A great shame that the Tomcat is no more in the USN. The SuperHornet doesnt have the range, endurance, climb rate and payload of the F14. I only hope this doesn't prove disasterous in a future war!
Big Navy failed to defend the big fighter jet. No HARM, No AMRAAM, LANTIRN but so what?, No 'Future Proofing' USN OPP, No Continuing Series Of Micro/Major Upgraades (frameless windscreen vs. DFCS) to prove interest in the program persists. The USN has a massive ego trip problem in that they literally sabotage any program that they are not lead on but when given leadership, refuse to pay for whatever Christmas List of goodies they wanted to put on the last jet 'but didn't have the money' has accumulated. They are worse than the French. And this is well known throughout the defense aerospace industry as a function of abortions like the A-12 and the Super Hornet and now the F-35C. They will slow roll something they don't want to the point it becomes ridiculous and then say that times have changed, the program is unsaveable and now they need to shift all funds to this new effort. Despite the fact that it was them screwing up the last effort and then demanding at-sea stealth which resulted in not just the _as spec'd_ current system but also the cancellation of multiple other programs to fix their mistakes. And they are so blatant with this that you can actually track it. The JSF went from tears 'we gotta go LO' after the A-12 debacle to the TAMP 2001 where the divorce settlement inherent to making the USMC this nation's third airforce began with a reduction in total airframes purchased from 600+520 to 450 and 250. Because JSF was just a plan to kick the USAF in the procurement sack on a whole bunch of come-due acquisition phases which they had carefully planned for the 1990s, even after the fall of the Soviet Union made existing budgetary environments uncertain. It wasn't just that the USN got an F/A-18E/F which FAILED OPEVAL (a pass/fail = operationally unsuitable refusal to acquire test level at one point, the Navair equivalent to a Doctoral Board or Bar Exam...) but that we cost the F-22 buyout to breakeven in later models (the Raptor is still flying at an FSD/LRIP configuration level, which is one of the reasons it is so hard to maintain and has such limited abilities), along with the C-17 and what would become the F-16 CAPES. Pure interservice penis envy leading to corporate level sabotage. Starting with the F-111B which was actually a great FADF and _never designed_ to do the OPP escort/MIGCAP missions and proceeding all the way to the F-22/23 and then F-35 aircraft. To the point where, now, the USN has neither a future attack airframe nor a competitive 4.5/5 gen fighter (UCAV) to support them. Aside from their personality issues of Building 512, it can ALL be traced to the fact that the USAF buys a chunk of dirt and turns it into a toxic waste dump while the USN has to build the barge they want to stick an IA upon and then build all the associated escorts which keep the piranha and speed boat navies from turning their floating resort town and airport on into submarine. You can build Haze Grey & Underway. Or you can build the air wing, half of whose exponents (F-14, E-2, S-3, EA-6B) are actually primary airbase defenders. But you cannot do both. And they adopt smart standoff weapons besides. The latter is a major problem because ot not only means the USN is riding the USAF coat tails towards a common mission:munition set of cloned capabilities. But it also highlights how limited in terms of 200 sortie surge days (just 2 sorties per day on a 50 jet airwing) on-station the USN really is, before it has to back off, restock from the Fleet Trains and move forward again. Starting with Vietnam, the USN was not really able to do the mission of punitive strikes until the USAF pulled into Thailand and once they were there, the USN lost relevance as a sortie generator in shared airspace allocations o RPV/VI and 'everything South'. Today, things are worse. Because the USN cannot even get through the littoral verge to start building the air operations bubble. But the navy is also the one with major assets like EW which the USAF only partly covers with its own 'expeditionary squadrons' (the EA-18G is one of the biggest deep-rut mistakes the USN has made, you either need serious Big Crow assets or something like the original X-45 program of forward area swarming EA...). Anyway... What a lot of people fail to take away from the F-14 is based on a failure to look through the propaganda as to why it was cancelled. No, the FADF mission never goes away on a 14 billion dollar hull with 2 NPP steam plants and a 100 million dollar ammunition ship load plus 4 million gallon MRT tanker worth of fuel onboard. But the reason the F-14 failed to highlight the REAL power of the long range missileer concept was because the Phoenix suckethed mightily. And nobody wanted to talk about what happened to a non-LO airwing which suddenly had to Offensive Power Projection penetrate, against a mass S-300/400 threat. Where every other SAM (Buk-M3, 9M96, 9M100, 40N6, 77N6) was an AMRAAM equivalent active/autonomous homer. And the need was to loft missiles that would go 100nm downrange, from low level, to get the shot in. Whether or not you had _Blk.V and JASSM_ capture of the airspace through rollback and stealthy targeters. If you are going to fight 100nm off the nose, you need a 36-40" radome supporting a Mach 6-7 midcourse weapon. Like the MiG-31/R-37M, which is now the most effective fighter/miissile combination in the world, having effectively annihilated the Ukrainian Air Force with some Foxhound crews have 11-12 kills. Admit to this and the F/A-18E with AGM-174 is a joke. Because the APG-79, even in the V4 version with GaN, is just a meh radar. Being too small (27") and too low power as well as late in the type's service life. By way of comparison, the radar the Super Horror 'beat' the Tomcat with was actually the APG-73 and they had to completely redesign an new forward fuselage to accommodate the APG-79 with dual advanced crew station compatibility to get, couple hundred airframes into Blk.II service. And you're still getting only two 1,862lb missiles on an airframe with, essentially, no supersprint capabilities to boost them. A-durrrr. Had they USED THE ARGUMENT that big reach = look-in/shoot-in on landbased (universal) SAM threats rather than Tu-22M Backfire bombers, the F-14D would have been the natural, pancake belly, massive missile compatible choice. Because it also had the APG-71 to service those distant threats in a way which even the F-22 would struggle to survive doing, today (hint: the Raptor is not 360` global VLO...). But to get there, you need to open the F-14 airframe to more of the fleet, so that 'anybody can land it' and there are no Revlon incidents. While you need to finish the job of upgrading away from an analog/Kalman front end towards and AESA version of the APG-70 which, oh by the way, also gives you the SAR/GMTI modes to properly point a targeting pod. Just as you also need a proper, digital, big screen, cockpit (the ASF-14 crew station looked, essentially, like the F-35 with a very large area CRT instead of AMLCD). And IDECM+HARM+ALR-67V3 survivability upgrades. Plus AAAM/AMRAAM for the fighter:fighter mission. Add proper sensor fusion to bring it and the dual bore optics tubes, all together into a single, IFDL, fused picture.
Effectively, you would have had an F-22 Avionics package on an airframe which could kill things, from standoff, that the Raptor had to get up close and personal to achieve (with period AIM-120C4). Now, you ALSO need to pour a lot of funds into maintainability/reliability/serviceability upgrades. No navy aircraft should be calling for high pressure air to start the jet in the 1990s. All manner of seals, fuel system components needed fixing and, contrary to the narrative, the avionics needed to be clustered into fewer boxes with integraated AWG-9/13 functionality across a universal 1760 MUX. More gas, a better aerodynamics package (useful maneuvering high lifts with integrated APC/DLC for carrier approach and recontoured gloves to provide useful snap turns) atop thrustier F110-GE-429 engines and some control-configured capabilities to replace CAS modes on the DFCS while carrying heavy air to ground loads would also help but were actually third down on the list. Neither the USN nor the USAF wanted to admit you didn't need stealth to kill a non-LO air threat enemy. And so the F-14D never got the love it needed to become both a production representative, useful, percentage of the naval inventory. Not an (R)eman conversion of tired 70s-80s jets. All of which would have been nice insights to have, in the 1990s. The effectiveness of the USN is now falsely centered on conventional airpower, whose day has come and gone, even as we now face a threat which has complete range and targeting overmatch with ASBM and we have no 'hypersonic' (aeroballistic) counter from an SSGN followon to win in the returning LSCO, high intensity, peer threat. Wars will be won in pulses of major operational surge by assets in place. And safe from missile attack of their own, because they are