RockyThe Tomcat fights in the inner circle of defense. Sure it needs the capability to catch a target. Let’s think of a situation where a pair of F-14’s needs to dash to catch an incoming target before it reaches its missile launch point for attack on the CVBG. Starting from subsonic it will accelerate on a vector given bei E-2. You’ll see when you do the math, that the capability to successfully complete such a mission does not really change if you restrict max speed to Mach 1.8 or Mach 2.3. With weapons it won’t really get above Mach 2 anyways, so the surplus thrust bought by complex inlet is wasted weight, as the thrust becomes not effective.
Besides reaching the target sooner, higher launch speeds increase the range of the missile. An F-14 can carry a load of Phoenix at Mach 1.8. But how fast is that F-18 going? It goes Mach 1.8 CLEAN. How fast is it after you attach pylons and add two Sidewinders and six Phoenix missiles and… oops, the F-18 can’t carry any Phoenix.
Ok, so the F-18 is slower, has shorter range, can’t loiter on station as long, carries smaller missiles with shorter range, the radar is less powerful, and it has one pilot, where the F-14 has a WSO who can devote his attention to the radar and targeting missiles. As a rule of thumb, I think its a good idea if your intercepter is faster than the bomber it is supposed to shoot down. A Backfire is faster than an F-18. I think the F-14 might be a little bit better intercepter.
RockyAIM-54
Originally Posted by Schorsch
“The AIM-54 warhead is only 20kg heavier than that of a Sparrow.”And how heavy is that exactly?
The AIM-7E warhead weighs 30kg.
The AIM-7F warhead weighs 40kg.
The AIM-54 warhead weighs 60kg.
As you can see, the AIM-54 warhead is “only” twice as massive as the warhead in the AIM-7E that the F-4 carried, and over five times as massive as the 11kg Sidewinder warhead.
RockyRocky,
3 years and nearly 500 posts on this forum should have helped to figure out what really matters in fighter performance. It obviously didn’t.
The time required and fuel spent to accelerate to speeds like M2 are restrictive. Basically what an aircraft needs is the ability to accelerate to M1.5 in an acceptable time and hold this speed for a few minutes. Long distance supersonic dash is impossible with most aircraft, including F-14 (all versions).
This is not news. An F-18 has an initial advantage in acceleration due to its higher T/W ratio, but from (I’m making up numbers here) Mach 1.1 to Mach 1.5 the F-14 is going accelerate faster.
In any case, I’m not trying to say that the F-14 is a better fighter than the F-18. It isn’t, but its a far better interecpter, and thats where speed becomes important.
The M2.34 are the flawed thinking of the 60ies, where top speed was still a major requirement. If the Navy and USAF had opted for an aircraft that flew M1.8 instead of M2.5 at altitude and subsonic instead of supersonic at deck, the F-111 would have been a fabulous aircraft.
We have not built an intercepter since the F-14. The MiG-31 is even faster, and that is not a mistake. The MiG-31 sucks as a fighter, but its a damn good intercepter.
I always wondered why so much money was spent on the AIM-54, finally developing a system that could only be used on one aircraft, instead of making the available missile (AIM-7) more lethal and possibly longer range. Maybe electronics weren’t up for that in the early 70ies.
Its the size. You can’t stuff an AIM-54 warhead and the fuel to hurl it 100 miles into an AIM-7. A Sparrow will never make a good ICBM either, no matter how small the electronics get.
RockyHell, by those numbers the F-4F looks superior in every aspect. I thought the F-4F flew heavier than that at its combat weight, somewhere close to the F-14A’s weight wherein the latter had more excess thrust and lower wing loading at that point. Looks like I had it wrong.
The F-14 is a much better fighter. The T/W ratio is about the same, but the F-14 has a much better wing loading. The tunnel between the engines creates a lot of lift, and this is usually neglected because its not the “wing”. The F-14 accelerates faster and climbs a little bit faster. At low speed the F-14 can out turn anything. Cockpit visability is far better in the F-14. Remember, the F-14 replaced the F-4, and the F-14 was designed to dogfight. The F-4 was not, although the F-4F got the slatted wing to improve turning ability.
