MANAMA, Bahrain – The Navy’s F-14 Tomcat, a Cold War-era fighter jet emblazoned in the public’s imagination as Tom Cruise’s sleek ride in the movie “Top Gun,” is beginning its final weeks of combat sorties over Iraq before being retired from the U.S. arsenal.
A pair of Navy squadrons with the last 22 operational Tomcats are flying bombing and strafing runs on insurgent targets in Iraq, jetting off the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, which departs the Persian Gulf for its base in Virginia early next year.
By next fall, Navy pilots will have switched to the smaller, more reliable and easier to fly Boeing-built F-18 Hornet, said Cmdr. Jim Howe, deputy commander of the Roosevelt’s F-14 squadrons.
“It’s a bittersweet time for all the Tomcat people,” said Howe, 38, of Pittsburgh. “The powers that be figured it was time to put it to rest.”
Despite the dogfighting flash of the 1986 film, in real life the Tomcat – a big two-seater with signature retractable wings – was so tough to fly and maintain that it became known as the “turkey,” Howe said.
The first squadron of Tomcats screamed across the skies in 1971 after rolling off Grumman’s assembly line in Bethpage, N.Y.
The jets were considered a major coup in the U.S.-Soviet arms race, carrying up to six Phoenix air-to-air missiles that could be fired simultaneously and guided to six separate targets.
The Tomcat isn’t the oldest combat jet in the U.S. arsenal. The B-52 Stratofortress bomber, which entered service in 1954 and still blasts targets in Afghanistan, wins that honor.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