submerged. None of which the USN wants to 'more flexible' listen to as they pursue ever more unaffordable, CSG centric, fleet structures where we build and retire entire classes (LCS and Tico) without replacement. At the same time we now need BOTH a new attacker and a new fighter. Because the USAF has them. And the USN will not yield pride of place to stay in their lane and simply build VLS hulls while other people do airpower. America, despite a 30 trillion per year GDP, is penniless, adding a trillion dollars, annually, in debt as deficit spending and despite 800 odd bases, worldwide, we cannot defend our own borders from a parasitic invasion of 10+ million people per year, all of whom become instant, multi-generational, welfare dependents at 100 billion annually. The Armed Forces are broken. And we cannot fix them by maintaining unnecessary, anachronistic duplication of capabilities. Spending 1.25 trillion per year, roughly a third of our 'discretionary budget', per year, on black/white defense budgets is unsustainable. Doing it to maintain a 1960s level vision of multi-domain/multi-service taskings, as roles and mission overlap, is purely evil. We are not having enough kids to fill the manning ratio billets of the platforms we now have. And everyone cringes and makes the sign of the cross when you even MENTION robots as UCAVs in a lockerroom jockstrap environment of fighter air.
Enjoyed the new episode! Great stuff about the mighty F-14D. Still on the Puck side. F-14D is superior to this tiny Hornets with all those fancy software codes n stuff :))
![Libya Raider - Flying on El Dorado Canyon. Jim Jimenez [Full]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/66BD1_KP8VY/mqdefault.jpg)
So glad these episodes are rolling again! Thanks to you and your guest taking the time to inform us and enrich our dreams of aviation! Cheers
That part about the line of code for the Radar was very interesting.
Excellent interview. Learned a lot!
Another excellent episode- thank you Hanky and Steve.
Wonderful questions and equally wonderful answers, probably the best tomcat specific episode anywhere on the net!
Thank you very much for your time ❤
Great stuff again Steve. Hope to see Hanky on the channel again soon.
Yesss!
Hell yeah
A great shame that the Tomcat is no more in the USN. The SuperHornet doesnt have the range, endurance, climb rate and payload of the F14. I only hope this doesn't prove disasterous in a future war!
Big Navy failed to defend the big fighter jet.
No HARM, No AMRAAM, LANTIRN but so what?, No 'Future Proofing' USN OPP, No Continuing Series Of Micro/Major Upgraades (frameless windscreen vs. DFCS) to prove interest in the program persists.
The USN has a massive ego trip problem in that they literally sabotage any program that they are not lead on but when given leadership, refuse to pay for whatever Christmas List of goodies they wanted to put on the last jet 'but didn't have the money' has accumulated. They are worse than the French. And this is well known throughout the defense aerospace industry as a function of abortions like the A-12 and the Super Hornet and now the F-35C.
They will slow roll something they don't want to the point it becomes ridiculous and then say that times have changed, the program is unsaveable and now they need to shift all funds to this new effort. Despite the fact that it was them screwing up the last effort and then demanding at-sea stealth which resulted in not just the _as spec'd_ current system but also the cancellation of multiple other programs to fix their mistakes.
And they are so blatant with this that you can actually track it. The JSF went from tears 'we gotta go LO' after the A-12 debacle to the TAMP 2001 where the divorce settlement inherent to making the USMC this nation's third airforce began with a reduction in total airframes purchased from 600+520 to 450 and 250.
Because JSF was just a plan to kick the USAF in the procurement sack on a whole bunch of come-due acquisition phases which they had carefully planned for the 1990s, even after the fall of the Soviet Union made existing budgetary environments uncertain. It wasn't just that the USN got an F/A-18E/F which FAILED OPEVAL (a pass/fail = operationally unsuitable refusal to acquire test level at one point, the Navair equivalent to a Doctoral Board or Bar Exam...) but that we cost the F-22 buyout to breakeven in later models (the Raptor is still flying at an FSD/LRIP configuration level, which is one of the reasons it is so hard to maintain and has such limited abilities), along with the C-17 and what would become the F-16 CAPES.
