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Cold War revisited

AllAmerican75 said:
Is that not normally done?
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CO and XO are not supposed to fly together in case the plane goes down. Don’t want to lose them both, but CAG can grant permission in special cases like an airborne Change of Command or this Protoex. Not a big deal. Some ORM forms to go on leave are more onerous than asking permission for a flight together. @Brett327 Did you have to abide with a similar policy??
 
Max the Mad Russian said:
BTW, some Iranian Tomcat driver has stated as follows: ‘It was 1983 before we learned from the Americans – who were permanently monitoring our operations, and knew about almost every one of our problems – that by pre-positioning the afterburner exhaust nozzle to a slightly open position in anticipation of afterburner ignitions, we could prevent most of the “pop stalls”.’

Really? Such USN involvement in Iranian deals in 1983?
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No one said the Americans were willing/witting to the knowledge transfer. Gray literature is real. Same with the internet, nowadays. Gouge and best practices for naval aviation problems on retired airframes can be helpful and applicable to active airframes. Even if it’s not a 1-1, a smart engineer might get an idea/benefit from it. Sometimes it’s helpful just to know “Don’t try X - we tried it and it doesn’t work.”

But you knew that already. ;)
 
Max the Mad Russian said:
BTW, some Iranian Tomcat driver has stated as follows: ‘It was 1983 before we learned from the Americans – who were permanently monitoring our operations, and knew about almost every one of our problems – that by pre-positioning the afterburner exhaust nozzle to a slightly open position in anticipation of afterburner ignitions, we could prevent most of the “pop stalls”.’

Really? Such USN involvement in Iranian deals in 1983?
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Hmmm...no US involvement with Iran after fall of the Shah. I suspect he means they “learned from the Americans” by monitoring us as best they could, which was easier than monitoring them due to our open society. They sure were and still are aggressively seeking parts for all their US made aircraft, but especially the Tomcat. So much so that the Tomcats were put into Demil Code D (destruction) to prevent any parts from stricken Tomcats from falling into Iranian hands through Black Marketeers that were very active and sometimes successful. The 80 some Tomcats on display in museums or on static display were rendered incapable of flight and critical parts “harvested” for SARDIP (some 200 parts could be used in other aircraft). Only a handful remain at AMARG in Arizona near Tucson that are designated for future possible displays.


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As to his nozzle management technique? We often said you had to fly the engine in the A model taking care how and in what flight conditions you advanced or retarded the throttles. It was a standard CRM call by RIO passing 30K of “Throttles” because retarding them would cause a stall in thin air. A lot of aircrews stayed below 30K for that reason whereas the “Big Motor” in the B and D variants loved to be above 30K

Max the Mad Russian said:
Look, and for you having been in Super Hornet project management team, though this is not about Cold War: the famous Aussie phrase "There's nothing super about this Hornet", coined in the defence of their F-111 fleet, was it truth from F-14 RIO's experience standpoint? Aussies had used their Aardwarks in a similar way to "Bombcat" concept, unlike those who fell in love with that fat chicken of MD bird farm that is F-15E.
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I can honestly say that I never heard any disparaging remarks even in jest from F-14 RIOs
who became SHornet WSOs. I will say they were all glad to have flown Tomcat, but liked the SHornet as an integrated Weapons System Platform. Due to my involvement with AIM-9X/JHMCS while still in uniform and LANTIRN integration after retiring from uniform and then ROVER and Link 16, I was in and out of the Oceana based squadrons routinely before moving to Pax River area to continue to be close to the community and latest developments. So I asked the question routinely to see how they liked their new ride. This patch was popular by the aircrews who transitioned


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This one was a little more humorous

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HeyJoe said:
I can honestly say that I never heard any disparaging remarks even in jest from F-14 RIOs
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Even the Hornet/SHornet-related range complains?


Anyway, let me say that Soviet respond to F-14/F-15 pair, a Flanker, mostly mirrored the Eagle. The aircraft of Tomcat's abilities and niche in Soviet inventory was MiG-25 for long time, then it had been replaced by MiG-31, which of course cannot be imagined in a dogfight. Actually the Tomcat is probably unique airplane with no close match all around the globe, and not so due to its role in fleet defence but rather by combination of air superiority/intercept/recco/battlefield management features.
 
