He should have included what it took to keep the Tomcat flying. The F18E/F costs about 1/5'th the maintenance man hours per hour of flight that the F14 took. Then, since the F14s didnt age very gracefully, it would have cost a further fortune just to upgrade them for further service life. What good is a cheaper delivery price if it costs you 5 times the cost of fighter X just to keep the things flying?
The sortie rate per maintenance hour for the F35C is going to be off the scale compared to legacy fighters like the F14. Compare it to buying the Lemon car for cheaper but then going broke just keeping it on the road and being able to even use it far less. Even if you wanted to compare 1974 $$'s to 2011 ones, which is silly in the first place. The Tomcats engines were so problematic, even with two of them, they accounted for about 1/3'rd of all accidental airframe losses. I remember when we lost three in one month in the mid-90s and the USN ordered NO supersonic flight at any altitude for the entire fleet.
And it would have cost about 10 Billion $ to upgrade the F14 fleet in the mid-90s, and for what? We'd still end up with a one dimensional fleet air defense fighter with no air to ground capability, except for a few D's, still costing us a fortune to maintain, and now with no Soviet threat to defend against.
Ten years from now compare airframe loss from engine failure per flight hour between the twin engined F14 and the single F35C. I think your going to get a good laugh at the doomsayers. I remember when people were running around pulling their hair out over the F16 and it turned out to be one of the best Jet fighters ever designed.
Man, this is so full of it I don't know where to begin. I do first have to applaud the fact that you've put more nonsense into fewer lines than most people on this board are capable of and that's saying a lot. I could write a tome about all the things you have wrong here but I'll try to just hit a few of the wavetops here.
First, maintenance man hours per flight hour (MMHPFH) was higher for the F-14 than F-18E/Fs. This is a surprise? The F-18E/F is brand new, the last F-14 was built in 1990 and we had only been procuring new F-14's at the rate of about a dozen a year, not nearly enough to keep the average age of the fleet reasonably low. The average age goes up and the maintenance costs go up, happens with every single airplane. But let's compare apples to apples. In 1990 at VX-4 we compared MMHPFH for our new F-14D's against our new Hornets (apples to apples bro) and the MMHPFH was only 2%-5% higher than the Hornet. Most of the additional man hours was related to the wingsweep mechanism of the F-14, obviously a logical outcome since the F-18 doesn't have the wingsweep or, more importantly, its advantages. For that additional cost the wingsweep gave the F-14 greater speed, more maneuverability, better energy retention, greater load, greater bringback, lower landing speed, and lighter weight. Pretty darn good tradeoffs compared to the F-18E/F's wing rock and angled speed brakes...errr...weapons pylons.
Second, the F14 didn't "age gracefully?" As I mentioned above, the last F-14 was built in 1990 and they continued to fly until 2007. The average age of our F-14A's in my last fleet squadron was 17 years and that was 1993. Also, if you think the F-14 didn't "age gracefully" don't forget the F-15 pilot whose airplane broke in half. Not a particularly "graceful event" and no F-14 ever did that. Even in 1993 we had to send wing sweep actuators (not an insignificant part since two of them are used to sweep the wings) off the ship and back to the States for hand rebuilding not just because there were none on the ship, there were NONE in the entire F-14 supply line. We were also constantly forced to rob parts from one airplane to fix another. Doing this crap means you more than double the maintenance time because every time you pull a part you risk breaking it or something else in the process. This was all happening already in the early 90's, I can't imagine how much worse this got 10 years later but how precisely is this the airplane's fault? Yeah, didn't age gracefully, right.
Third, the F35C. You claim the F35's sortie rate is "going to be off the scale." Really? This tells me that you know little about airplanes, less about maintenance, and nothing about contractors (or the F-22 for that matter.) Pratt & Whitney, the same company that built the wonderful TF-30-414A afterburning high-bypass turbofan engine for the F-14 that "caused 1/3 of all accidental airframe losses" (your words) can now make an engine that "won't break?" Wow. And Lockheed, who can't stay on schedule can build an airplane that doesn't break? You mean like the F-22 which has totally failed its availability metrics? OK, yeah, I believe you, no really, I do. Really.