Pure interservice penis envy leading to corporate level sabotage. Starting with the F-111B which was actually a great FADF and _never designed_ to do the OPP escort/MIGCAP missions and proceeding all the way to the F-22/23 and then F-35 aircraft. To the point where, now, the USN has neither a future attack airframe nor a competitive 4.5/5 gen fighter (UCAV) to support them.
Aside from their personality issues of Building 512, it can ALL be traced to the fact that the USAF buys a chunk of dirt and turns it into a toxic waste dump while the USN has to build the barge they want to stick an IA upon and then build all the associated escorts which keep the piranha and speed boat navies from turning their floating resort town and airport on into submarine.
You can build Haze Grey & Underway. Or you can build the air wing, half of whose exponents (F-14, E-2, S-3, EA-6B) are actually primary airbase defenders. But you cannot do both. And they adopt smart standoff weapons besides.
The latter is a major problem because ot not only means the USN is riding the USAF coat tails towards a common mission:munition set of cloned capabilities. But it also highlights how limited in terms of 200 sortie surge days (just 2 sorties per day on a 50 jet airwing) on-station the USN really is, before it has to back off, restock from the Fleet Trains and move forward again.
Starting with Vietnam, the USN was not really able to do the mission of punitive strikes until the USAF pulled into Thailand and once they were there, the USN lost relevance as a sortie generator in shared airspace allocations o RPV/VI and 'everything South'.
Today, things are worse. Because the USN cannot even get through the littoral verge to start building the air operations bubble. But the navy is also the one with major assets like EW which the USAF only partly covers with its own 'expeditionary squadrons' (the EA-18G is one of the biggest deep-rut mistakes the USN has made, you either need serious Big Crow assets or something like the original X-45 program of forward area swarming EA...).
Anyway...
What a lot of people fail to take away from the F-14 is based on a failure to look through the propaganda as to why it was cancelled.
No, the FADF mission never goes away on a 14 billion dollar hull with 2 NPP steam plants and a 100 million dollar ammunition ship load plus 4 million gallon MRT tanker worth of fuel onboard. But the reason the F-14 failed to highlight the REAL power of the long range missileer concept was because the Phoenix suckethed mightily. And nobody wanted to talk about what happened to a non-LO airwing which suddenly had to Offensive Power Projection penetrate, against a mass S-300/400 threat.
Where every other SAM (Buk-M3, 9M96, 9M100, 40N6, 77N6) was an AMRAAM equivalent active/autonomous homer. And the need was to loft missiles that would go 100nm downrange, from low level, to get the shot in. Whether or not you had _Blk.V and JASSM_ capture of the airspace through rollback and stealthy targeters.
If you are going to fight 100nm off the nose, you need a 36-40" radome supporting a Mach 6-7 midcourse weapon. Like the MiG-31/R-37M, which is now the most effective fighter/miissile combination in the world, having effectively annihilated the Ukrainian Air Force with some Foxhound crews have 11-12 kills.
Admit to this and the F/A-18E with AGM-174 is a joke. Because the APG-79, even in the V4 version with GaN, is just a meh radar. Being too small (27") and too low power as well as late in the type's service life.
By way of comparison, the radar the Super Horror 'beat' the Tomcat with was actually the APG-73 and they had to completely redesign an new forward fuselage to accommodate the APG-79 with dual advanced crew station compatibility to get, couple hundred airframes into Blk.II service.
And you're still getting only two 1,862lb missiles on an airframe with, essentially, no supersprint capabilities to boost them. A-durrrr.
Had they USED THE ARGUMENT that big reach = look-in/shoot-in on landbased (universal) SAM threats rather than Tu-22M Backfire bombers, the F-14D would have been the natural, pancake belly, massive missile compatible choice. Because it also had the APG-71 to service those distant threats in a way which even the F-22 would struggle to survive doing, today (hint: the Raptor is not 360` global VLO...).
