сказал:

SR-71 instead of the correct RS-71

I've read that it wasn't a mistake. 

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

On 6/4/2024 at 9:15 AM, WarthogOsl said:

But then this is the same system that went from the B-2 to the B-21, so what-are-you-gonna-do?

I look at it as a B-2.1 aka B-21 (with the B-2 being the B-2.0). The "A" as version number doesn't mean much nowadays anyway: it doesn't mean anything for the F-22A and doesn't mean anything for the B-2A either: upgrades are done iterative instead of in large packages that would warrant a version change 

 

On 6/3/2024 at 11:05 PM, RustBelt said:

Wait, the 35 is the 35 because some stuffed suit mumbledumped the wrong number? 
 

Based on what I heard at the time, the person who made the press announcement wasn't too versed in how the military usually names their aircraft, so he called it "F-35" because "X-35".
It should have been called "F-24" since it immediately follows F-22 and YF-23.

[Rhrich]

This reminds me of the old quiz question: How many buffalo did Buffalo Bill kill?

Answer: 0. There are no American buffalo, they're bison. 

But there is a philosophical question here: If enough people use a word as a name for something, that something will have that name. Regardless of whether it's correct or not. 

I sort of get why folks use "Cat". It's got a certain flair. And since they neither have the issues that Victory mentiones and DCS only got the one cat and not the other Grumman cats, I sort of see why its caught on. 

That said, I'm sure everyone appreciates some education and stories from those that actually was there and know the real story. 

[Dragon1-1]

TBH, the word "tarmac" does serve an useful purpose: it means any paved part of the airport that's accessible to aircraft. So you know the passengers were stuck near where the aircraft are, and not, say, in the parking lot, which tends to also be paved with asphalt or concrete. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some people didn't even realize it originally referred to a road surfacing material, as opposed to any kind of airport pavement. Seeing as the use of actual tarmac has pretty much passed into history, we might as well reuse the word.

On 7/3/2024 at 1:43 AM, Rhrich said:

I sort of get why folks use "Cat". It's got a certain flair.

Real Tomcat jocks use "Turkey" or "Tomcat", and that's flair enough.  Not that it stopped Bug drivers from coming up with other names...

On 5/9/2024 at 6:34 PM, Victory205 said:

My favorite on this grave, linguistic quandary is a passage by astronaut Michael Collins- a broadly educated, thoughtful man, describing how NASA changed the word “nominal” from meaning “a trifling, or small amount”, into a new usage describing an event as being “normal”. I think of him every time some kid from SpaceX utters it during a Falcon launch to dramatically convey that the payload fairing jettisoned without hitting anything important. Courtesy of NASA, the new meaning of “nominal” made it into the dictionary.

This is actually a common myth. NASA did not invent the second meaning of "nominal", it existed before, though it was quite more specific than simply "normal": it meant (and still does), roughly, "related to the value the property is supposed or expected to have". You can have a battery with nominal voltage (in other words, the one written on it) of 1.5V, and the actual voltage (as measured by the multimeter) of 1.45V. The NASA usage is exactly this - if the measured voltage and the value on the label match, you say that the voltage is nominal (and if a spacecraft battery shows 1.45V when the nominal value is 1.5+-0.1V, this is a cause for concern). It's not a huge leap to generalize it to "normal", particularly when dealing with such a numbers-bound discipline as spaceflight. Outside it, I guess an off-nominal value could be normal, but it usually does indicate something has degraded.