RockyIn flight test things are allowed that are not allowed to pilots in service. The latter counts, the previous is the stuff nerds talk about on the internet.
The F-14A would go Mach 2.34 clean. Not in combat, of course, but it illustrates the higher performance over the Mach 1.8 F-18 when clean.
Those charts must have something to do with structural limitations or thermal limits, rather than performance. Neither jet has a top speed of Mach 2 clean, let alone with pylons and a couple of missiles. The F-14D had a top speed of Mach 1.8 because the intakes were pinned. An F-14D pilot once told me that the top speed of an F-14D is Mach 1.8 with either a full load of Sparrow or Phoenix, which didn’t make sense to me until I learned about the intakes. If a loaded F-14D can go as fast as an F-18 clean, thats a big difference.
So I guess that is the reason they bought an aircraft with limited top speed and high flexibility on external stores.
F-18D = the cheapest solution. It cost less to maintain and support than the F-14.
If actually Afghanistan is the mission that really bothers the Navy, I would propose to start production of the A-6 again, which actually weights 7 ton less than the F-14D and still carries more bombs a longer distance. Must have been a moment of flawed concluding when they decided their next conventional bomber should go supersonic.
The A-6E has never been adequately replaced, and I don’t think the Navy “decided their next conventional bomber should go supersonic.” They had nothing to replace the A-6E with, so they hung bombs off of the F-14, which happened to be supersonic. The A-6F is a better bomber than anything we have had since the A-6E. The priority imposed on the Navy has been cost over performance ever since the cold war ended.
RockyI’m curious why the USAF doesn’t acquire the Growler? Surely it would come in useful accompanying strike packages and enhancing the efficiency of legacy and even stealth aircraft.:confused:
I’m sure the USAF would like an aircraft with some range.
RockyWouldn’t it be interesting if the US launched a cruise missile attack on an enemy, and they accidentally used the nukes? Ooooops….. 😮
RockyOK, no one said it was an empty ship. That’s different. Here in the US, some people have tried to float the idea of shooting down planes suspected of carrying drugs, and judging by some of the trigger happy responses here, and the “WAR on drugs” rhetoric that we hear, bombing a North Korean drug ship violating Australia’s borders isn’t so far fetched.
BTW, drug smugglers coming into the US have actually loaded up old jet airliners with drugs, unloaded them at remote airstrips in the US and abandoned them.
It was a great video though pity it wasnt under its own steam.
What a waste of a potentially mobile target.
Actually, drugs do great harm to society as a whole, with lost productivity, increased probability of psychiatric problems, and all the associated crime that goes with drugs.
Alcohol causes all of those problems and to a many times greater degree. We once banned it in the US, and it was a disaster. Crime soared, the murder rate soared, organized crime flourished, police were corrupted by the huge amounts of dirty money, and everyone still had lots of booze to drink. Sound familiar?
The problem is quite simple – legally produced narcotics would be expensive anyway, because they would have to be produced to clinical standards.
What, like asprin?? A bottle of vodka?? :rolleyes:
People with chronic drug abuse problems would still abuse legal drugs, and would still support their drug habit by crime.
They abuse drugs now! Addicts will always be here no matter what the law is.
Also, where do you stop? Legalise lower level drugs like marijuana only? Or go to the next level, and legalise extasy or amphetamines? Heroin?
If someone wants to eat rat poison, thats their buisness. It becomes our buisness when the government spends billions of my tax money on a futile effort to stop people from getting high or drunk, driving them to crime to support habits that otherwise would be cheap, and throwing millions of people into prison for years (maybe one of your children), even though they have harmed no one except themselves. End the drug price support war now.
RockyTrials
I see Australia has decided that it can dispense with legal representation, trials, juries, and all that civil liberties stuff. How very North Korean. Maybe we ought to station the USS Vincennes off the Hawiian coast in case someone smuggling a joint on a Quantis flight tries to land here….