But to get there, you need to open the F-14 airframe to more of the fleet, so that 'anybody can land it' and there are no Revlon incidents. While you need to finish the job of upgrading away from an analog/Kalman front end towards and AESA version of the APG-70 which, oh by the way, also gives you the SAR/GMTI modes to properly point a targeting pod. Just as you also need a proper, digital, big screen, cockpit (the ASF-14 crew station looked, essentially, like the F-35 with a very large area CRT instead of AMLCD). And IDECM+HARM+ALR-67V3 survivability upgrades. Plus AAAM/AMRAAM for the fighter:fighter mission. Add proper sensor fusion to bring it and the dual bore optics tubes, all together into a single, IFDL, fused picture.
Effectively, you would have had an F-22 Avionics package on an airframe which could kill things, from standoff, that the Raptor had to get up close and personal to achieve (with period AIM-120C4).
Now, you ALSO need to pour a lot of funds into maintainability/reliability/serviceability upgrades. No navy aircraft should be calling for high pressure air to start the jet in the 1990s. All manner of seals, fuel system components needed fixing and, contrary to the narrative, the avionics needed to be clustered into fewer boxes with integraated AWG-9/13 functionality across a universal 1760 MUX.
More gas, a better aerodynamics package (useful maneuvering high lifts with integrated APC/DLC for carrier approach and recontoured gloves to provide useful snap turns) atop thrustier F110-GE-429 engines and some control-configured capabilities to replace CAS modes on the DFCS while carrying heavy air to ground loads would also help but were actually third down on the list.
Neither the USN nor the USAF wanted to admit you didn't need stealth to kill a non-LO air threat enemy. And so the F-14D never got the love it needed to become both a production representative, useful, percentage of the naval inventory. Not an (R)eman conversion of tired 70s-80s jets.
All of which would have been nice insights to have, in the 1990s.
The effectiveness of the USN is now falsely centered on conventional airpower, whose day has come and gone, even as we now face a threat which has complete range and targeting overmatch with ASBM and we have no 'hypersonic' (aeroballistic) counter from an SSGN followon to win in the returning LSCO, high intensity, peer threat.
Wars will be won in pulses of major operational surge by assets in place. And safe from missile attack of their own, because they are submerged.
None of which the USN wants to 'more flexible' listen to as they pursue ever more unaffordable, CSG centric, fleet structures where we build and retire entire classes (LCS and Tico) without replacement. At the same time we now need BOTH a new attacker and a new fighter. Because the USAF has them. And the USN will not yield pride of place to stay in their lane and simply build VLS hulls while other people do airpower.
America, despite a 30 trillion per year GDP, is penniless, adding a trillion dollars, annually, in debt as deficit spending and despite 800 odd bases, worldwide, we cannot defend our own borders from a parasitic invasion of 10+ million people per year, all of whom become instant, multi-generational, welfare dependents at 100 billion annually.
The Armed Forces are broken. And we cannot fix them by maintaining unnecessary, anachronistic duplication of capabilities. Spending 1.25 trillion per year, roughly a third of our 'discretionary budget', per year, on black/white defense budgets is unsustainable. Doing it to maintain a 1960s level vision of multi-domain/multi-service taskings, as roles and mission overlap, is purely evil. We are not having enough kids to fill the manning ratio billets of the platforms we now have.
And everyone cringes and makes the sign of the cross when you even MENTION robots as UCAVs in a lockerroom jockstrap environment of fighter air.
Call sign "Hanky"🫢
The mind boggles 🤔
It's a South Park reference...others in his class also had SP character names as callsigns
Enjoyed the new episode! Great stuff about the mighty F-14D. Still on the Puck side. F-14D is superior to this tiny Hornets with all those fancy software codes n stuff :))
What a letdown to go from the SuperTomcat to the SuperHornet.
I'm with Hanky, no to Top Gun 3. The sequel had amazing flight cinematography, third act was great because Tomcat, but that is it.
Great interview and NO to TG3 with what?? Drone pukes and Amys Nitendo jets? I'll pass.