so you are saying that both the regular hornet & the Super hornet , now have the same intake design????
you kind of lost me there, the Super Hornet did not even exist back in the 80's when I was in the Navy as an Aviation machinists ( AD / JetMech )
doesn't really matter..... did they ever convert the F-14 to "fly-by-wire" like the F-18s ........... something else I started thinking of for no apparent reason......... although I doubt they did or would undertake such a huge overhaul .......... how many F-14 squadrons are even left these days, I wonder???
TC
At length: Same general design principles and applied practices, but both are different powerplants (F100: 29kLbThrst | F414: 22kLbThrst) mounted to different airframes (F-15 | F-18), and (while you may be able to jimmy-rig one onto the other with enough duct tape and welding gas) they are not interchangable (you might get them to lineup on the engine, but inside each intake are many other inlets and bleeds for a multitude of sensors or necessary systems). Both feature a giant box scoop feeding a tunnel that's made/lined with a low-friction carbon-fiber or poly-carbon material, contouring back along the airframe to the engines and narrowing gradually back along the way in a manner to additionaly increase the thrust/speed of the intake air. Also, throughout the intake is a lot of highly engineered baffling and other inlets to feed intake air to other systems and reduce air turbulence inside the intake itself. You'd have to see them for yourself to truely apreciate the degree of percision engineering that is going into them, it is finite and thurough.
OK, as for the F-14, the Navy hasn't paid anyone to fly her in over half a decade. The last carrier launch took place in late July of 2006 aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt (I remember that because she's my favorite carrier in the fleet - some call me Teddy). The F-14's final and last operational flight under U.S operation is cited as taking place "4 October 2006, when an F-14D of VF-31 was ferried from Oceana to Republic Airport on Long Island, NY". About a year after that, the hoopla over Iran getting their hands on any spare parts sitting in the middle of the dessert got modern mediafied and snesationalised, so starting back then (for the record:
*insert-waste-toilet-flush-smiley*) and at the bargain beurocratic cost of $40,000 per airframe, some contractor has already long shredded all but a few historicaly preserved display pieces.
They're gone. All have been deactivated or transitioned to Super Hornets.
And, now for the salt... you probabley know then that it's actually you guys (Navy mechanics/techs) that nailed the F-14s coffin... well, ok, that's not fair, but you're as equally responcible as the bean-counters and Grumman themselves. The real problem with the F-14 didn't become noticable until the F-18 showed up on the carriers. And this might sound familiar recently in regards with one of the few military forces that tries operating them today, and that's parts, parts, parts, and more MFing spare parts! The F-14 became quickly evident that it was not an ideal candidate for continued carrier operations, period. As a front fighter aircraft in the Navy, you might as well start packing and calling yourself a paperweight. The numbers I heard was like for every two deployed F-14D squadrons on a carrier, you can have three super hornet squadrons deployed onboard (and these are the hornets that are ~25% larger - going back to the older ones, I think they were talking about shoehorning 5 hornet squadrons for ever 3 tomcat squadron shoehorned onboard....), and that's a drasticly signifigant increase in a fleet's projectable force. It's single worst characteristic though was that each one deployed onboard required a healthy stockpile of bulky spare parts for the engines and variable angle wing (just ask Iran what they think of the F-14). In comparison, the largest and bulkiest spare component needing to be stored onboard for the F-18 is a complete engine assembley - the largest F414 for the newest Hornets is still less than 70% the size of an F-14's F110 (again, this is a sign of a flaw/oversight on Grumman's part, as they were advancing development of the tomcat, so they also were advancing the size and mass of the engine and the complexity/size/scale of all its components... yeah... all those variable thrust vector nozzles being proposed for future F-14 varients had the jocks and public fanbase going
, while the guys milling about under the flight deck and any Navy bean-counter with the intelligence of knowing you can't keep shoving larger and larer round pegs into the smae square hole was
... and... well, yeah... congrats Boeing (it is the public's money, but remember the Navy is the one signing the check).
This is also in large part with why I'm so estatic and "Yes!, Yes!, Lord-why-didn't-they-think-of-it-sooner Yes!" now with the EA-18G comming onboard to replace the archaic EA-6B Prowlers (besides the fact I was a shameles hornet fan before). It's continueing forward with a strategical move and decision made years ago when they sent the F-14 packing, and if any idea deserves to be half-arse implimented if at all by the Navy then it should definetley not be this one. My position has, I feel, always been on par with the Navy on this one - this has never been a debate/issue/decision about which aircraft is better than the other individualy, but how to at any given moment project the maximum potential capabilities of each individual ship and thus the entire fleet. This was a decision about which aircraft is the wisest choice for the US Navy to decide shoehorning a carrier full of them for repeated long deployments out at sea, and a carrier loaded to the brim with F-18s is 30-40% more capable/powerful than one with F-14s. The F-18 carrier can stay deployed that much longer too because it also has that many more spare parts, spare engines, trained personel, etc..