Fourth, costs. The "Super" Hornet was sold to Congress as a modified F-18C/D and therefore cheaper to build. What a load of BS. It's basically a completely different plane with all of the developmental problems and expenses of a new airplane but then McDonnell Douglas needed to lie because they knew had competition. The Tomcat 21 would have retained the existing airframe and used the development work already done on the weapon system and engines for the F-14D. Not only would it have been cheaper but also more effective. Faster, longer ranged, bigger payload, heavier bringback and more maneuverable than the F-18E/F.
Fifth, where did I use 1974 dollars??? I mentioned the estimated costs of both the Tomcat 21 and Hornet 2000 in 1990 dollars versus what the "Super" Hornet actually costs because that's when the argument was taking place. The estimates for the F-35 are current dollars but you're going to tell me that we've had 300% inflation since 1990 so $200M per airframe is now reasonable? Now who's being silly?
Sixth, engines. These are your most woefully ridiculous statements. You're quoting some generalized statistics about F-14A's with Pratt & Whitney TF-30 engines and pretending they apply to the whole F-14 program. It's true, the TF-30s were a piece of crap and caused many mishaps
in the F-14A but perhaps you're unaware of the F110-GE-400 engine in the F-14B and D which caused none of the problems the TF-30 caused, they fixed them and provided a ton of extra thrust to boot (actually, several tons additional thrust). Basically, this is nothing but a strawman set up using the faults of the TF-30 and pretending that it applies to either the F-14D or what would have been the Tomcat 21. Nonsense. You're also confused about the subsonic restriction. One F-14D was lost to a catastrophic engine failure during supersonic flight. The mishap was caused by the failure of the screech liner in one of the engines. No, the entire "fleet" was not limited to subsonic flight, just F110 equipped F-14B's and D's and only until they uncovered the problem. You appear to claim that in some way you were in a position to know all this stuff since you say "we lost," or, are you just implying that you "were there" to support your story? I say this because you not only appear unfamiliar with F-14 engines but also the fact that a catastrophic failure where no cause has been determined means it's kinda mandatory to restrict operations until you know what did it. If you were really "there" with actual insight into actual aviation you'd know that. Doesn't ring a bell, huh? Also, for someone so much "in the know" you seem to have missed the fact that at about the same time F-18's were also restricted but in this case, it
was the entire "fleet". Hazard to guess why? Screech liner failure in their GE F404 engines. You don't even know what a screech liner is, do you? (Ah, I can hear the keyboard clattering away as you google it). You know none of this but buy into Pratt & Whitney's claim their new engine "won't break." BTW, the screech liner is the inner lining of the afterburner can and the problems were fixed for both the F110 and F404 engines.
Seven, you're seriously going to claim the F-14 was a "one dimensional fleet air defense fighter?" What year did you write this, 1980? First, it was an air superiority fighter and second, we started carrying bombs on the F-14A in 1987 and there were many improvements made over the years to give both the A and eventually the D greater capability including precision munitions but that's really completely irrelevant since the point was whether or not the Navy should have bought the Tomcat 21 or the Hornet 2000. Basically, it's just another of your strawmen. The Tomcat 21 would have had all of the Hornet's air to ground capability so the whole premis of your argument is moot. Also, where do you pull out 10 Billion $ as the cost to "upgrade the F14 fleet" and to what? Dude, what the hell are you talking about?
Let's bottom line this. VX-4 participated in wargames and studies comparing the Tomcat 21 to the Hornet 2000 and the Tomcat won every single test except for one, life-cycle cost. Even the F-14D beat the Hornet 2000 on mission effectiveness when given full precision weapons capability and AMRAAM (both easy to do with the existing weapon system architechture). And no, the life cycle cost problem wasn't maintenance, it was two aircrew versus one and the expense of recruiting, training, maintaining and paying RIOs. Also, if McDonnell Douglas had been honest about the costs in the first place the Tomcat 21 would probably have been a clean sweep over the Hornet 2000 even in life cycle costs.
