good bye tomcat!!!

they are retairing the f 14
what would happen to them?
museum or scraped or mothballed?

 

Alittle bit of all 3

It had to go someday

 

I think that tomcats was to expencive per flight hour and that why the pulling them out.

 

A bit like the Vulcan - £1 per minute for fuel, apparently. And that was in the 1980s.

 

My english is not so good,but il try to explain.F-14 can change "angle" on wings in purpose to extract maximum from that plane,but in real life it does not work so whell.Benefits was on minimum and it highly raised price of plane alone and his maintainance,so it become to expencive withouth much benefits.Russia allso produced Mig-23 with same wing concept and u don see that many countrys,including Russia use them in larger numbers.

 

maybe they are selling them off cheap, I always wanted a pet cat

BTW, is there anything else the US have that uses the AIM-54 Phoenix?

Is that still fairly long range for A2A or is there more modern and better stuff out there? I'd have thought that being able to engage at 3/4/5 or even 10 times the range of the enemys A2A missles comes in quite handy.

FNG

 

I think that this can answer ur question:http://www.navy.mil/search/display.asp?story_id=15422

 

The F-14 is an elderly aircraft from the early 1970s, it will be replaced by the F-18E/F Super Honet, which is a little larger version of the F-18 Hornet and it can do the same as the F-14.
I know wikipedia is not well seen in here, but you can read a little about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F/A-18_Super_Hornet

 

Sinissa, that article doesn't touch the real reasons for phasing out the plane and missile. In the real world ROEs probihited the use of Phoenix and the Soviets already had a counter tactic for the Tomcat in the seventies which only AEGIS cruisers and destroyers could counteract. After Falklands, the Navy knew they wanted an asset that could be used against small pop-up groups, a mission that the Tomcat and Phoenix was never developed for.

Without 'Bombcats' the Tomcat would have been retired in the late 80's-early 90's.

 

is the F-18E/D radar (AN/APG-79) more powerfull then the F-14D's(AN/APG-71)?
Will there be use for the APG-71?

 

There's 30 years of developement between -71 and -79, I'd say the latter is much more 'powerfull' in relative detection

Modern radars are all about pulse modulation and wave shaping rather than raw power.

 

Hubsu i just answered on question " is there anything else the US have that uses the AIM-54 Phoenix? " and notthing more.

 

*nods* Noticed that now.

And sorry if my replies sounds a tad 'tight', I have no idea what makes me so blunt at times. Sorry!

 

No hard fealing man,relax

 

The Super Hornet can do everything the Tomcat, or 'Bombcat' can do, but is cheaper and more logistical. Okay. But I still like the F14. Maybe it's because of it's debut in Top Gun.

 

hmm maybe i have to refrase my question...it was a bit to obviuos (as ofcourse the 79 is much more modern and so on and so on)...

What are the differences, why is it better and how much is it better (detection range and RCS detection ranges/ differences?

 

You will not find exact answers to those questions you made, because military tends to keep quiet about op-sec stuff.

However I can tell you why it is better. Signal processing got a lot better in the last 30 years. Processors got a few thousands times better in that timeframe, which enabled the radars to be able to process the signals with more powerfull algorithms thus they're able to pick out the real signals out from the noise more efficiently than the older radars. Jamming the radar became much more harder when the processors became more powerfull. Current radars can shape the signals they send 'on the fly', something that the older radars weren't as good because the lack of computational power and programmibility. Reliability (the early radars had terrible MTBF), upgradeability and serviceability is considerably increased compared to the early radars, as technology improved and lessons were learned.

 

ok thanks (But i guess you do mean 20 years and not 30....APG-71 became operational in the 90ties!)!

I did found some info about the 71 though.
this is the information from Janes on the AN/APG-71

Type
I/low J-band (8 to 12 GHz) fire-control radar.

Description
The AN/APG-71 is an upgraded version of the radar portion of the AN/AWG-9 airborne weapon control system (see separate entry) to satisfy US Navy air superiority requirements for its F-14D Tomcats. It is essentially a digital version of the AN/AWG-9, the key elements in the upgrade being a fully programmable processor and a companion radar data processor which replace the AN/AWG-9's four analogue processors and provide digital capability. Digital radar displays are incorporated and the system includes sophisticated electronic counter-countermeasures provisions. Detection and tracking modes have also been improved over those of the AN/AWG-9. Operational details and use are the same as for the AN/AWG-9.

Operational status
Testing of APG-71 engineering development models began in late 1986. Flight trials began in March 1988 with operational evaluation aboard the F-14D being completed during December 1990. APG-71 production (55 examples) was completed in 1993

Specifications
Frequency: I/low J-band (8-12 GHz)
Power: 500 W (average - pulse mode); 7 kW (average - pulse Doppler mode); 10 kW (peak)
Range: 213 km across a 213 km wide front
Scan rate: 80º/s (horizontal); 2 scans/s (vertical)
Tracking capacity: up to 24 targets simultaneously
Antenna: slotted planar-array
Weight: 590 kg
Volume: 0.78 m3

Contractor Hughes Aircraft Company
Radar Systems, El Segundo, California.



also intersesting list
http://www.designation-systems.net/usmi ... n-apg.html

 

I propably am thinking a little different from you recarding of technology, nothing more

The -71 is based and uses alot of same modules as the APG-70 in Mud Hens. The -70 is a product of early 80's so the technology of it propably is the thecnology that was developed in the late 70's.

Of course, I have absolutely no idea what's in there for sure, so I just made an "off the hat" assumption

 

Nah i don't think so...as technology wich is brought to the "market" now has been in development for atleast 10 years(so what counts for the 71 also counts for the 79)!
I work at the European Space Agency so i'm used seeing new stuff getting old by the day :lol:


BTW
i really can't understand why those military guys won't give all the specs to the public...would make everything for us forum guys much easier (no more speculation):lol: