F14 pre flight

preflight




pretty in depth video about the pre flight for the tomcat.

I got to see the last demo tour in `06 IIRC in Smyrna, TN. You just cant believe how agile they are when they take off into a full afterburning barrel roll while putting the gears up.

They made better fighters, but cooler I just dont think so. Would love to see one fly again one day but we`d have to steal one back from Iran if any can still fly. IIRC all the extra parts and tooling were destroyed to keep it out of their hands.

I was in highschool when the last nuclear carrier visited my city (AFAIK) it had F-14s and wasn't open to the public (being a nuclear carrier it had to park outside of our port) But they were running boats taking VIPs and school groups to visit the carrier.

Stupidly it was the day I decided to take a day off school... many regrets...

The F-14 was a great plane and I saw it a couple of times at air shows. I'm still unhappy about it's demise but that was done with national security in mind. The coming age of long range air to air missiles and hypersonic will change all tactics and aircraft. I hope war becomes passé but I won't hold my breath. My best,

a reply to: airforce47

I thought one of the main reasons for the standing down of the F-14 was due to the staggering maintenance costs per hour of flight time. The thing was incredibly expensive to keep in the air.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk
Yep same is what happened to the RAAF,s F111 fleet and now the Tonka fleets in Uk and Europe..Its a swing wing thing.

a reply to: Blackfinger

I mean, it makes complete sense. Here you've got a moving airfoil on a supersonic jet which is clearly under incredible stresses throughout it's flight envelope. And, it better work too! If it doesn't swing in, you just turn around and go back, but if it doesn't swing out you're screwed! I don't think you can land an F-14 on a carrier with the wings retracted, can you?

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Nope. They'd be so fast they'd either snap the cable, or rip the hook out. There was a Tomcat out of Texas that had the wings fail swept back. They had no flaps and no spoilers on landing. Stall speed was 200 knots (normal approach speed was 135), the cable could only take 178 knots. They used the Ball, and LSOs on landing, but they rolled 2,000 feet before hitting the cable and were at the maximum rated speed of the cable when the hook hit it.

originally posted by: StratosFear
I got to see the last demo tour in `06 IIRC in Smyrna, TN. You just cant believe how agile they are when they take off into a full afterburning barrel roll while putting the gears up.

They made better fighters, but cooler I just dont think so. Would love to see one fly again one day but we`d have to steal one back from Iran if any can still fly. IIRC all the extra parts and tooling were destroyed to keep it out of their hands.

My favorite fighter, bar none.