HeyJoe said:
Only a handful remain at AMARG in Arizona near Tucson that are designated for future possible displays.
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I'm not sure that's even true anymore. When I was there in 2010, there were none outside and our handlers told us they had all been chopped up. My understanding is that the statics are managed by the Naval Aviation Museum and not AMARG, though I wouldn't be surprised if AMARG is in the parts chain in there somewhere, since you still have to go through AMARG to pull something off a static for an operational aircraft.

Switching gears... @HeyJoe , you mentioned booming over Iraq, but it appears your pictures of DS are of F-14s with A-model engines. Assuming you had a combat load, how easy was it to go supersonic over the desert and not be out of gas? In the ride I got, we could barely break the number while going downhill at 30K slick, and it burned a lot of gas to do so.
 
Gatordev said:
I'm not sure that's even true anymore. When I was there in 2010, there were none outside and our handlers told us they had all been chopped up. My understanding is that the statics are managed by the Naval Aviation Museum and not AMARG, though I wouldn't be surprised if AMARG is in the parts chain in there somewhere, since you still have to go through AMARG to pull something off a static for an operational aircraft.
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The reason they are there is because a Squadron’s worth of B and D models were kept intact for quite some time under auspices of PMA-241 before they were stricken at which time 10 were requested by Museum Naval Aviation Museum to be kept for further disposition to museums or for static display (ie BUNO 159437 which was The VF-32 MiG killer from 1979 and requested for a potential JFK museum). The ones not saved by museum were chopped up in pieces no bigger than 5” after being harvested by SARDIP team. They are at AMARG because it costed anywhere from 50-100K to move them at the time they were stricken.

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Gatordev said:
Switching gears... @HeyJoe , you mentioned booming over Iraq, but it appears your pictures of DS are of F-14s with A-model engines. Assuming you had a combat load, how easy was it to go supersonic over the desert and not be out of gas? In the ride I got, we could barely break the number while going downhill at 30K slick, and it burned a lot of gas to do so.
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Well, watching gas while supersonic is certainly advisable and RIO only has a Totalizer to monitor fuel state, but it is fairly straightforward to do with a little planning an foresight. Booming the ship (or small boys upon request) was a regular occurrence.

In Combat over Iraq, I only did it once and planned it well ahead for a TARPS mission through 6 overlapping SAM
Sites. See attached image of my chart I used which worked out to be roughly 8 min in Zone 5 burning quite a bit of gas but we tanked right up to fencing in and had a tanker waiting for us on way out. We climbed to 30K and unloaded with jet stream on our backs to 20K at the Accel mark which resulted in M1.2 with TARPS pod and missiles + ALQ-167. That was as good as we could get with so much drag.

As to the Baghdad run, we climbed to 25K and unloaded right down to 5K. Around 10K, the inlets are amazingly efficient and engines get quite a boost in that realm. You can feel it like an old 4 barrel carburetor kicking in. Not generally known because of artificiality of Training with hard deck of 10K. Not sure what altitude you were at for your good deal
Hop but it makes for a big difference.
 
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Flash said:
The two shootdowns off Libya were '81
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Is that true that the pilot bagged this first Tomcat kill later lost his life to A-Hornet during landing mishap on a wet strip? If so, sadly...
MiG-23, BTW, was a nightmare for ground maintenance crews. The main landing gears folding system, they lamented, deserves the Nobel prize in engineering for complexity and unreliability. On a first ever navalization effort of a fighter aircraft in USSR (1972, MiG-23A, where that A meant "Aircraft Carrier", Project 1160) almost complete airframe redesign took place just to simplify main gears. Canceled 1160 stopped that works too.
 
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jmcquate said:
79'? The other one (I assume you mean the MiG-23 shootdown) is at the NASM. It was converted to a D and finished it's career in VF-31.
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My bad - Jan 89 26277
As you note, BUNO 159610 is at Udvar-Hazy and left the squadron as an A after that deployment to become a D reman. Since we lost both jets, we painted the collective score on 200 and 201.
 
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