RockyVietnam
That’s a gross oversimplification. Impopularity of the war within US public was in direct connection with a failure to defeat Vietnamese. Military failures –> requirement for reinforcements –> more soldiers thousands of kms away –> more casualties –> public getting pi$$ed.. If the things were going according to plans, US public would have been cheering and applauding to the freedom carrying doves chasing off commie rats out of their potholes.
Wars do not become unsuccessful after they have become impopular. Wars become impopular after they have become unsuccessful.
The failures were not military. The US repeatedly destroyed the NVA every time it was sent south. The problem was that President Johnson had the foolish idea that the North Vietnamese would be intimidated by US power and give up. Since the US wouldn’t invade North Vietnam, all NV had to do was stay in the fight until the US public tired of the war and quit. The insurgents in Iraq are doing the same thing, and will probably succeed.
RockyTomcat 21 ==> F-14E !!!!!!
There have been a lot of super aircraft mentioned that would have been superior to what we did buy or hang onto (Arrow, F-108, F-12, B-70), but as has been said here, we really didn’t need them. The F-14E is a plane that we really should have bought. The F-20 was a great little jet, but I’m not sure exactly who should have bought it instead of what. Jordan, maybe. Switzerland. The F-20 had less range/payload than the F-16, so the F-16 is a better, yet more expensive aircraft.
And another excellent might have been:
F8U-3 Crusader III
We almost had a Mach 2.9 fighter flying off of our carrier decks!
RockyThunderbirds F-105B
The 105 was designed from it’s outset as a lowlevel, high speed, tactical nuker, interdiction fighter/bomber and as such not really suited for interception work. It’s main purpose was to dash into a foreign country, kick out the nuke and (hopefully) return to it’s base. Basically air to mud as opposed to air to air.
Yes, but it did shoot down 27.5 MiG-17s. Three were by AIM-9, and the rest were gun kills. 12 F-105s were lost to MiG-21s, and only five were shot down by MiG-17s, out of a total of 321 F-105s lost in combat. 😮
The Thunderbirds did in fact fly the F-105B for about half a season, approx 6 months, but after cracks began appearing in the nose gear they were pulled from service and replace by their old F-100D’s for the remainder of the season and they never went back to them.
According to F-105 Thunderchief in action, by Ken Neubeck, the Thunderbirds grounded the F-105B after just six shows. They started flying displays in April 1964, but on 9 May “An F-105B flown by Capt. Gene Devlin broke apart in front of the weapons bay during a display and crashed, killing the pilot.” That was at Hamilton AFB, in California. An “inquest revealed that a structural splice plate in the upper part of the fuselage failed due to fatigue.” After that, the Air Force retrofitted a redesigned splice plate to the F-105B fleet.
RockyLightning
I thought the RAF retired the Lightning. 😀
RockyNo doubt about that, and no doubt about the advantages of the swing wing, but the decision to fix the inlet ramps shows a pattern: The upper right corner of the flight envelope is not considered most important, especially as entering this area has some boundary conditions (nearly clean, continued afterburner use for minutes).
The upper right hand corner of the flight envelope is unimportant for an air superiority mission, a recc mission or a strike mission, but if you are on a Fleet Defence interception mission it can be very important. You want to get out there as fast as possible and hurl those Phoenix as far as possible. If the F-14 is loaded up with eight missiles, four to six of which would be Phoenix, then the top speed isn’t going to be over Mach 1.88, no matter whether the intake ramps are pinned or not. I supect that the top speed of a fully armed F-14 is not very different with the ramps pinned or not. The top speed of a fully armed F-15C is Mach 1.8.
RockyIt is limited to M1.88 for most times and will not sustain anything beyond that speed much long, either.
That was because a decision was made to pin the intake ramps of the F-14D in a fixed position. A clean Tomcat with fully functioning intake ramps will do Mach 2.3. Of course no fighter spends any amount of time at its top speed, and a clean Tomcat or Hornet is pretty useless. The bottom line is that the F-14 is a faster jet.
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